<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>Excerpt from an article by Brian J. Atwood which was in <i>Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy, Winter 1997</i>:<blockquote>Poll after poll shows that Americans believe foreign aid expenditures are running up the federal deficit. They believe it is time for America to curtail its contribution and for other countries to do their share.
It turns out, however, that the same Americans who tell pollsters the United States spends too much on foreign aid also think foreign aid accounts for nearly 20 percent of the federal budget. When asked, they say that spending levels should be closer to 5 percent. They are shocked to learn that U.S. economic and humanitarian aid - which includes U.S. contributions to such mulitlateral organizations as the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and regeional developmental banks - <b><i>amounts to far less than 1 percent of the federal budget</b></i>.
Indeed, cutting foreign aid out entirely - or doubling it - would barely make a discernable difference in the U.S. deficit.
Many Americans still think the United States is the most generous donor in the world. They might be embarassed to learn that the United States ranks foruth in the world in the overall amount of resources it devotes to foreign assistance. Japan, Germany, and France all outspend us annually, although our economy is six times larger than France's, more than four times larger than Germany's, and one-and-a-half times that of Japan's. In per-capita terms, U.S. foreign-assistance programs rank dead last among programs of all the industrialized nations, behind countries like Ireland and Portugal.</blockquote>Emphasis mine. At the time that Atwood wrote this, he was the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
There's also this misconception that most of our foreign aid is humanitarian aid. It's not. Now, I believe the number one area we give aid to is debt releif. Number two is military aid - which is a round-a-bout way of subsidizing our own defense industry, since often the countries have to buy from us. Number three is infastructure, and number four is humanitarian aid.</div>