Pete's BLOG-Day 26,422. The long cost of U.S. wars.

Today is Friday, March 22, 2013. My stats from Tuesday to today are 9.1 miles of walking for a March total of 44.6 miles. My weight today was 161.0 pounds.

QUOTE from Jim Doyne: ""How long a minute is depends on which side of the bathroom door you're on."

My THOUGHTS today have to do with the high cost of fighting our wars. In the paper yesterday was a front page article entitled LONG COST OF WAR. The AP did an investigation  through the Freedom of Information Act to find out what the U.S. government is still spending and will spend for our wars from the Civil War to the Iraq and Afghan wars. Here are some of there findings:
- Civil War: Two children of Civil War veterans (one in N.C. and one in Tenn.) are receiving payments of $876 each. Their ages are around 93 and 83 which means their fathers would have had to have been 70-80 years old when they fathered these two kids.
- Spanish-American War: There are 10 living recipients of benefits at a total cost of $50.000 per year.
- World War I: It costs U.S. taxpayers $20 million a year. There are 2,289 survivors of WWI , about one-third are spouses and dozens of them are over 100 years in age.
- World War II: It costs taxpayers $5 billion per year.
- Korean War: About $2.5 billion per year.
- Vietnam War: Above $22 billion a year.
- Persian Gulf War of early 1990s, the 10 year war in Iraq and the Afghan War: 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 vets, and are poised to grow for many years to come. About 45% of vets are seeking compensation for a variety of ailments.

Experts are predicting we will be paying for Bush's War in Iraq and Afghanistan for over a century - to the tune of at least a couple of trillion dollars. Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney told Americans in 2003 that the war in Iraq would be over in a matter of months and would cost around $60 billion dollars.

I was right - I knew they were wrong in the first place and had no understanding of the Islam religion and didn't even know the difference between a Sunni and Shiite. In fact, one advisor told Bush before the invasion that if we invade Iraq we would stir up old hatreds between the Sunnis and Shiite and it could head to civil war. Bush looked at the guy and said, "I thought they were Moslems over there."

It is hard to imagine a President of the U.S. being so damn stupid and then leading his country into war. But we can thank the U.S. Supreme Court for stopping the recount in Florida and giving the presidency to Bush and Cheney. Do you think they're proud?