General Discussion

My next door neighbor (a great young man) received a TBI (traumatic brain injury) on his 4th tour to Iraq. It took him a year to re-learn how to talk, walk, etc. He seems normal now except he has seizures which has made him lose his drivers license (4 bad wrecks later). He has left the Army with 100% disability. He will receive 100% of his pay for life. He got back-pay and disability which is over $100,000. He lives better than most.
My son-in-law (another great guy), broke his leg in Afghanistan. He suffers PTSD and minor leg complications. He received a 40% disability for life. He got about $20.000 in back-pay and $1200 a month for life. I do not know many young people here (Ft. Campbell), very many are disabled (cannon fodder) from our unnecessary wars. They are receiving (from my poor view) large sums of money (mostly deserved) for life, from tax payer money. The rest of their lives and careers will be subsidized (many will earn more in disability money than they will earn in their future careers).
My SIL is becoming a pastor, my neighbor an I T professional. There are (at least) thousands of young people in this situation, here.
Most vets from previous (unnecessary) wars are not compensated at all. From these 2 "wars" they are becoming our new upper middle class.
This is money spent much better than wealthy tax breaks or corporate welfare, but those expenditures are still increasing too. My generation has been told to buck up.
I am in awe at how fucked up this system is. These young people deserve to be well taken care of, the elite needs to pay. What happens to those of us who are neither?
SS when we apply because we are disabled (and our Dr.'s tell SS we cannot work at all, ever) turns us down the 1st time (almost every time) then they may allow us a court hearing, when they finally admit to those still living applicants, that they are 100% disabled, they backdate their disability to ensure that the new recipient will receive minimal benefits. Benefits are calculated on the last 5 working years and they will claim that you were able to work for 3 of those years even though nothing has changed and the DR."s tell them so.
So we have people like me who earned well as Union employees who receive benefits on 1 or 2 out of 5 of their last "able to work years", abject poverty. what a country.