The US is number one in military spending compared to all other countries in the world. According to the UN, we spend 5% of our $6.1 trillion gross national product (GNP) on the military, far surpassing other Western industrial nations. (France: 2%; United Kingdom: 4%; Sweden: 2%). At the same time, the US lags far behind other countries on key socio-economic indicators, which are measures of the well-being of the American people as a whole:

A recent study of 18 nations revealed that poor children in the United States are poorer than the children in most other Western industrialized nations because the gap between rich and poor is particularly large in the United States and because social welfare programs here are less generous than abroad. The US ranks sixteenth out of the 18 countries, ahead of only Israel and Ireland⁵.

The Children's Defense Fund estimates that every year of child poverty at current levels will cost the economy between $36 billion and $177 billion in lower future productivity and employment among those who grow up poor. These costs don't include the billions of additional dollars that will be spent on special education, crime, foster care, and teenage childbearing resulting from child poverty.

The deteriorating social conditions in the US are exacerbated for people of color because of the historic legacy of racism. The United Nations Development Program rates countries by a Human Development Index (HDI) that measures life expectancy, literacy, education, and GDP per capita. In 1993, they found that when the HDI of the US was broken down by race, its ranking changed dramatically: first place for whites; 31st for African Americans (along with Trinidad and Tobego) and 35th for Hispanics (comparable to Estonia).

World military spending is still over $700 billion a year which equals the income of nearly half the world's people⁶. This continuing high level of resources going into the military is having a huge impact on women all over the world by draining resources that could be spent on human needs. For instance, at a cost of less than half their military expenditures, the developing countries could have a package of basic health services that would save ten million lives a year⁷.