USAToday; cut military pensions
The editorial board of the USAToday comes out in favor of military pension cuts in a green-eyed envious opinion piece today, sent to us by Chock Block. Of course, they blame Reagan for our “generous” retirement benefits;
But one big group was largely untouched by Reagan’s overhaul: members of the military. They are still on a plan so generous that it allows them to retire in their late 30s or early 40s and collect a pension, with cost-of-living increases, for the rest of their lives. This is accompanied by lifetime health coverage whose premium, $460 per year for a family policy, has not risen since 1995 even as costs for everyone else have skyrocketed.
In last month’s bipartisan budget deal, Congress made some wholely defensible trims in military pensions, prompting a howl of complaints from veterans groups.
They protest too much. Way too much. The military pension system is not only extremely generous, it is also counterproductive. It drains defense money from today’s troops and weapons. And while the system encourages some people to consider the military who otherwise might not, it also encourages them to leave early, taking their first-rate training to go double-dip by moving into a civilian government job. In any case, they can collect pensions — intended as old-age protection — in the prime of their working lives.
Yeah, the system is way too generous. When I retired, twenty years ago yesterday, my pension was less than $12,000/year. In those twenty years, the generous COLA increases have brought the generous pension to a little more than $18,000 last year. So yeah, I’m cleaning up. I’d like to see some of the editorial board of the USAToday eat the shit I ate for two decades and settle for $1500/month before taxes. The thing that kept me in the service for twenty years was the FREE medical care I knew I’d need after gobbling down those shit sandwiches everyday. Before I got out, the FREE medical care was gone, but it was at least affordable. But obviously, it’s too affordable – while the Obama Administration and the editorial board of USAToday want lower medical for everyone else in the country, they want raise the medical costs for veterans, as a way of saying “thanks for your service, asshole”.
They want single-payer healthcare for illegal aliens, but screw veterans for expecting the government to keep their promises.
The editorial board of the USAToday continues;
This approach would save taxpayer money and help reach budget targets. It also would discourage people from leaving early after the government has invested so much in them.
The change would also make military pensions less wildly out of line with most Americans’ experience. Private-sector pensions, to the extent that they exist at all, are routinely scaled back or frozen in ways much more dramatic than these changes.
Certainly, protecting veterans impaired by their service is a different sort of issue. But the current system rewards all equally, including the 40% of servicemembers who have never seen a combat zone.
Yeah, suddenly the Left is worried about saving the taxpayers money – I almost believe that. And, oh, yeah, all veterans participated in war in some manner or another. Those who haven’t deployed filled some necessary function that contributed to the war effort, so don’t try to pit combat veterans against POGs with this battle, especially what with you, the editorial board of USAToday, being the most POG in this discussion, you cowardly assholes who rode out the war from behind your glass-topped desks, sniping at the troops every time you had the opportunity. And the sniping continues. Assholes.
Category: Media, Veteran Health Care, Veterans Issues
There are 2,162 service members who will never get a chance to avail themselves of those over generous retirement packages. http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/us-military-deaths-afghanistan-2162-21384310
I wonder if the editorial board of USA Today can say the same.
Utter liberal BS. Fairly common up here in the Great NW.
Maybe they can divert some of Phildo’s and APL’s taxpayer-funded revenue to the cause.
Expect a lot more of this as the class war rhetoric heats up this year. The Dems need distractions and lots of them. Going after the .5% of the 1% who serve their country through to retirement is a lot safer than attacking unions, government workers, city and municipal pensions that are way out of whack (5 Santa Monica cops make over $250K a year?).
What do they go after, the earned benefit of military retirement vs. the unearned entitlements of the parasitic class? You’d think that would be an easy call. I guess it is kind of easy for the media; they get a chance to blame Reagan AND the military in the same column. The doucheoise (sorry for the lack of accent, it’s pronounced “douche-wa-zay”) take their editorial cues straight off Dear Leader’s teleprompter transcripts.
All just so much prep work to get the left coasts worked up enough to shoehorn Hillary in and hope the sheeple in flyover country continue to let the Republican Party squabble over intra-party nonsense that keeps the current do-nothings doing what they do best; nothing.
14 years ago I wanted to punch a DODMERB guy in the face for declaring that a minor medical issue meant I could never join any service.
These days, with the politics, journalists like this, etc., I want to hug him. Kinda sad, that.
