A third of the United States foreign aid is spent on Israel and Egypt. That’s your tax dollars hard at work.
Israel receives $400 million in economic aid and $2.775 billion in military aid while Egypt receives $250 million in economic aid and $1.3 billion in foreign aid. Their total aid package ($3.175 billion to Israel and $1.55 billion to Egypt) account for a third of all US foreign aid and yet neither one of the countries are developing countries.
What is disturbing is that both of these countries turn around lets the US borrows the money back with interest. The US borrows $20.6 billion from Israel and $26 billion from Egypt and are pay them back with interest.
In fact, the US pays close to $200 billion in interest on its own money!
If you express the money that is being given to these countries as aid per citizen it is vulgar how much money is being given away.
Israel receives $412 per citizen while Egypt receives about $20 per citizen. In total aid, Israel receives twice as much aid as Egypt but when you express the numbers in terms of aid per citizen, Israel receives 20 times more aid!
When you further analyze the number and try to access the impact the money is having on the country, the disparity is greater.
Israel citizen average $29,404 per year which is nearly three times the average for the world while Egyptian citizens average $6,367 per year which is almost half the average of the world.
When we give $412 per Israel citizen, we are only making the rich richer whereas when we give $20 per Egypt citizen we helping (albeit minimally) reduce the disparity between the rich and the poor.
The whole point in giving aid to a country is to help that country develop; to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor, to develop infrastructure to help the people. By the above numbers, it is obvious that the intention here is not to help the people rather it is to help their governments buy more F-22s and M16s.
Sources
http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/112189/who-owns-the-us?mod=bb-debtmanagement
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/tic/Documents/mfh.txt
Wow, thanks for sharing this information with us!
1Very disturbing
Definitely crazy isn’t it? I remember I read that Israel receives more aid per capita than all of Sub-Saharan Africa and South America COMBINED.
when listing the aid breakdown for egypt, you differentiate between foreign aid and economic aid; what’s the difference?
It actually should be say “$1.3 billion in military aid” not foreign aid. Its probably a typo.
Foreign is economic aid plus military aid. Or at least that is how they break down.