Get Your Wallet

Donald Sensing looks at good old Charlie Rangel's "universal service" bill and calculates the cost. He goes much, much further than I did when doing this calculation and looks at what the entire program would entail.

So we have 8,000,000 men and women on active duty or service at any one time, including we would assume the NCOs and officers of the armed forces and their career equivalents in civilian service. What might the total be for directly-paid salaries alone, not including associated costs?

Brand new privates in the Army receive $1,178 per month for the first four months and $1,273 per month after that. By the end of their second year they pay grade E3 and make – again, this is directly-paid salary – $1,501 per month. In the middle is pay grade E2, which pays $1,427. Let’s use that figure as the overall average.

Eight million salaries paying $1,427 per month equals an astonishing 1.3699 to the 11th power dollars. That’s $136,990,000,000 per year just for salaries.

One Hundred Thirty-Six Billion, Nine Hundred Ninety Million dollars per year for salaries alone. But almost a million careerists, at least, will each be making considerably more. So a more realistic salary figure is a cool quarter-trillion dollars.

Overhead costs could easily add another 50 percent to that, although probably most overhead would be sunk costs that would be incurred at the beginning and at a much lower levellater. Even so, we may charitably add $25 billion per year. Now we’re up $275 billion per year.

Sensing calls it the “biggest ongoing budget deficit in the history of the world”.  That's about right.