The plight of the poor has played a role in America’s politics for decades. In the 1930’s, Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic Party vowed to fight the Great Depression, and by implementing countless anti-poverty initiatives and agencies it won enormous favor with the public and ushered in a period of Democratic dominance. In modern politics, narratives surrounding the poor and programs designed to help them are utilized by Republicans and Democrats to further their party’s agenda. I examine the influence of various demographic factors on the attitudes of Mississippi residents towards spending by the government intended to alleviate poverty, using the Mississippi Poll’s results from the years 2004-2014 as my dataset and using cross-tabulation analyses to draw conclusions. I find that gender and religiosity are relatively weak predictors of poverty spending attitudes, while income, education, and age are stronger predictors, and race and party identification are very strong predictors.

This study explores the relationship between human development and military expenditure across a broad spectrum of developing countries. The United Nations Development Programme releases an annual report on the state of human development in the world. The report includes four composite measurements of different aspects of human development: Human Development Index, Human Poverty Index, Gender-related Development Index and Gender Empowerment Measure. This study uses multiple regression to determine the existence and strength of causal relationships between the independent variables and different measurements of military expenditure. Special attention is provided to the role of gender empowerment in shaping the behavior of countries. Attention is also paid to the unique human development and military issues of the Middle East, although countries on every continent are included in the analysis. The study concludes that Military Expenditure as a proportion of central government spending is moderately influenced by human development in general and strongly influenced by gender empowerment in particular. On the other hand, human development has a more limited impact on Military Expenditure as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product.