Money Spent on the War Would Help End Poverty
April 14, 2008

Since Martin Luther King’s death forty years ago, our nation, if not our world, has been wandering in the desert: at times morally directionless and spiritually unquenched. By one measure, one that captured King’s last earthly attention, the elimination of poverty has not changed much over those four decades, except to worsen.  In 1968, there were 29,700,000 Americans living in poverty.  At that time, the poverty line was $3,335 for a family of four.  Any family with less than that amount of income was officially poor.  15% of the U.S. population was poor at that time.

Today, there are 37,000,000 Americans living in poverty (12.5% of the population).  A family of four with a household income of less than $21,200 is poor in 2008 poverty threshold calculations.  That family of four has gained only $17,865 totally or $447 a year of increased income in raw dollars over the last 40 years. 

Martin Luther King was convinced that poverty, along with racism and war represented the triple threat to America’s future.  After years attacking America’s apartheid, he turned his attention to waging a war on poverty while trying to end war in Southeast Asia.  He was paralleled in his struggle for peace and economic justice by then Presidential candidate, Senator Robert Kennedy (D. NY).  In his political blog, “truedig”, a writer named Bill Boyarsky said it best on August 14, 2007:

“One of the most important, now forgotten, aspects of the tragic year of 1968 was the way Sen. Kennedy and Dr. King saw the relationship between the Vietnam War and poverty at home.  If the war continued, poverty would too. 

They carried this message throughout the country.  It was not popular.  Even some of those who loved him thought Dr. King should stick to his subject: civil rights.  And too many opponents of the war thought Kennedy was muddying up the antiwar campaign by diving into the complexities of poor brown and black America.  But the two persisted, and if Kennedy had been elected in 1968, more Americans would have been persuaded to care.  Assassination—King in April and then Kennedy in June—silenced them.”

Today, we still have millions of Americans mired in poverty and we still are a nation bogged down but in two wars.  It is safe to say that as Christians we must at least wonder about the efficacy of war and the concomitant neglect of our nation’s needy.   The fact remains that a war on poverty and our engagement in military battles overseas cannot effectively co-exist. 

Put simply, in a “Report by the [Congressional] Joint Economic Committee Majority Staff” in November 2007, to date, the costs of the Iraq war alone has been $607 billion since 2003; it increases to $804 billion when you add in Afghanistan.  What’s more interesting is the report’s calculation that the cost per family of four is $16,500 for the Iraq War and $20,900 per family for both wars. 

Those figures are similar to numbers for the poverty thresholds.  It’s easy to see we could have eliminated poverty in America with a fraction of what we’ve spent on war.  We could have provided health insurance to our nation’s uninsured with similar amounts.   Martin Luther King, Jr. saw the bankruptcy of unending military spending and decreasing allocations to social programs.  He said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death".

One of the best arguments for ending the wars we are waging is that they costs us too much in blood and treasure.  One of the best motivations to end these conflicts is because we needed those battle dollars spent to end hunger, homelessness, joblessness and to improve schools and increase health insurance coverage.

Next week: Ending Baltimore’s Poverty

Ralph E. Moore, Jr.

Director of the Community Center

St. Frances Academy