Loose Change

By Bill Maher

Remember the Fresh Air Fund, where you could send a poor city kid to the boonies somewhere to get bitten by chiggers for pennies a day? What would you guess it’ll cost to keep an American soldier in Afghanistan in 2014? According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, $2.1 million. That’s just half a million pennies a day!

Here’s the weird part: From 2008 to 2013, it only cost $1.3 million a year. We’ve cut the number of troops from 100,000 to 40,000, but the Pentagon says it will only save 10%. And that means somehow, magically, the price of keeping Marky Mark lone surviving has gone up $800,000 a year.

I don’t want to sound unpatriotic, but it’s almost like the Pentagon just extracts these numbers out of its ass.