“especially what with you, the editorial board of USAToday, being the most POG in this discussion, you cowardly assholes who rode out the war from behind your glass-topped desks, sniping at the troops every time you had the opportunity. And the sniping continues. Assholes.”
Glad I’m not the only cranky bastard today.
They floated trial balloons on this last year with the whole “we need to reform spending, it’s patriotic. You guys are Patriots, so will you take the hit as your patriotic duty?”
They didn’t come right out and say “sucker”, but that was the extent of their restraint.
Anyway, spending really is a crisis for the Republic, and the political class knows it, but they can’t give up the vote buying and they know that we are a small enough constituency that we can be safely ignored.
Look, I’ve made long term plans for the money-I need it to make those plans a reality. But, at this point, I’m treating it like social security: “it’ll be nice if I get it, but I’m not counting on it”. I’m not happy, but I know that I can’t trust the political class (my service was never about them anyway) to protect my interests if they perceive that my interest can be sacrificed to further their own.
Whatever else happens the Army allowed me to be something more than I thought I could be and do great things that I will take pride in forever. Those things are less tangible than a pension, but more fulfilling.
TLDR-I want the money, but I’ll manage and I have no regrets.
Cutting retirement bennies will discourage people from leaving early? Is this guy for real? I can’t even come up with a sparky response to this right now.
My local newspaper always cites a field grade officer’s pension to demonstrate how generous the retirement system is. They never report what retired NCO’s and Petty Officers receive. Are they afraid of the truth? For me this changes today; I just called the publisher and told him what a retired NCO gets.
OK, folks, there remains a lot of work to do. It’s up to us to educate the masses on the meaning of earned income and earned retirement benefits.
And of course, members of Congress can get pensions (granted, starting at age 62) that are FAR better than anything but the most senior officers pull.
I figured it out once, and assuming I had stayed to 20 and even made E-8, my pension today still wouldn’t cover my mortgage payment. IOW, these idiots at USA Today think people in the military retire at age 38 and never work another day in their lives. Bzzzzzzttt!!!! Wrong!
I would like to say it is hard to believe the USA Today’s stance but it is not surprising as all. They are part of the hard liberal left in this country. Those who want to force every citizen to have health insurance at rates they can’t afford or be fined so we can give free healthcare to illegals paid for by the same citizens. Their opinion of the military and its pay and retirement structure goes hand in hand with the above attitude. I have always maintained the military deserves everything and more that they have gotten. Lives given in service to the nation in war and peace. Low pay and hard living to raise a family while in a career defending our country deserves more then respect and honor. It deserves more than has been given. I was always a proponent of a 75% pension at 20 years graduated to 100% at 30. Plus free health care for life. The segment of society and the federal budget that retirees and disabled veterans represent is miniscule compared the the welfare load and the drain of illegal aliens. It goes to prove what I have known since Vietnam. The liberal left hates the military. They offer phoney honor from one side of their hypocritical mouths and out the other side they defame and deride the men and women who have kept them free to be the vocal snakes in the grass and America hating Socialists/Communists they are. This is a national shame. But Obama and his administration know no shade of shame whatsoever. If Obama had a son, he would not look like a man in uniform. This subject saddens me and makes me irate at the same time. @8 OWB I agree.
There are three points to the gigantic spending binge of the current administration:
1. enrich their supporters,
2. pay for votes
3. drain the US ability to field a standing military.
This last is something radicals have been saying for many decades: that the US military-industrial complex is responsible for, and encourages, warfare, and that the US is the most dangerous country on earth. Their logic is, when the ability of the US to go to war is drained by ruinous taxation, the world will be a better place.
I. Kid. You. Not.
The lessons of WWI, WWII, the Cold War, and the war the Islamists are currently making on civilization, are lost on them entirely, because they don’t know their history or their economics.
Stay in longer? USAF is offering early retirement to all AFSCs/MOSs for over 19 bellow 20, which boils down to $154 a month differance. Which isn’t looking all that worth it for another year with these schnagans going on and just giving people all the more reason to pull the trigger and take the early retirement option. At least this way I can lock in something, who knows what they will try to do over the next 12 to 18 months….
