Where Is All of My Money Going?

While searching through various newspapers and newspaper web sites online, I realized that the biggest social problem of all is the how misinformed and uneducated the public is. In search of articles on important social problems, the most prominent topics I found were things such as “Halliburton is awarded $72 Million in Bonuses,” “Putin blows of steam over baltics at EU Summit,” “Egypt Presidential Vote may not be very open,” “China is unwilling to impose sanctions on North Koreans.” Although these are fairly important “world” issues, they aren’t as important as things such as global structural inequality, racial and ethnic problems, gender inequality and male superiority, over consumption and starvation, and globalization and technology. It seems that people are so caught up in the smaller issues that we forget that some countries are wasting too much of the world’s resources, while other countries are starving to death, and ultimately we’re destroying the Earth at a rate faster than even imaginable. But that’s not what we hear on the news because we’re so caught up with the “runaway bride,” and the naughty priests.

I did, however, find an article that somewhat relates to the issue of overspending and misplacing our funds while we’re at it. The article is from the Los Angeles Times and is entitled “$82 Billion Okd in Emergency Spending.” I’ve never managed national budgets, but with that kind of money we could build countries and feed billions of starving children. We could use that money towards one of the biggest social problems of all: global poverty. Growing up in a place like Southern California can make people often forget how poor the world truly is. Of the world’s approximate 6 billion people, more than 1.2 billion live on less than $1 a day. About 60% of these people live in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the article I found in the LA Times claims that $82 Billion dollars will be spent on “military operations.” Actually, $4.2 billion of that will go to foreign aid, and some of these starving people might live to see another day or two. The rest of it, $75.9 Billion of it to be exact, will be wasted in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military operations in Afghanistan? Afghanistan is where my family is originally from, and there