NFL Teams demand PAYMENT to Salute troops at games

Sad..but true. Oh, so pathetically sad though. What has happened to our nation, anyway? I'm not THAT old here, and it wasn't THAT long ago that people (and I mean the public, not immediate company who spend measurable time being informed) wouldn't need spoon fed and led by the nose to consider the concept of scale. 

$$ Ask everyone in your neighborhood to give you $1. You can have quite a party, indeed! 

$$ Get everyone in your city to pay up $1, and you can live pretty well, in most cases, for at least several years, eh? (Okay, depends on where and how many pony up, I admit) 

$$ Do this with everyone in your state...and you'll take your place as a newly minted millionaire with just enough money to know what 'trust fund bratty' feels like to wear like a hat. 

$$ See everyone in the US to give just $1...and you're in the ranks where money starts to lose meaning, and power becomes the object. 

$$ Now go get the Chinese to fork or chopstick over $1, and you'll be slapping some sense into Bill Gates while sipping tea and pinky shaking by the end of the month.  

All in the scale of things...eh?

300,000 here, with a few million there ain't much...until we start counting independently budgeted agencies comprising 'The Government', and without even getting into sub divisions with independent spending authority? Scale leaves little mystery to how we've added almost as much debt as a nation since Obama took office, than actually existed when he did. ($10.6 Trillion on Jan. 20th, 2009 vs. 18.1 Trillion as of yesterday )

I DO agree with saying business is business for Army contracts to have signage at sporting events or other clear means of straight advertising. One only needs to look at America's Army. . . 

Source: America's Army Fact Sheet 

It cost over $32 Million by 2009, and when that article came out at Gamespot, showing financials from a FOIA request about the game budget. 

You're right, it isn't the money...and this is a military with single cruise missiles costing almost twice what this one team was paid (used regularly enough, too). It is the fact it's hidden and covered to appear something totally different.

This *IS* how we've added 8 trillion of debt in under 8 years...with interest payments now over 1/4 billion a year alone. Money like this, unseen, largely unknown or unnoticed outside the specific budget it comes from ..scaled across a nation kinda running itself at the moment where even the public doesn't have any sense of how large a scale this is happening at.