Foreign Aid

Dear Barack,

You should increase US foreign assistance from $25 billion per year to ensure the US does its share to meet the Millennium Development Goals in your yearly budget. You may receive heavy criticism for this from Congress because of our ever increasing debt and financial crisis at home. However, doing this will signal to many of the most underdeveloped countries in the world that the United States wants to target new spending towards strategic goals, including helping the world's weakest states to build healthy and educated communities, reduce poverty, develop markets, and generate wealth. Foreign spending is always unpopular in America, but your best chance of passing this is while your popularity is high. That is not to say that you should not be focusing most of your attention on stimulating the economy, just that you need to keep in mind people are suffering outside of the United States too.