President Barack Obama has defended US foreign assistance, saying Amercia's overseas aid is only about 1% of its federal budget, but the return on this investment is much higher.
"It's important for people to know that foreign aid accounts for less than 2 per cent of our budget. If you defined it just narrowly as the kind of foreign aid to help feed people and what we think of classically as foreign aid, it's probably closer to 1%," Obama said in response to a question during the first ever Twitter Town Hall at the White House yesterday.
"So sometimes people have an exaggerated sense that we spend 25 per cent of the federal budget on foreign aid. It's a tiny amount that has a big impact," he argued.
He was responding to a question from Elizabeth in Chicago, who said: Stop giving money to countries that "waste" it and cited Pakistan among the culprits.
Obama argued that to be a leader in the world, to have influence, to help stabilize countries and create opportunity for people so that they don't breed terrorists or create huge refugee flows and so forth, it's smart for the United States to make a very modest investment in foreign aid.
"It's a force multiplier and it's something that even in tough fiscal times America needs to continue to do as part of our role as a global leader," he said.
Obama argued that his administration wants to promote alternative sources of energy.
"I want to promote alternative energy everywhere, including oil states like Louisiana and Texas. This is something that I'm very proud of and doesn't get a lot of attention," he said.
"We made the largest investment in clean energy in our history through the Recovery Act. So we put forward a range of programs that provided credits and grants to startup companies in areas like creating wind turbines, solar panels," he said.
"A great example is advanced battery manufacturing. When I came into office, advanced batteries, which are used, for example, in electric cars, we only accounted for 2% of the world market in advanced batteries. We have quintupled our market share, or even gone further, just over the last two years. We are projecting that we can get to 30 to 40 per cent of that market. That's creating jobs all across the Midwest, all across America," he said.
"Whoever wins this race on advanced battery manufacturing is probably going to win the race to produce the cars of the 21st century. China is investing in it. Germany is investing in it. We need to be investing in it as well," Obama said.
