I don't understand money, but I've worked out how to fund war heroes care.

I don't understand money, possibly because I have never had enough of it to be on close terms. I know money only as a fleeting acquaintance. For example a recent £3000 endowment policy matured, and remained within my bank account for about an hour before it paid off my credit card balance and for some urgent repairs on my car. They say money talks, but mine barely has time to learn the local dialect before it is saying goodbye.
I follow the basics of finance, in that there are 100 pennies to the pound, and six zeros behind a million, and 9 behind a billion (unless you are American, they seem to follow their own rules)
I can even follow basic interest rates in that 2% interest means you get £102 a year back for every £100 invested. What I can't quite follow is negative interest, the idea that the bank would charge me to look after my money, so that for every £100 I invest I get £98 back. A financial dumb dumb I may be, but at that point shoving it under the mattress seems a better option. Particularly as I have a safe built into the house which I could throw the mattress on top of. Of course having cash around the house is not a good idea in these dark times. Anything over a couple of hundred quid and you are likely to mistaken for a drugs baron money laundering his ill gotten gains, because we live pretty much in a cashless society otherwise. I rarely have more than £30 in my wallet, and being a working married man it is usually less than that.
What I can't comprehend however is other peoples attitude to money.

Hitting the headlines today is the story of two senior employees with the Crown Prosecution Service. They are apparently being investigated in a fraud case for up to £1 million expenses claimed for taxi fares. This is a staggering amount. I would assume that this has accrued over a number of years, but how? Has nobody noticed this? 1/2 a million each in taxi fares couldn't go unnoticed even over five years. And surely the accountants do an annual review, the Inland Revenue must look at the figures, and Mr CPS Limited can;t have failed to notice the money leeching from the public funds. Lets' say then that this must have happened with the last financial year to have gone unnoticed at the last review. Allowing these guys two weeks leave there are 50 working weeks to keep things simple. £1/2 a million over 50 weeks is £10,000 a week. Excuse me? I bought a 4 year old Vauxhall Vectra a few years back for less than half of that, and can run it for a year on a couple of grand including insurance. That allows one hell of a parking budget and still gives change out of £10000. I could pay a chauffeur a handsome £30000 a year to drive me around and still only spend £40000 a year. So in one month I could have bought a decent car paid for it's running costs. In two or three months I could have bought and paid for a brand new executive car and been chauffeur driven whilst a private masseur attended to my every need. Yet these guys were claiming that much for black cabs and nobody noticed? I can only assume they were being driven by his holiness The Stig in a gold plated special edition Bugatti Veyron.

It beggers belief that public money can be squandered unnoticed by other public officials in this way and yet we force our war heroes to sell their homes to pay for their care in their twilight years. Because the other news that caught my eye this week was the story of a WW2 RAF fighter pilot, who was decorated for many deeds of bravery and had an enviable 19 kills to his score sheet during the hostilities with Germany, is being forced to sell his medals to raise the estimated £120,000 he needs to pay for his care home. This is an absolute disgrace. We owe our lives and freedom to "the few" and those who battled in the theater of war so that we might enjoy those freedoms. The medals we present them with are mere bits of stamped metal but their rarity and what they stand for makes them value able beyond words to the recipients and their fallen comrades, their families and those who understand what they went through. That they can be sold to the highest bidder, some faceless collector who doesn't deserve them is abhorrent  That the ex serviceman should have to consider that option in his twilight years is a national disgrace.
So how about this for a suggestion. We currently have 2.5 million unemployed in receipt of benefits. This week we should deduct £1 from each of their benefit payments and fund the care of this war hero and others like him. £2.5 million could be raised just like that. A proportion of those 2.5 million, the genuinely unemployed minority would, I am sure, willingly donate a pound. The remainder are being funded by the workers and have their rights and freedoms funded by the surviving war heroes and others who gave their lives and endured hardships so they wouldn't have to, so a pound is the least they can give. And if, next week another war hero finds himself in the same position, we should do the same again. Because I'd be happier with a pound of my taxes supporting the genuinely needy than some drug taking alcoholic fat lazy scumbag on a council estate. And heroes should be buried with their medals, or pass them on to their families - lest we forget.
In essence it would seem we can spend public money on taxis for able bodied bureaucrats without anyone worrying, but we can't pay for a care home for retired disabled ex-servicemen.