"A Reflection of Values" from a speech by Ben Cohen
by Ben Cohen
Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, and president of TrueMajority.org, gave the following budget information on a chart in a speech given at the Washington Peace Rally held October 26, 2002:
- $40 billion – children's health care
- $34 billion – children's education
- $15 billion – higher education
- $7 billion – job training
- $29 billion – affordable housing
- $8 billion – environmental protection
- $355 billion – the Pentagon budget. And that does not include the 200 billion dollars that war with Iraq and the ensuing occupation and nation-building is expected to cost.
Cohen added additional facts and figures:
And now the administration wants to add another 200 billion dollars to that last line on the chart. 200 billion—that's a lot of money. What could we buy with that if we didn't have this war?
- For 55 billion dollars we could provide all of our public schools with state of the art computer systems for all of our students.
- For 11 billion dollars a year, we could reduce class size, kindergarten through 3rd grade, to 15 kids per class.
- For 6 billion dollars a year, we could provide health insurance for all those kids who don't have any today.
- For 2 billion dollars a year we could provide Head Start for the hundreds of thousands of eligible kids who can't get into the program.
- For another 2 billion dollars a year, we could double funding for clean and renewable energy.
- There are 30,000 children a day, around the world, who are dying from hunger. For 13 billion dollars a year, we could feed all of 'em!
- There are 6,000 people a day dying from AIDS in Africa. For 10 billion dollars a year, we can curb the disease.
- And for 1 billion dollars a year, we could provide complete public financing of all federal elections, allowing us to really, totally and absolutely get money out of politics—for one billion dollars a year.
Cohen noted that if the leaders instead chose to apply the costs of war to the above social needs rather than war, we would still have $100 billion leftover.
Concluding his speech, Cohen stated:
The continued belligerence of our leaders saps our souls, saps our spirit, and saps our strength as a nation. Let us instead rededicate ourselves to helping our nation to match its actions with the spirit and soul of our people—in goodness and justice and compassion and love.
Note: Cohen is also founder and President of Business Leaders For Sensible Priorities, which mobilizes business leaders to redirect U.S. federal budget priorities away from Cold War military spending levels and toward meeting basic human needs. He is also helping to launch a company called Sweat X, which produces active wear in a unionized, employee-owned garment factory in Los Angeles for people who don’t want to wear clothes manufactured in sweatshops.
Editor’s Experiment: To get a visual of these statistics, I plotted them as a bar chart using an electronic spreadsheet program. The Pentagon budget ran for six pages before any of the other budgets even came into view. Shocking.