It's recently come up that in addition to treating the member of the military retiree community so well, Bush II has proposed giving the members of the military a tax cut by reducing the amount of the raise that they are going to get, from 3.7% to 2%. or about half for those whose calculators are not handy. Just think of how much lower their taxes are going to be, the Lucky Duckies!! Why would I call them "Lucky Duckies?" Well let's take a quick look at the Jan 1, 2002 document from DOD which has the military pay tables. Let's figure out what this reduced pay increase means to an enlisted military member who is single and deployed (likely the least affected). For the sake of argument, I am not going to do an Officer in this first calculation, you can do it yourself, suffice it to say, an officer is more likely to be close to OK money-wise, unless they are heavily in debt or just stupid with their money, not to imply they are overpaid but they do a little better in terms of salary (I did).
"We are going to restore morale in the U.S. military," Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Milwaukee on Monday at the start of a two-day campaign swing through Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Missouri. "America's soldiers must have confidence that if asked to serve and sacrifice, the cause will be worthy and our support for them total."
The proposals Bush was releasing Monday include: (from the article on the 2000 campaign; representative rhetoric, I believe)
* Increasing military pay by $1 billion -- or about $750 per active-duty service member -- over the $75.8 billion increase President Clinton signed into law this month. Bush also promises to boost targeted re-enlistment bonuses and the pay of specialists such as pilots, computer programmers and engineers.
* Create a "Veterans Health Care Task Force," composed of officials from the Department of Veterans Affairs, veterans service organizations and VA health care providers, to help implement the Veterans Millennium Health Care Act.
PG1
TIS2
BasePay
FSA3
SDIP4
BAS5
BAQ6
Seapay
Total
Annual
Month Aft-Tax Net
with 2% raise
E4
<2 yrs
1443.30
100
165
337.80
166.3
100
2311.90
27742.8
1537.06
1567.80
1Paygrade 2Time in Service 3Family Separation Allowance - has not changed in >20 years 4Special Duty Incentive Pay, i.e. enlisted flight pay, etc. Does not cover sub pay - sep. category 5Basic Allowance for Subsistence 6Basic Allowance for Quarters
Looking at these numbers and running the tax (15% of gross income, in this case basepay+all special pays) and then the raise/decrease in raise numbers it looks like our young man/woman is not going to do so well based on the promised increase and "being taken care of" by the administration. If you are curious what these folks do to earn this money, here's a sort of (depending on flight ops etc..) typical day in the life a "roof rat" (a person who works on the flight deck, for which they are paid an extra $150 taxable dollars per month:
0600 reville
0700-0800 morning chow
0830- 0900 quarters
0900-0930 FOD walkdown on the flight deck looking for anything that might ruin an engine - all hands evolution no one exempt
0930-1000 man up
1000-1030 first launch
1030-1230 work in shop spaces, do maintenance, paperwork, grab chow
1230-1300 first recovery
1300-1330 second launch
1330-1530 back to work on equipment (called PMS or Preventative Maintenance System), work on cleaning spaces/ship PMS
1530-1600 second recovery
1630-1700 third launch
1730-1930 back to work, grab chow again, turn over some work to oncoming shift (if there is one)
1930-2000 third recovery
2000-2030 fourth launch (if there is one on the Air Plan for night ops/currency for the aircrews)
2030-2230 back to work, late chow
2230-2300 last recovery of the day.
So now the sailor has pretty much been at work for about 16+ hours and is still probably not quite done, twice what a civilian would work, in an environment so unforgiving that if he is not awake and alert from the moment he shows up on the deck, until he/she hits their rack that night they could very easily be maimed or killed or cause something to happen to a shipmate. And the administration wants to reward their political appointees but not these folks.
Friends of mine still on Active Duty or recently retired, whom I "grew up" with in the service had sadly been convinced that Clinton's Penis was an instrument of both National Policy and Eternal Shame (I wonder how they feel about the Patriot Act). But with the not-so-subtle lead-in of "dishonor and loss of dignity" Bush & Co sold a pig in a poke about restoring the military. I was unaware that it needed restoration, so were many other people. After all, with the fall of the Wall, BRAC/downsizing started under Bush 1, Clinton was merely a "steward" of that process, but still was blamed by innuendo and slander as being "soft on defense" for a process started before he was even the Democratic candidate.
My math may be not be right, and I'm not an accountant but... Something is surely out of whack here!!! A $30 per month raise? YGBSM to use an old military acronym.
