That can't be right

Last not on NBC's The West Wing, one of the charectars was throwing around the figure that less than 1% of the United States Budget went to foreign spending. I did some research this morning, and it appears that information may be correct. The US spend about $25,227 million on conduct of Foreign Policy. When you take out $7,154 Million for the running of foreign policy, and an additional $910 million for communications efforts, you are left with $17,163 million or a little over $17 billion. The entire Budget is $2.1 Billion. That works out for about 0.86% of the national budget. So for every $100 the Government collects, people in the rest of the world get 86 cents.

Now it looks a little worse if you take foreign policy as a subset of Discretionary spending. The United States budget is divided into two halves--discretionary and non-discretionary. The non-Discretionary includes Social Security and other programs that Congress, in it's wisdom, has declared that they will not touch. Non-Discretionary spending makes up 63% of the annual budget--leaving just 37% for programs that Congress has to approve each year. Out of that, Foreign aid accounts for 3.25%.

National Public Radio, which I love, and many would like to see closed down, will get $454,000,000 or about 0.021%. In other words for every $100 the government collects, NPR gets 2 cents.

Those interested in finding out more can check out the White House site where I collected this info. For those who watched the episode, I agreed when it was said that we don't sell foreign aid right. It's not giving money to poor people, it's not charity. It's investing in making the world a safer place.