National Budget

Ben & Jerry's co-founder Ben Cohen uses Oreo cookies to demonstrate how much money the U.S. spends on defense.

Ben Cohen: Well, really the major issue that our organization is concerned with is national budget priorities in general, essentially the way Congress divides up our tax money. You know, we started from a group of business people who said, "How is it possible that, in the richest country in the world, we have the highest child poverty rate in the industrialized world; our schools are in financial crisis; our health care system is in a crisis; and we have all this money? How is that possible?"

So, as business people, we started by looking at the federal budget, and it doesn't take you long once you start looking at the discretionary budget the amount of money that Congress has available to spend as it wishes. You know;after all the mandatory expenses. You look at that budget, and you see that half of it, fifty percent, goes to the Pentagon.

Tavis: Some would argue, though, Ben, that in the world we live in today - I mean, look at what's happening around us, as we speak; to say nothing of what we're engaged in in this country - I'm not one of these persons, but some would say that defense spending ought to be our priority in a very, very unsafe and tenuous world.

Cohen: Well, I mean, it definitely is an unsafe world, but there's a certain level of spending that actually is beneficial. Once you spend beyond that, essentially to make weapons that were designed to defeat the former Soviet Union that have no effect on protecting us from terrorism, then it actually makes our country weaker when we take our resources and use them for things that they're not needed on, while our kids are suffering.

Tavis: So there is about sixty billion dollars you and the organization have earmarked, highlighting the budget.

Cohen: It was a study that was done by Larry Korb, the former Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan, and signed onto by, you know, a whole host of military advisers that we have, including the former head of the CIA, the former head of the North Atlantic Fleet.

Tavis: What got my attention was when a Reagan guy says that; then it gets your attention.

Cohen: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. Dr. Korb got involved in this because he was part of the Reagan White House, and he was privy to their strategy. Their strategy was to pump up our Pentagon spending in order to spend the Soviet Union out of existence. And then the plan was to drop it and be able to fund all these other domestic needs. He got so upset because they never dropped it, as per the plan.

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