Many of us have a sense that our economic priorities and, more specifically, our national budgetary allocations are disproportionately skewed toward addressing military threats.
Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN from 2013 to 2017, quantifies this in an essay in Time, April 27/May4:
"Since 2010, the U.S. has been spending an average of $180 billion annually on counterterrorism efforts---compared with less than $2 billion on pandemic and emerging infectious-disease programs. In a reflection of how skewed the U.S. national-security budget is toward the military over other tools in the national-security toolbox, Congress appropriated $685 billion in 2019 for the Pentagon, compared with around $7 billion for the CDC."
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