Bringing back this graphic from the archive after foreign aid spending came up in President Obama’s Google Hangout.
Polls consistently show Americans overestimate the percentage of the U.S. budget used for foreign assistance.
Its percentages in relation to overall spending or GDP are irrelevant. If I punched an innocent person yesterday, my initiation of aggression isn’t made right by placing it in context with everything else I did that day.
Foreign aid tends to be a forced - and thus immoral - transfer of wealth from (primarily) the middle class here to the politically connected and rich somewhere else as well as myriad corporate interests, with many greased palms in between. We may have an earnest disagreement with regards to both its general effectiveness and whose interests are truly catered to by this political and bureaucratic largess, but to couch it in terms of its relative insignificance is meaningless.
