Foreign Aid

Foreign aid: the little thing that causes a big fuss. In the US, foreign aid is only about one percent...the economic kind of foreign aid, anyway. The other kind of foreign aid? Military assistance. If you know anything about the US budget, then you know that percentage is no doubt much higher when you put economic foreign aid and military foreign aid in the same basket.

While “foreign aid” may be used by some to describe any money crossing borders (like from NGOs in the US to lower-income nations) this is not really what foreign aid is. Foreign aid implies that the money is coming from one fellow nation (a government) to another.

When did foreign aid start? Waaayyy back in the day when colonies were a thing. Then WWI and WWII destroyed a lot of things, creating the need for a more “sharing is caring” attitude. You know, for the (political) economy.