Beginning in 1974, Ruth Sivard and World Priorities Incorporated have published a booklet titled "World Military and Social Expenditures." In this book Sivard explains how much the world spends on armaments and then translates these figures into terms of daily living. For instance, the United States and the Soviet Union spent together about $1.5 billion a day on military defense. But the United States ranks eighteenth among all nations in infant mortality; the Soviet Union, forty-sixth. The fuel consumed by the Pentagon in a single year would run the entire U.S. public transit system for 22 years. To protect Kuwaiti oil tankers in the Persian Gulf costs the U.S. Navy an extra $365 million a year above normal operating costs, about three times as much as the U.S. budget for research on energy conservation. The absurdities go on.
The point is obvious: a bloated military budget and a commitment to excessive military strength corrupts the very society the military is supposed to serve and protect. (Witness the defense contract scandal brewing in Washington.) Of course, the corruption caused by a military budget out of control needs to be stopped. But the problems are symptomatic of our capitalist system as a whole. More often than not, money goes to activities that contribute little or nothing to sustaining our society in the things most of us would consider important: health, food, clean air and water, affordable housing, and so on.
There are solutions, but you won't hear them on Nightline. Mark Satin, editor of New Options, asked twenty non-mainstream economists and thinkers what they would do to cut the $220 billion deficit estimated for the early 1990s. Some of their suggestions: a tax on mergers and elimination of the deductions companies get for merging; a tax on the transfer of stocks; paying people to stay healthy (including high taxes on alcohol and cigarettes); increasing energy conservation; encouraging more ownership of companies by employees. Satin believes that $250 billion could be cut by 1993 and that we could have a system that encourages health, productive work, and satisfaction.
The real point of Satin's review is not the money we could save but the different vision we need of what our society is all about. We need to think in terms of a "sustainable society," one that sustains itself by sustaining its members, not a society where the market declares its fiats ignorant of the future or of people's values. But as Sivard's analysis shows, we and most other countries in the world have militarized societies that seem to disdain their members by putting them in constant jeopardy. We could all use a little less jeopardy and a lot more health.
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Men And Women