Proliferation and poverty. The federal government released two important statistics on these matters recently.

First, the Department of Defense is to receive its largest budget increase in 20 years — an 11 percent increase to $355.5 billion dollars. That’s $34 billion more than last year and $10 billion less than President George W. Bush wanted.

Why the increase?

According to President Bush in the Associated Press, “Bring justice to agents of terror … liberate a captive people on the other side of the Earth … prepare for conflict in Iraq if necessary … serve in many places far from home and at great risk.”

Now let me share a few facts from our friends at the Center for Defense Information.

Take the seven countries most frequently charged by the Pentagon as “enemies”: they are Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria. Our budget is 26 (that’s twenty-six) times greater than their combined military spending. We spend about six times more on weapons and training for mass destruction than the closest country, Russia.

There’s much more. Our budget is more than the combined military budget of the next 25 countries. If you add the seven potential enemies, plus Russia and China, that doesn’t even account for one third of the United States’ budget.

And my favorite, global military spending fell from $1.2 trillion in 1985 to $812 billion in 2000, while in that same period U.S. spending rose from 31 percent to 36 percent.

In the face of this staggering information, what did the president offer and Congress approve? An 11 percent increase in funding for the U.S. military. Our current lust for total world domination now costs us $355.5 billion. It seems the administration has managed to fear-monger us into thinking we need more weaponry than we already possess.

There is a host of reasons we could discuss, including cozy governmental relations with the defense industrial machine. That conversation is best left for another time.

The second interesting statistic is equally disturbing. The U.S. Census Bureau’s latest numbers show that for the first time in 10 years, the poverty rate in the United States has risen. The number of people living in poverty rose to 11.7 percent of the population, which is an increase of approximately 1.3 million. Officials attribute this increase to the onset of the recession and that makes sense, but two issues emerge from this rise in poverty.

First, the justification for the salaries of corporate executives in this country is questioned now more than ever.

In fact, according to the same census report, the only group whose income grew in 2001 was the richest 5 percent. Additionally, I heard a book by Kevin Phillips quoted recently and learned that from 1981 to 2000 ordinary workers’ salaries rose 100 percent whereas the salaries of top executives rose 4300 percent. The commentators cited expansion of corporate wealth and influence as contributing factors.

These disparities are now discussed on the national stage as serious threats to our democratic system, with a large part of the populace feeling voiceless in a system supposed to give them an equal say.

Second, it seems to many that the war machine ballooning out of control provides a handy cover for the serious inequalities on our own soil. Inequalities we would rather place at a lower priority than building and buying more weapons.

The Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., is concerned with this increasing imbalance of wealth. A recent press release on their Web site, www.tolerance. org, states, “As the gap in wealth and privilege widens, the eyes of the nation remain fixed on other matters — the possibility of a war with Iraq, the D.C. area sniper and a sick stock market.”

The point is that we could have used some of this war money to alleviate the suffering of the poorest Americans, but instead chose to spend it on a military considered by many experts to be overstretched.

While increases in military spending and the poverty rate seem unrelated at first glance, to many, the correlation is clear.

The United States government spends inordinate amounts of money amassing and surrounding itself with destructive weapons so as to intimidate largely imagined threats from some countries instead of committing those resources to social welfare and education programs where they are needed most.

Instead of facilitating dialogue with other governments to solve conflicts so the threat of war and need for weapons is diminished, we hoard these weapons like 10-year-olds with piles of Halloween candy.

If we continue to squander enormous resources on implements of mass destruction, then I fear it will have the opposite effect — destabilizing an already precarious international situation and imperiling from within the very democracy we prize.

Omar Tesdell

is a junior in journalism

and mass communication from Slater. He is the online editor of the Daily.