Legislative

What did we learn about lobbying Congress through our participating in ANA DC Days?

by Claire Gosselin, co-chair of WILPF Disarm: Dismantle the War Economy Committee

Best Practices

Perspective by Ray Acheson of WILPF's Reaching Critical Will Project

• Always use the term "military budget" rather than "defense budget
• Increasing military spending, as the proposed 2010 Department of Defense budget does, is not a reasonable response to the financial crisis.
• In fact, spending more money on the military is counterproductive in terms of job creation and sustainable economic growth in the United States.

Excerpt from Jane Midgley's article "Gender Responsive Budgeting," originally published in the May/June 2006 edition of Dollars and Sense magazine.

Government budgets are far from bureaucratic exercises. They are profound expressions of how those who govern a country distribute its resources and how the results of their policies help or harm different sectors of its population. Budgets inevitably represent a series of trade-offs. In themselves, though, the numbers don’t illuminate the high stakes, especially for women and other groups marginalized in the decision-making process.

Budgets are not gender neutral, either in their development or in their impact. Because the different impacts that women and men experience as a result of expenditure and revenue decisions are not measured, government budgets typically suffer from what some economists have called "gender blindness."

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