Surveys show Americans believe foreign aid is 25% of the federal budget. It’s less than 1%. The public is misinformed about what the US spends money on, which creates an abstract desire to “cut spending” that’s extremely difficult to translate into policy. https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/what-every-american-should-know-about-us-foreign-aid/
Official development aid (ODA) flows are a joke. Most of the global north can't even be bothered to meet their own promised target of a whole 0.7% of GNI. What aid they do give is usually just in the form of agricultural price dumping that destroys local farmers, which in turn creates dependency on more foreign aid.
The US loves doing this for imperialist reasons. In Haiti for example, we came in and killed all the native pigs on the island because "they could have a disease" (most didn't) then dumped a bunch of excess agricultural products that wiped out the rest of the Haitian agricultural sector. A pig used to be the most valuable thing a Haitian peasant would own, now they all have to work in foreign owned sweatshops because they can't compete with American megafarms that are allowed to engage in anti-competitive practices under he guise of "aid". Agricultural corporations also lobby the government hard for this type of "aid" because they are just offloading surplus product anyway, with the bonus of destroying any future competition. If we actually wanted to help, we'd give these places tractors, technology and raw capital. But everyone handwrings about "corruption" whenever a poor country is given something more than our table scraps.
Also the CIA loves planting their agents and saboteurs in the USAID teams that distribute all this cheap food, so most countries would literally be better off if they just set all the "aid" on fire and expelled the aid workers from the country. But if you do that your country will get painted as a "dictatorship that wants it's people to starve" by the imperialist media apparatus like Venezuela or DPRK did.
The biggest source of foreign aid and by far the most effective for actually improving people's lives is remittances. That's simply just migrant workers sending money to their families back home. And, of course, migrant workers are almost universally treated like trash and underpaid wherever they are. But the millions of them that send whatever they can back home are doing more to develop the global south than the entirety of the capitalist world's official aid is. It's pathetic.
Official development aid (ODA) flows are a joke. Most of the global north can't even be bothered to meet their own promised target of a whole 0.7% of GNI. What aid they do give is usually just in the form of agricultural price dumping that destroys local farmers, which in turn creates dependency on more foreign aid.
The US loves doing this for imperialist reasons. In Haiti for example, we came in and killed all the native pigs on the island because "they could have a disease" (most didn't) then dumped a bunch of excess agricultural products that wiped out the rest of the Haitian agricultural sector. A pig used to be the most valuable thing a Haitian peasant would own, now they all have to work in foreign owned sweatshops because they can't compete with American megafarms that are allowed to engage in anti-competitive practices under he guise of "aid". Agricultural corporations also lobby the government hard for this type of "aid" because they are just offloading surplus product anyway, with the bonus of destroying any future competition. If we actually wanted to help, we'd give these places tractors, technology and raw capital. But everyone handwrings about "corruption" whenever a poor country is given something more than our table scraps.
Also the CIA loves planting their agents and saboteurs in the USAID teams that distribute all this cheap food, so most countries would literally be better off if they just set all the "aid" on fire and expelled the aid workers from the country. But if you do that your country will get painted as a "dictatorship that wants it's people to starve" by the imperialist media apparatus like Venezuela or DPRK did.
The biggest source of foreign aid and by far the most effective for actually improving people's lives is remittances. That's simply just migrant workers sending money to their families back home. And, of course, migrant workers are almost universally treated like trash and underpaid wherever they are. But the millions of them that send whatever they can back home are doing more to develop the global south than the entirety of the capitalist world's official aid is. It's pathetic.