Dick Cheney: A Most Expensive Man

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/jaime-oneill/59082/dick-cheney-a-most-expensive-man

Dick Cheney: A Most Expensive Man
Dick Cheney
by Jaime O'Neill | October 19, 2014 - 9:09am

Among those early morning thoughts that began to form with my first intake of coffee this morning was a bit of speculation about just how much money a man like Dick Cheney has cost the American taxpayer. As the sky grew gradually brighter and my thoughts began to coalesce around this question, it became obvious that Mr. Cheney was and is a most expensive human being. I don’t have access to enough information to do a precise accounting, and there are certain costs associated with his sojourn on this planet that could never be accurately calculated, but even a conservative guess would suggest that even a country as rich as the United States of America really can’t afford people who cost this much.

If you Google Cheney’s net worth, you get a very big array of estimates, running from a high of $90 million to a low of around $19 million, depending on the source. Even the shadowy imprecision of those figures suggests some fairly nefarious manipulations of money, but let’s allow for the idea that much of Cheney’s wealth came from his brief stint as head of Halliburton, the company that made roughly $40 billion off the war in Iraq that was, as much as anyone’s, Cheney’s bright idea.

Halliburton wasn’t in great shape when Cheney slithered over from his stint as Secretary of Defense under Bush the First to take over the reins of that company, but once he returned from that brief interlude in the private sector to take up yet another top government post with Bush, Too, the nitwit son, Halliburton began to rake in really substantial and very profitable defense contracts. Even if we accept the low-ball figure of $1 trillion as the cost, to date, of the war in Iraq, that would mean Halliburton collected 4% of all the money spent on that disaster. That’s not chump change, though only a country with such a large percentage of chumps would have spent it.

But leaving the rather astounding costs of Cheney’s war aside, the former V.P. has run up a sizeable medical bill on our tab. His most recent heart operation—a transplant—has cost in excess of a million dollars, for instance. The procedure itself was around a quarter of a million dollars, and the various post-op ministrations—from a series of cardiac biopsies to monitor the possibility of rejection, to the anti-rejection drugs that keep the heart from rejecting its recipient added another half million to the V.P.’s tab. But while he waited for a heart to become available, Cheney spent 20 months on a ventricular assist device, at a cost totaling some $300,000. These are the kind of medical costs the always- dickish Mr. Cheney and his kind don’t want lesser people to have spent on treatment for their medical conditions. Infinite sums of taxpayer money should be spent to keep public “servants” like Dick Cheney alive and well, of course, but less important people should have the courtesy to just go die when they get sick because, if you don’t have the personal initiative to sleaze your way to top government slots and then trade that connectedness in for big salaries in the private sector (while keeping your limitless government medical benefits for life) then you just aren’t the kind of entrepreneurial go-getter whose health care we care to subsidize.