Some of this money goes to "foreign aid," which has been much in the news this week. For 2023, foreign non-military aid including USAID cost the average taxpayer about 40¢ per day. Depending on one's social and moral beliefs, either it was wasted or it paid for health, safety and economic well-being in some of the world's poorest countries.
For comparison, the U.S. military budget for fiscal year 2023 was approximately $820 billion, which accounted for about 13.3% of the federal budget. The average taxpayer paid about $13.99 per day for defense, or $14.40 per day if we include aid to allied military forces.
For example, about $3.3 billion went to Israel, or about $412 per Israeli or 68¢ per square foot, or 4¢ per day per US taxpayer, which roughly quintupled the following year due to the war in Gaza.
In other words the Pentagon's budget is about thirty-six times the foreign aid budget.
Completely eliminating "foreign aid" would save the average taxpayer about $0.80 per day, or, for example, just a bit less than a daily ration of therapeutic pediatric survival food** (photo). Happily for certain leade(R)s, the impact — increased poverty, disease and conflict — would be felt by people who are far away and powerless.
If the overriding goal is really to save some money, consider this. Each year recently something in excess of 40,000 people have died in firearms-related incidents — usually for no good reason. If we assume that each of them loses 20 years of adult life during which they would have produced $100,000 worth of goods and services annually (an amount far below actual US productivity), then the annual loss to the economy is (40,000 X $100,000 X 20 =) $80 billion per year and compounding, which this writer estimates to be much more than the foreign-aid bill of $71.9 reported by Pew Research Center for one recent year.
(It's important to note that estimates of foreign aid range from about $50 million to about $100 million, usually with the clear sound of an axe being ground in the background. We've used median values in this analysis, and we could be off by a factor of two either way, but that does not change the overall trends.)
Sources: (URLs responsive as of 2025-02-07)
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy'nut
* https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/united-states/individual/taxes-on-personal-income
* https://www.atf.gov/resource-center/docs/undefined/fy2023congressionalbudgetsubmission508cpdf/download
* https://www.nationalpriorities.org/interactive-data/taxday/average/2023/us/receipt/
* various additional government documents
