One of the major things that the people watch whenever they talk about politics is the fiscal calendar of the year. The budget that the government will be alloting for certain departments is very important to the people because the people see it as a means of knowing how their leader prioritizes things, and which projects are being given the most attention and the most resources.
A recent study shows that the US spent a large amount of their budget on the military, and that if we were to total the budget of all the countries in the world for military expenditures in 2005, the world spent a total of $1.1 trillion the US spent nearly half of that budget. Other regions have smaller percentages, but if you look at the individual budgets of these countries and what percentage of their budget was used for military purposes, they still used a huge chunk of their budget for military expenditures. When you look at education, though, it’s a different story. The developed continents had a high budget for education, even higher than the total military budget of the world (North America had a budget of $1.355 trillion in just in 2004), but those smaller countries and the developing nations, who need more budget for education precisely because they are developing, only had small percentages of their budgets alloted for education.
It is precisely because of things like this that people monitor the fiscal calendar and the planning of the fiscal calendar closely. In the developing countries, this is a major issue because education and agriculture, two of the major resources of these countries, are not being given the attention they deserve, whereas military exercises are being given much more priority. In the bigger countries, meanwhile, while education has not suffered as much as it has in the smaller countries, what has suffered in its stead is the health care service in these developed countries. What, then, could these countries learn from each other when it comes to budgeting? Let’s hope they learn in time, before we suffer the consequences of their misplaced priority.