(AP) OLYMPIA, Wash. - If history is any judge, the U.S. government
will be paying for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next century as
service members and their families grapple with the sacrifices of
combat.
An Associated Press analysis of federal payment
records found that the government is still making monthly payments to
relatives of Civil War veterans _ 148 years after the conflict ended.
At
the 10 year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, more than $40
billion a year are going to compensate veterans and survivors from the
Spanish-American War from 1898, World War I and II, the Korean War, the
Vietnam War, the two Iraq campaigns and the Afghanistan conflict. And
those costs are rising rapidly.
U.S. Sen. Patty Murray said such expenses should remind the nation about war’s long-lasting financial toll.
"When
we decide to go to war, we have to consciously be also thinking about
the cost," said Murray, D-Wash., adding that her WWII-veteran father’s
disability benefits helped feed their family.
Alan Simpson, a
former Republican senator and veteran who co-chaired President Barack
Obama’s deficit committee in 2010, said government leaders working to
limit the national debt should make sure that survivors of veterans need
the money they are receiving.
"Without question, I would affluence-test all of those people," Simpson said.
With
greater numbers of troops surviving combat injuries because of
improvements in battlefield medicine and technology, the costs of
disability payments are set to rise much higher.
The AP
identified the disability and survivor benefits during an analysis of
millions of federal payment records obtained under the Freedom of
Information Act.
To gauge the post-war costs of each conflict,
AP looked at four compensation programs that identify recipients by
war: disabled veterans; survivors of those who died on active duty or
from a service-related disability; low-income wartime vets over age 65
or disabled; and low-income survivors of wartime veterans or their
disabled children.
_The Iraq wars and Afghanistan
So
far, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the first Persian Gulf conflict
in the early 1990s are costing about $12 billion a year to compensate
those who have left military service or family members of those who have
died.
Those post-service compensation costs have totaled more
than $50 billion since 2003, not including expenses of medical care and
other benefits provided to veterans, and are poised to grow for many
years to come.
The new veterans are filing for disabilities at
historic rates, with about 45 percent of those from Iraq and
Afghanistan seeking compensation for injuries. Many are seeking
compensation for a variety of ailments at once.
Experts see a
variety of factors driving that surge, including a bad economy that’s
led more jobless veterans to seek the financial benefits they’ve earned,
troops who survive wounds of war and more awareness about head trauma
and mental health.
_Vietnam War
It’s been 40 years since the U.S. ended its involvement in the Vietnam War, and yet payments for the conflict are still rising.
Now
above $22 billion annually, Vietnam compensation costs are roughly
twice the size of the FBI’s annual budget. And while many disabled
Vietnam vets have been compensated for post-traumatic stress disorder,
hearing loss or general wounds, other ailments are positioning the war
to have large costs even after veterans die.
Based on an
uncertain link to the defoliant Agent Orange that was used in Vietnam,
federal officials approved diabetes a decade ago as an ailment that
qualifies for cash compensation _ and it is now the most compensated
ailment for Vietnam vets.
The VA also recently included heart
disease among the Vietnam medical issues that qualify, and the agency is
seeing thousands of new claims for that issue. Simpson said he has a
lot of concerns about the government agreeing to automatically
compensate for those diseases.
"That has been terribly abused," Simpson said.
Since
heart disease is common among older Americans and is the nation’s
leading cause of death, the future deaths of thousands of Vietnam
veterans could be linked to their service and their benefits passed
along to survivors.
A congressional analysis estimated the
cost of fighting the war was $738 billion in 2011 dollars, and the
post-war benefits for veterans and families have separately cost some
$270 billion since 1970, according to AP calculations.
_World War I, World War II and the Korean War
World War I, which ended 94 years ago, continues to cost taxpayers about $20 million every year. World War II? $5 billion.
Compensation
for WWII veterans and families didn’t peak until 1991 _ 46 years after
the war ended _ and annual costs since then have only declined by about
25 percent. Korean War costs appear to be leveling off at about $2.8
billion per year.
Of the 2,289 survivors drawing cash linked to WWI, about one-third are spouses and dozens of them are over 100 years in age.
Some
of the other recipients are curious: Forty-seven of the spouses are
under the age of 80, meaning they weren’t born until years after the war
ended. Many of those women were in their 20s and 30s when their aging
spouses died in the 1960s and 1970s, and they’ve been drawing the
monthly payments since.
_Civil War and Spanish-American War
There
are 10 living recipients of benefits tied to the 1898 Spanish-American
War at a total cost of about $50,000 per year. The Civil War payments
are going to two children of veterans _ one in North Carolina and one in
Tennessee_ each for $876 per year.
Surviving spouses can
qualify for lifetime benefits when troops from current wars have a
service-linked death. Children under the age of 18 can also qualify, and
those benefits are extended for a lifetime if the person is permanently
incapable of self-support due to a disability before the age of 18.
Citing privacy, officials did not disclose the names of the two children getting the Civil War benefits.
Their
ages suggest the one in Tennessee was born around 1920 and the North
Carolina survivor was born around 1930. A veteran who was young during
the Civil War would likely have been roughly 70 or 80 years old when the
two people were born.
That’s not unheard of. At age 86,
Juanita Tudor Lowrey is the daughter of a Civil War veteran. Her father,
Hugh Tudor, fought in the Union army. After his first wife died, Tudor
was 73 when he remarried her 33-year-old mother in 1920. Lowrey was born
in 1926.
Lowrey, who lives in Kearney, Mo., suspects the
marriage might have been one of convenience, with her father looking for
a housekeeper and her mother looking for some security. He died a
couple years after she was born, and Lowrey received pension benefits
until she was 18.
Now, Lowrey said, she usually gets skepticism from people after she tells them she’s a daughter of a Civil War veteran.
"We’re few and far between," Lowrey said.
___
Reuters headlines are reporting that the Eurozone finance bureaucrats
were looking at the same chart we were this afternoon, and are ready to
back down regarding the Cypriot depositor haircut- at least as it
pertains to ordinary Cypriots with deposits under €100,000 and make sure
they remain whole. Astoundingly, the ECB continues to demand that the entire €5.8 billion deposit wealth confiscation level must still be achieved.
