And how much of that $300 billion is actually just serving intelligence goals?
So the money does stay in the U.S., at least.
We could also just stop meddling in other countries' affairs so much.
If you are an effective altruist and want foreign aid to benefit the world, you should be concerned that it's funnelled to defence contractors instead.
If you just think the US wastes too much money on it's military you should be concerned that they are sneaking more money to defence contractors under the guise of humanitarianism.
But in this case "foreign aid" seems to mean mostly "weapons for dictators", so it doesn't look like a constructive use of the funds.
So in fact, if your other number is correct, about 1/2 of the bridge budget.
Over the past 50 years, Pittsburgh and other similar cities have tripled their developed areas while the region's population remains flat. That's a lot of additional infrastructure - roads, sewers, power, water and gas lines - to maintain without new revenue to maintain it.
Strong Towns has referred to this as the "growth ponzi scheme" and it's only going to get worse as population growth slows in this country.
To me it adds up. I live in the a city that's sprawled without growth. I see the lifecycle
1. Used to be a dense city with most houses being doubles, and 3-5 story apartment buildings.
2. Built area has tripled since 1970 into mostly SFH suburbs, but population is the same
3. Outside the very newest suburbs, infrastructure has decayed tremendously. Taxes haven't really increased, the only time sewers or roads ever get repaired is with grants from the feds.
It happened to the city and now it's happening to the post-war suburbs.
Pittsburgh got a lot of money from it for this kind of thing, although there obviously wasn't time to do anything yet.
The BBB bill wasn't for this, it was social spending.
—Michael Parenti
0.5% not 8%. These numbers are very different.
Although this bridge seems disconnected from the highway system, so I'm not even sure the US government even funds it at all.
Infrastructure is theoretically already popular but most would put it off for a few extra dollars.
Edit: I provided a wrong figure earlier for Foreign Aid. As per @whatkim, the correct amount should be approx. 1.3% ($51 billion) for 2021.
You can see a complete categorical breakdown here: https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spend...
Still, there are a few areas of concern:
1. Income Security > Other Income Security $831 billion
2. Education is 41% of the military budget! $296 billion