Americans want to cut, increase foreign aid
World Public Opinion released a poll today that shows Americans want to cut foreign aid by 50% and raise it by 1300%. How is this possible? Well, on average, poll respondents think that 27% of the US federal budget goes to foreign aid. The average respondent thinks that the federal government should allocate only 13% of the budget to foreign aid. Bad news for aid advocates, right? Well, it depends how you look at it. Yes, cutting foreign aid by 50% would be a big deal. At the same time, considering that the federal government only allocates 1% of the budget to foreign aid, the government would need to increase foreign aid by 1300% to get it at the level where the public thinks it should be. Now, I am not advocating that we increase aid by 1300%. That seems a bit ridiculous. Rather, this is just a factoid that you can use the next time someone talks about how much money we waste on foreign aid.
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Yes! Thank you for talking about this (Barak and the World Opinion whatever people). It drives me crazy when people “complain” that the US spends a bajillion dollars overseas when Americans need help first bla bla bla…our perception of what real money is (and is not) is so off-balance, it’s insane. Furthermore, it should be noted that while spending a little under $60B on foreign aid–and I know that seems like a lot–the budget for the Defense Department is expected to top out around $733B for FY 2011. That’s more than TEN TIMES the foreign aid budget. So maybe people should worry about that first!
I have a feeling I’ll be citing this poll at the dinner table this holiday season. Just a feeling.
The answer to this will be something along the lines that military spending and foreign aid are the same thing because we are getting rid of the bad guys.
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