Posted on 05/09/2014 10:36:45 AM PDT by Theoria
Veterans' Benefits Live On Long After Bullets Stop
Each month, Irene Triplett collects $73.13 from the Department of Veterans Affairs, a pension payment for her father's military service—in the Civil War.
More than 3 million men fought and 530,000 men died in the conflict between North and South. Pvt. Mose Triplett joined the rebels, deserted on the road to Gettysburg, defected to the Union and married so late in life to a woman so young that their daughter Irene is today 84 years old—and the last child of any Civil War veteran still on the VA benefits rolls.
Ms. Triplett's pension, small as it is, stands as a reminder that war's bills don't stop coming when the guns fall silent. The VA is still paying benefits to 16 widows and children of veterans from the 1898 Spanish-American War.
The last U.S. World War I veteran died in 2011. But 4,038 widows, sons and daughters get monthly VA pension or other payments. The government's annual tab for surviving family from those long-ago wars comes to $16.5 million.
Spouses, parents and children of deceased veterans from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan received $6.7 billion in the 2013 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. Payments are based on financial need, any disabilities, and whether the veteran's death was tied to military service.
Those payments don't include the costs of fighting or caring for the veterans themselves. A Harvard University study last year projected the final bill for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would hit $4 trillion to $6 trillion in the coming decades.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
ya, I know what you mean. He may have had lots of interesting times in his later years, with his young wife, LOL.
My great grandfather began getting a pension in 1892 (it was $8 a month). After his death, my great Grandmother got a pension, hers for some reason, was only $6 a month.
I wonder how much she gets? My great grandmother collected a pension after the death of my great grandfather, but I think it was only about $2 a month. As far as I know, the children got nothing. Perhaps that is because they were all married. My grandmother was 11th of 13 children who were orphaned when my great grandfather died of the black lung in the 1890s. My grandmother was only about 5. (After the War, he mined coal in PA.) “He was just a lad,” she would say when she cashed her check.
The rest of my family fought for the South, and I don’t think they got anything.
It would cost more to stop those payments than it would to just keep paying them.
It keeps a gubmint bureaucrat employed. That's the point of every program.
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