The Marshall Plan cost less than one year of America's current foreign aid
The program credited with rebuilding a continent was smaller, and stranger, than the legend suggests.
Ask someone to guess the size of the Marshall Plan and they'll usually overshoot by an order of magnitude. The real number: about $13.3 billion, spent over roughly four years, spread across sixteen countries. Adjusted to today's dollars, that's around $143 billion total, less than the United States now spends on foreign assistance in a single year.
What made it work wasn't the sum. It was the structure. Congress required European governments to agree, jointly, on how the money would be spent before a dollar moved, a condition that forced France, Britain, and their neighbors into the kind of coordinated planning that later became the seed of European economic integration. Most of the aid arrived as grants, not loans, specifically to avoid saddling shattered economies with new debt. During the recovery years, European investment ran at roughly 20% of national income, a full third above prewar levels, even though domestic savings were close to zero. The dollars weren't rebuilding factories directly so much as they were buying time for European savings to exist again.
The generosity is real. So is the fact that it worked partly because the U.S. insisted on strings, not despite it.