The Big Answer

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Social losses refer to the reduced support for education, health, and services as many if not most nations opt to support military spending instead of spending their nation treasures productively. Some nations spend themselves into debt buying weapons, as the people get hungrier, poorer, and more desperate. In places like North Korea this military obsession has led to a starving populace and yet the powers-that-be there show no concern whatsoever for their people's plight.

The military spending in some countries is suicidally obsessive

Nearly 775 million people, 60 percent women, are still illiterate. In developing countries, 30 percent of children aged 6 to 11, and 60 percent aged 12 to 17 do not attend school. In the early part of the 20th century, half the world was illiterate, but in 1998 the rate was 16%. In 2011 the illiteracy rate for the world is 15.9%. (Source: CIA World Factbook) The illiteracy rate in the U.S. is 1%, although many high school test scores show that these young people might as well be illiterate since their educations are a complete bust. Increasingly, American companies import workers that have proper job prerequisites since our schools are failing our citizens.

The average person can expect to give up 3 or 4 years of his/her working life to pay for military spending

A whole series of conversion studies in the U.S., Britain and elsewhere have shown that, dollar for dollar, government spending on the military creates far fewer jobs than would equivalent public money spent on, say, health and services. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, one billion spent in education rather than on the military would create 111,000 more jobs. The military industry is capital intensive and becoming ever more so, offering less and less employment. In an industrialized society, every billion dollars invested in the service industries would create about 51,000 more jobs than it would in the defense sector.

At present levels of military expenditure, the average person can expect to give up 3 or 4 years of his/her working life to pay for military spending.