-Ish
And let’s not forget the disaster of REDUX, which showed that cutting retirement benefits didn’t encourage people to stay until 30–it only served to punish those who reached a mandatory control point and HAD to retire. As it stands now, the only people who can stay until 30, in the Army at least, are sergeants majors, colonels, and flag officers. Everyone else gets bounced before that. All of these pro-cut articles seem to focus on those who retire at 20, as if everyone does it. Well I had 29 years, 5 months, and 9 days of active duty–18 months of it as “overseas wartime service”, and another 15 months in the reserves before I came on active duty. If your goal is to encourage people to stay longer, then why does it apply to me? I stayed as long as they’d let me (well, OK, I left a couple of months early, because I found a job, but WTH). And of course by “me,” I mean any retiree who stayed past 20. And I’m just as pissed for those who retired at 20 as they are themselves. The COLA cuts are a buncha, well, I don’t want to cuss on teh blog. But you get my point. If their plan was truly to encourage people to stay longer, they would have designed it to only effect the short-timer retirees. So they would, say, reduce the COLA until you hit what would have been your 30th year of service. That they do it to everybody until age 62 shows that it wasn’t done to encourage people to stay longer. And, of course, 40% of base pay at 20 years escalating to 75% at 30 years didn’t seem to help retention or get people to stay longer, either. And besides, Paul Ryan himself says it was done to save money, ebcause “working age” retirees can “afford” it. Finally, USA Today couldn’t even get the formula for computing retirement right. You don’t get retired at a percentage of final pay unless you first entered service before September 1979. Anybody else gets their retirement… Read more »
“It also would discourage people from leaving early after the government has invested so much in them.” There is so very much wrong in that line, I hardly know where to begin. It smacks of indentured servitude–or worse. It applies only to the military, not to those whose federal pensions are vested and who opt to move on, say, from Congress, to private-sector lobbying. It treats our military as objects, like some sort of improved property that should not be let go easily. It overlooks the fact that the government pays much to many who do absolutely NOTHING for years and years, generation after generation, and the government takes no issue with that, and seeks no recompense. It overlooks the sacrifices and the hardships so many make for their ‘salary’–and which would see most EMs earning 100K or more yearly IF they were paid by the hour. I could go on, and I might a little later, but that will do for now. F the newspaper and its editorial board.
@12 I’ve heard so many morons say, “Why don’t we just have a small defense force like Japan?” or “Countries in Europe dont have big militaries,” or better yet, “Why don’t we abolish the military altogether like Costa Rica?” Well, lets see. Japan: surrounded by ancestral enemies that still hate their fucking guts, some of whom have nukes. Small defense force has been effective so far because A) they haven’t really been challenged since 1947, and B) they are fully backed by the US military. So they’re kinda like the loud-mouthed little kid with the badass big brother nobody wants to mess with. Western Europe: spent the last 70 years dependent on a unified NATO response against the Russian threat (because historically Germans, Brits, Scandies, French, Danes, Italians, Austrians, Irish, and Spaniards have always worked SO well together). Other than Britain and France (YMMV) none of them have had much involvement in any conflict in that time apart from token forces in Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. And they have all been dependent on the US military to take the lion’s share of the load if shit ever hit the fan. So they could be likened to the individually-weak entourage of the one big badass kid who will never be caught away from him. Costa Rica: pacifist hippie model nation of peace-loving and kumbaya. Shares a border with Nicaragua. No problems there, right? Those violent, repressive, Che-loving commies are such friendly neighbors since the Sandinistas won! And Cuba never helped anybody make war on their neighbors, especially not with the Russians calling the shots, right? Last I heard, doesn’t Costa Rica have an agreement with the rest of OAS and especially the US that says we will take care of it if they are ever attacked? Hmm, no way that could make any pissant banana republic dictator think twice. IOW, the US military is what allows Costa Rica not to have one. So they are sort of like the meek, quiet little pussy that nobody messes with for fear of his badass big brother. See a pattern here? Then again, when… Read more »
Discourage people from leaving early? How would it discourage them if they’re not bang up to the marker in the first place? If they get thrown out for any disability, they’re not going to be asked to return, so how is that going to discourage them from leaving early?
I think POG is too nice a label for the writer of this piece. It should be REMF, IN SPADES.
@17 How about ignorant sanctimonious shitbag?
