US still paying compensation to Civil War veterans' families

 

US still paying compensation to Civil War veterans' families

The US government is still paying compensation to relatives of the Civil War which ended 148 years ago.

Two descendants of Civil War veterans still receive payments from the U.S. government Photo: ALAMY

By Nick Allen, Los Angeles

9:22PM GMT 20 Mar 2013

Each year two surviving offspring of veterans who fought in the conflict receive cheques worth $879 (£581). The recipients, who have not been publicly named, live in Tennessee and North Carolina.

There are also 10 living recipients of benefits linked to their fathers who fought in the Spanish-American War of 1898, and the total cost of that conflict to the US taxpayer is currently around $50,000 a year.

The US government's total compensation bill for veterans and survivors of all the wars since, including the First World War, Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, is now $40 billion a year.

The costs were uncovered by the Associated Press in an extensive investigation of payment records obtained under freedom of information laws.

Government officials had kept figures for each war on what it was paying disabled veterans, survivors of those who died on duty, low-income veterans, and low-income survivors of veterans or their disabled children.

US Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington state, said her veteran father's disability benefits had helped feed her family, but the figures should remind the nation about the long-lasting financial toll of war.

She said: "When we decide to go to war, we have to consciously be also thinking about the cost."

Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator who co-chaired President Barack Obama 's deficit committee in 2010, said government leaders should make sure that survivors of veterans need the money they are receiving.

He added: "Without question, I would affluence-test all of those people."

America ended its involvement in Vietnam four decades ago but the compensation bill is now above $22 billion a year, twice the size of the FBI 's annual budget.

Compensation for Second World War veterans and their families peaked in 1991, 46 years after the war ended, and continues to cost $5 billion a year. The First World War cost US taxpayers about $20 million every year.