Commentary: War costs last forever

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/03/29/186937/commentary-war-costs-last-forever.html

Commentary: War costs last forever
Glenn Garvin | The Miami Herald
Posted on Friday, March 29, 2013

~snip~

Aside from its curiosity value, the tale of the Civil War kids suggests an easy way to trim the federal deficit — not by cutting the pensions, which cost the government a grand total of $1,752 a year, but by eliminating subsidized Viagra from Obamacare. Those children were fathered well into the 20th century, when their fathers were close to 80 years old.

The Civil War isn’t the only war of the 19th century we’re still paying pensions for. Ten people are still getting pensions from the Spanish-American War, which ended in 1898. Total cost: $50,000 a year.

~snip~

The real money, not surprisingly, starts with World War II, in which nearly a million U.S. soldiers were killed or wounded. The $5 billion annual cost of pensions (which hasn’t declined much from its 1991 peak, even though the veterans are dying at the rate of more than 1,000 a day) is almost as much as FEMA pays out each year in disaster aid. The much smaller Korean War, which ended in 1953, still costs about $2.8 billion a year.

In the 1960s, it often seemed that the Vietnam war would never end — and for government accountants, it hasn’t. They issue checks for $22 billion each year (nearly triple the annual cost of the Transportation Safety Administration) and have already paid $270 billion to vets and their families. And the Middle Eastern wars of the past two decades may prove to be the most costly of all.



unhappycamper comment: http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm