About One Week of US Military Spending Would Wipe Out World Hunger

As continued reports of expensive and devastating military drone strikes roll in from overseas, which have actually taken the lives of US citizens in addition to countless innocents, virtually no one is talking about the very realistic expense of literally solving world hunger. An overall expense that has been calculated to be about $30 billion per year. To put that into perspective for you, the US military spent $737 billion on ‘military defense’ in 2012, $30 billion of which is about 8 days of such an expenditure.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that it is not the ‘job’ of the United States populace and government to go around saving the world in every manner, but it’s especially not the job of the nation to be policing the world through military dominance based on fabrications and laughable WMD allegations. The bloated military budget is funding things like drone strikes on innocents (to which the real figures have been scrubbed by the Air Force), the continuation of an excessive 1,000 or so military bases around the globe, and a series of new wars brought upon by political rhetoric.
But it’s not even about the military budget.
As The Borgen Project notes on their website, feeding the world actually offers benefits beyond the basic moral implications (that most corporations and politicians couldn’t care less about). Even the Los Angeles Times has written about how spending the 30 billion to annihilate the massive worldwide starvation crisis, or perhaps even a fraction of it for less, would generate business on a level that would trump virtually any form of economic ‘recovery’ that may be hiding behind the next financial meltdown scare.
We’re talking about a new revolution of individuals who were previously unable to work, let alone walk, now providing economic value to the world. Perhaps most importantly, we’re talking about a method that could solve the highly complicated immigration problem once and for all. An initiative that could ultimately save many more billions from this fact alone.
Solving The Immigration Problem
The inherent problem regarding immigration is extremely simple: more people want to get into the United States and other developed nations than can be let in for reasons of economy, stability, and otherwise. But why do they want to get into these nations? Well, for one we’re talking about people who live in third world scenarios, and they are living a poor lifestyle. But an even larger issue which affects billions is the lack of basic food and water. Now we’re talking billions, and virtually everyone’s ‘answer’ in this situation is to go ahead and move somewhere else like the United States — oftentimes done so illegally.
Now instead of doing something ludacris like letting the hundreds of millions/billions of hopeful immigrants into the country and suffering the inevitable destruction of the nation’s infrastructure, you can actually go in and fix at least some issues with where these people are coming from. The $30 billion that goes into solving world hunger, for example, may be enough to cause inhabitants of third world nations to instead stay in their present countries. To instead take up employment within that nation, and therefore expand that economy.
Through generating reasons to stay, this effectively reduces the number of those who would seek to game the system of the developed world and come into developed nations as illegal immigrants. And over time, it drastically improves the wealth and infrastructure of the nations themselves.
Will this ever come to fruition? Will the corrupt corporate-owned government ever dish out enough cash to potentially fix the root issue of this problem? Not unless we force them to through activism. But to have the knowledge is the first step, and knowing that just a bit over one week of military spending could alleviate world hunger for around a billion people is indeed a powerful amount of knowledge.
This post originally appeared at Story Leak.