Tony Hall: “I want really the people that listen in and watch the Congress in action, because so many people are under the…”

“I want really the people that listen in and watch the Congress in action, because so many people are under the misunderstanding that we spend so much of our total budget on foreign aid, to understand that the fact is that is not true. If we put everything together, including aid to Israel and Egypt, of our total budget it is less than 1 percent that goes for foreign aid. Most people across the country think that we spend somewhere between 17 and 25 percent of our total budget on foreign aid. We have done polls on it. A lot of our elected officials run against foreign aid and they tell people we spend too much money, but the fact is it is less than 1 percent. In our own country the bottom 2 rac{1}{2} to 3 percent of our people live in great poverty, whether it is in the cities or in Appalachia or in other parts. As a matter of fact, they rank as low as any people of the poorest of the poor in the Third World countries. The first thing this Congress ought to do is take care of that problem.”