@16 Here-Here. Well said. The liberals conveniently forget those facts. I am just tired of spending American lives and blood to be that badass big brother. I said in another post that I am more and more becoming an isolationist in my military world view. I want our military bigger and stronger than it currently is for our own defense. I want to stop being the LEO to the world. I say defend ourselves and our true friends at home and abroad. Our true friends are far less than the liberals would have us think by the way. I say let the Muslim world die or choose to have free homelands and fight for them as hard as they fight one another and beyond that leave them alone. If they export their terrorism to Americans or our interests anywhere then we bomb them back to the stone age they want to live in and then we come home. One, maybe two lessons like that will get the point across I think. I say give Europe, Japan and the Costa Ricas of the world, real pause, to think about how very good they have it under the American umbrella of strength, blood and lives. My view has changed because as I have become older the cost of American lives and blood has become the most precious asset our nation holds in my mind and heart. I knew this in Vietnam and it has become more evident to me as the decades have passed. If we as a nation would go into a conflict such as Afghanistan, with a true purpose and end result in place from the beginning AND stick to that until the objective is accomplished and then come home I would feel differently. But it has not been that way in Afghanistan. The end game changed. The exit strategy has become to kiss Karzai’s ass and for what I cannot fathom. The ROE have changed in favor of the enemy. That’s no way to run a railroad as my grandfather said. But I don’t want to sound humorous about… Read more »
I usually research the offending asshole and publish their e-mail contact information following the post. However, USA Today shields themselves and I had to revert to Firefox when Internet Explorer 8 and I had a disagreement and can’t deal with all of the pop up crap encountered. While venting on this site results in contemporaries with the same view reading your post, take the time to go to the USA Today site and enter a letter to the editor. That seems to be the only way to tell them where to go with their views and how to get there. References to their Momma’s would be appropriate in this case.
I’m also for cutting pensions. And redirecting that money into better pay in the present. It lets our warfighters invest their earnings as they see fit, and allows the government to better plan. Pensions are hell on budgetary planning calculations and simplifying this can lead to less waste and greater agility in responding to funding needs.
(NOTE: I’m not for cutting already promised pensions – that’s utter insanity; I’m for changing how it’s done in the future.)
Generous due to Reagan? I think not. In September of 1980 (before Reagan, the retirement system was changed from the highest monthly salary during a 3 year period to the 36 month average. I signed my ROTC paperwork a week after the change. As a result, my retirement pay is three hundred less a month than if I had signed the papers a week earlier. That will cost me tens of thousands of dollars over the rest of my life.
The 1986 revision was even worse for retirees…
A military pension is, to me, delayed compensation. I say again, that if active military were paid by the hour, buck privates would probably be raking in 80K or more per year.
And wasn’t the largest pay raise ever the one in the 1981 budget signed by Jimmy Carter?
Arby: actually, no. The 1981 pay raise promulgated by Carter was the fifth largest one I know of.
The 1981 pay raise was 11.7%. The 1963 and 1969 military pay raises were each 12.6%.
The 1982 pay raise varied somewhat by grade, but averaged 14.3%. That was the 2nd largest.
Best I can tell, the largest military pay raise was probably the one in October 1949. While I haven’t been able to find an across-the-board estimate, pay for an E1 went from $50/mo to $75/mo at that time. That’s a freaking 50% increase. I’d guess most other grades got a damned hefty raise at that point too.
Source for 1963, 1969 and 1981 pay raises is http://www.navycs.com/charts/
Source for 1982 pay raise across-the-board average is http://usmilitary.about.com/od/militarypay/a/historicalpay.htm
Source for the last is a fairly old family friend and the DFAS web site (Oct 1949 pay scale is available there, but nothing earlier). He joined in the early 1950s and has mentioned more than once that he caught a lot of grief as a private from old-timers about their “excessive” $75/mo pay vice the $50/mo privates were getting just a year or two earlier.
(Edited to add: this source confirms base pay at $50/mo for privates prior to Oct 1949: http://www.hardscrabblefarm.com/ww2/payscale.htm )
Before 1963, annual military pay raises don’t seem to have been the norm. Base pay was raised less frequently.
If we relabeled retirement pay as welfare benefits for “victims” of the military-industrial complex (or neocons), then liberals would probably want to raise it.
Follow-up: I did some quick calculations for E1-E7 comparing World War II pay and Oct 1949 pay for <2 years of service (don't have the time to compare all of the possibilities). Looks like the 1949 pay raise varied roughly between 43% and 60%, depending on grade (E1s with >4mo of service got $80 vice $75 in Oct 1949, so they got a 60% pay increase).
