Trump says South Korea pays 'peanuts' for U.S. troop presence

[Eugene]

Note the fourth paragraph.

Source: Reuters

Politics | Wed Jan 6, 2016 7:40pm EST

Trump says South Korea pays 'peanuts' for U.S. troop presence

WASHINGTON

South Korea should pay the United States "very substantially" for maintaining 28,000 troops there to help defend it from the North, Republican presidential contender Donald Trump told CNN on Wednesday, a day after Pyongyang detonated a nuclear device.

Trump told the cable television network: "We get paid nothing, we get paid peanuts" for deploying the troops to South Korea. But Seoul, still technically at war with North Korea, has shouldered part of Washington's cost for stationing its troops in the country since 1991.

Under a five-year cost-sharing accord reached two years ago, Seoul agreed to contribute $867 million toward U.S. military costs in 2014, about 40 percent of the total. The deal called for the amount to rise annually at the rate of inflation.

Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination ahead of the November 2016 election, has made the complaint about Seoul for years. The political fact-checking website Politifact investigated similar statements he made on a television program in 2011 and rated his comments "false."

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Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-southkorea-idUSKBN0UL02D20160107

[TreasonousBastard]

1. As usual, it's "very substantially"...

meaning it's another quick sound bite when he has no idea what he's talking about. His fans love it, though, so it's working.

[yeoman6987]

2. OMG. He will make the world so unsafe

So South Korea will have to decide either extort money to trump or lose the US and right when North Korea is playing "games". I think South Korea has enough to worry about. Trump shut up.