Foreign Aid

[MikeB]

So I happened to hear on the news this morning that we gave 257 Million Dollars to Guatemala in foreign aid. I immediately thought, wait a minute that sounds like more millions than the population of the country. That can't be right. Well it is/was.

So we gave Guatemala 15 Million dollars per citizen in 2017 and they still need to leave and come here? I knew Foreign Aid tends to be crazy and invariably gets wasted to corruption, but come on? Heck that is almost a million dollars (700K) per US citizen we sent to Guatemala assuming my math is correct. (US Popluation ~327Million)!

2016 was worse, 2018 is better only about 3.5 Million per Guatemalan citizen - but I wonder if that number is complete yet.

Just think what we could do with that money either not in the deficit, or actually spent in the US. Heck, I might even stop complaining about funding some of those Dem boondoggles in the US, if we had that money here. That's an awful lot of homes for homeless people, or medical care for poor people, heck make it like Oprah - "Everyone get's a car!"

https://explorer.usaid.gov/cd/GTM

Never mind. Not to self, don’t try to do math in your head before the first cup of coffee.

[dogmush]

Your math is way wrong.

According to that USAID link we gave the $257,347,600 in 2017.  2017 pop of US is 325,700,00.  So $0.79 per US citizen.

Population of Guatemala is listed as 17,600,000. So $14.62 US aid per Guatemalan.

[MikeB]

Your math is way wrong.

According to that USAID link we gave the $257,347,600 in 2017.  2017 pop of US is 325,700,00.  So $0.79 per US citizen.

Population of Guatemala is listed as 17,600,000. So $14.62 US aid per Guatemalan.

Yeah. You’re correct. I heard it and thought wait a minute that’s more millions than people, but was not dropping the zeros in my head when doing shortcut division.

[230RN]

One of the beauties of slide rule training is that you semiautomatically figure out where the decimal point should be in the result.

But coffee sure helps.

[Ben]

Yeah. You’re correct. I heard it and thought wait a minute that’s more millions than people, but was not dropping the zeros in my head when doing shortcut division.

Don't feel bad. I did something similar once in front of an audience while giving a talk. If the stage background were red, my face would have blended right in and I could have disappeared. 

[230RN]

That happened in my first lecture involving math.  After that, I had the problems all worked out in advance, and would pretend I was just selecting the starting numbers at random.  I'd call them "PFA" numbers, for just "Plucked From the Air."

But they weren't, tee-hee.

Terry