The Hidden Costs

Nothing in life is exactly what it seems. We love to obsess on the surface and frankly have no time to go deeper. It's only when we have to go deeper that we learn the true cost of things.

The obvious first example is the house. The first thing you do when you want a house is make an offer. It's not just a dollar figure. There are closing costs, rodent removal, septic systems, electric, plumbing and dozens of other considerations. And when you get what you want, thinking for a moment that you've pulled something over on the other side, you realize that's not the fact, jack. The house has twice the square footage than our current place. We need more furniture. The bathrooms don't have electrical outlets. We can't live without those.
I'm a man and therefore must have a grill. But even a grill's not just a grill. I'm not going to double the price for the grill with the extras like gas, a cover, and utensils. It's going to be higher than the sticker price.

We bought the man-sized HD TV and wouldn't you know, it needs more than a place to sit in the man cave. We need to upgrade our cable or satellite to HD. We need HDMI cables, which you can't get at the dollar store, to hook the tellie up to a DVD player (Blu-Ray of course), cable/satellite box and any kind of surround-sound system that we get. And don't forget the Netflix subscription.

I listen to the NPR Fresh Air podcast, and two of their episodes were the hidden costs of the wars we have going on. Everyone knows about the army of contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq. We look down on them, almost to the level that returning soldiers from Vietnam were treated. I learned that the contractors have to get their own insurance, which can be as expensive as their salary. That's OK, though, because it's paid by the government. When a contractor gets injured, they may get military transport out of the "hot zone", but it's not guaranteed. And when they get home, while their insurance claims are also paid by the government (paid to the insurance company, not the contractor), they do not have the veteran support structure that regular soldiers get. There's a big hidden cost to that bloated salary you might get to drive a truck in Afghanistan.

Speaking of trucks, another NPR podcast told the tale of bribes contracting companies pay to the Taliban in order to get the supplies over the sparsely defended roads in order to, yeah, fight the Taliban. Most of the countryside is controlled by warlords, and since contractors can only defend themselves with AK-47s, they go the payout route instead. At least in this case, and it really is a least, some Afghani businessmen are making a lot of money out of the deal in protection.

Most of the contractor costs aren't made public. We'll never really know how much the war costs. It would make more sense to have everyone under the umbrella of the army. That would probably require a draft, and we're not going for that again. We're OK with people profiting on the suffering of others, though.

If I ever meet a contractor who has been injured in a war, I'll give them the same respect I'd give to a veteran. It's the least that they deserve.