Guess How Much Of Uncle Sam's Money Goes To Foreign Aid. Guess Again

[liberal N proud]

How much of the federal budget goes to foreign aid?

What's your best guess? 10 percent? 20 percent? 1 percent?

If you're like most Americans, you probably guessed wrong.

In December, the Kaiser Family Foundation polled 1,505 people. Only 1 in 20 knew the right answer: less than 1 percent of the $4 trillion federal budget goes to foreign aid. The average respondent estimated that 26 percent went toward assisting other countries.

What's more, our ignorance colors the way we think about foreign spending. Fifty-six percent of the poll respondents thought the U.S. spends too much on foreign aid. Once they were told that the U.S. spends less than 1 percent of the federal budget on foreign aid, only 28 percent still thought the nation was overspending.

This is nothing new. The Kaiser Family Foundation has conducted this poll since 2009, and every year the response is the same. But maybe it's not our fault. Maybe the problem is that foreign aid is incredibly complicated. Even coming up with a definition of "foreign aid" is tough. So we spoke to five specialists to soak up some foreign aid smarts.


http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/02/10/383875581/guess-how-much-of-uncle-sams-money-goes-to-foreign-aid-guess-again

[PoliticAverse]

1. And every penny of that that is cut would result in a reduction of the deficit and

the resulting national debt.

[Amishman]

2. agreed, cut back on foreign aid and massively cut back on military spending

That money has better uses here at home.

Some of the countries that receive the most aid as Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan. I don't think that money given to those countries will be well spent on helping their people.

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. Our foreign aid is the equivalent of the penny

yes the penny, you dropped in the couch.

It used to be a couple pennies.

[whatthehey]

3. The standard response to this has some but not much merit

In that it only counts direct foreign aid, as in "here you go, Haiti, have a few million" rather than the much larger amount spent by the US government supporting other nations. That's true as far as it goes, but much of that support is military and while quite a few bars and restaurants in, say, German cities like Kaiserslauten and Wiesbaden would probably go under if that were removed, it's unlikely to be a massive blow to Germany as a whole economically or in QOL.

[-none]

4. Just think of how much better the world would be if the 'defense budget' and the foreign aid budget

were reversed. Most, if not all countries would even need a defense budget. But where's the profit in that?
Obscene profits in helping people... Naa, the real profit is in killing people with high tech death toys that then need maintenance or better yet, replacing.

[Scuba]

5. And guess what country gets the biggest slice of that little pie ...

[nadinbrzezinski]

6. Hmm, gone down I see