The Asso­ci­ated press has ana­lyzed the US gov­ern­ment spend­ing on Haiti earth­quake relief. They broke the num­bers down to what each Amer­i­can dol­lar will be spent on. 42 cents will go to dis­as­ter assis­tance, 33 cents for mil­i­tary aid, nine cents for food, another nine cents to get the food to Haiti, and only one penny to the Hait­ian government.

Total pledges of aid from the US gov­ern­ment to Haiti amount to $379 mil­lion that trans­lates to $1.25 for each US citizen.

From this Asso­ci­ated Press arti­cle that we found at The Sun News, writer Martha Men­doza gives more detail to the dol­lar analogy.

Of each U.S. tax­payer dol­lar, 42 cents funds US AID’s dis­as­ter assis­tance — every­thing from $5,000 gen­er­a­tors to $35 hygiene kits with soap, tooth­brushes and tooth­paste for a fam­ily of five.

Another 33 cents is going to the U.S. mil­i­tary, pay­ing for secu­rity, search and res­cue teams, and the Navy’s hos­pi­tal ship USNS Comfort.

Just under a dime has already been spent on food: 122 mil­lion pounds of pinto beans, black beans, rice, corn soy blend and veg­etable oil. When pur­chased in bulk, the actual food prices are rel­a­tively low. Pinto beans, for exam­ple, cost the U.S. gov­ern­ment 40 cents a pound when pur­chased in 5 million-pound batches last week.

Get­ting the food to Haitians — pay­ing for freighters, trucks and dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ters, and the peo­ple to staff them, took another nine cents from each dollar.

Ini­tial dis­as­ter spend­ing was aimed at sav­ing lives; now the spend­ing is shift­ing to recov­ery. The Obama admin­is­tra­tion is putting five cents of each dol­lar into efforts to pay sur­vivors to work. One pro­gram already in place describes pay­ing 40,000 Haitians $3 per day for 20 days to clean up around hos­pi­tals and dig latrines. That project also includes rent­ing 10 exca­va­tors and load­ers, at $600 each, and 10 dump trucks at $50 a load.

Just under one penny of each dol­lar is going straight to the shat­tered Hait­ian gov­ern­ment, whose pres­i­dent is sleep­ing in a tent while strug­gling to orga­nize an admin­is­tra­tion that was noto­ri­ously unsta­ble even before the earthquake.

The U.S. rarely gives large amounts of money directly to gov­ern­ments, a prac­tice that is “very defen­si­ble from my point of view,” said John Simon, who coor­di­nated U.S. responses to inter­na­tional dis­as­ters under Pres­i­dent Bush’s administration.

Like

Unlike