Yeah, I’d guess that’s probably the all-time “biggie” of military pay raises.
Oh, is military pension pay too high? And people ‘retire’ (go find other jobs) too soon for these geeks?
OK, a school teacher in the state of Illinois will retire after 33 years at an annual pension that STARTS at an amount as high as $63,000/year, with medical and dental benefits included. The fact that teachers don’t pay into Social Security UNLESS they moonlight at other jobs escapes the general public.
And people think that a teacher’s pension is too high, but since it’s the ONLY funded retirement plan they have, and they pay into it out of their paychecks, how is it too high?
Other state workers pay into both the state pension AND Social Security, so they a pension that is 50-50 state and SSRI.
My point is that if you expect people to make a career out of something as demanding as the military can be, then you’d better reward them at the end, instead of viewing them as disposable items or else there won’t be anyone there guarding the borders when your state/city is invaded.
Okay, Hondo, then the pay raises between 1949 and 1967 didn’t amount to a hill of beans. When I was an E-1 in 1967, the pay was $97/month. It went up by $10 when I reached E-2.
Hondo. You like calculating stuff. What would you estimate the average trainee’s pay would be at minimum wage if determned at an hourly rate of, say, $12.50 an hour? I guess we should include holiday pay at double time for, oh, two holidays. Saturdays would be time and a half, and, altough Sundatys are supposed to be a day of rest, we really should include on-call pay in that–plus, the time it takes to clean barracks, make bunks, shine shoes, and so forth.
Ex-PH2: that is true. Pay raises before 1963 were irregular – there were only two (1955 and 1958) between 1949 and 1963. Annual pay raises started in 1963. And that was also generally a time of relatively low inflation, so pay raises tended to be relatively small.
Still: $75/mo to $97/mo (I’m assuming that was the entry-level E1 w/<4 mo service rate) is still nearly a 30% difference. And much of that happened in a single year - 1963, which saw a 12.6% increase.
OT is anything over 40. No comp time option.
2/17 Air Cav: depends. Does the guy/gal pay rent, get charged for eating in the mess hall, and pay medical and dental like civilians? And do they lose pay for training holidays, 3-4 day passes, and the like? Is vacation time cut to 2 weeks a year until you get 5 or 10 years service?
Minmum wage is still $7.25 an hour, actually – so that’s what an E1 would probably get. And I’m guessing military service would be considered FLSA-exempt (or the law would be changed to make it so), so forget time-and-a-half for overtime or holiday time.
I’m taking a SWAG here, but in broad figures I’d guess being in the military probably would average out to 60 hrs/week over the long haul – maybe 70hrs/week, tops. (Don’t forget, the military gets quite a bit of compensated “free time off” that tends partially to compensate for the 18+ hr days during crunch time.) And don’t forget the 4 weeks annually of leave – plus the 10 Federal holidays.
Crunching some numbers, I get
70 x 46 + 40 x 6 = 3,460 paid hours annually
At $7.25 an hour (FLSA-exempt, remember), that works out to a bit over $25k annually.
Per current (2014) pay scales, an E1 < 4 mos service is paid at an annual rate of about $17k. Add 50% for no-cost benefits in kind (medical, dental, housing, food, clothing) that a civilian worker would pay for out of pocket, and that works out to $25.5k annually. I'm not trying in any way to defending cutting military pay and benefits. But making the argument that the pay is inadequate is a tough sell when you take a hard look at the actual numbers and include the stuff a military guy/gal gets free that a civilian employee has to pay for out of pocket. It really is an "apples and oranges" comparison between military and civilian compensation.
I agree with Sparks, that we should not be the world’s police force. That should always fall to NATO and other alliances.
And if some foreign country can’t stand up to an invader or a despot (karzai the clown comes to mind), then he can takes his lumps and quit whining.
The Afghans invited the Taliban when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The USSR was there 10 years and failed miserably. Afterwards, the Afghans couldn’t get rid of the Taliban so they whimpered and cried and we went in to push out the very parasites to whom they had opened their doors. Then we left, and the Taliban came right back in.
I don’t expect other people to clean my house or get my groceries for me, so why should they expect me to do that for them, especially if I did it once and they couldn’t keep it tidy?
In 1977 there were only two of us in our AFSC assigned to a USAF base; we worked alternating 12 days on and two days off, including weekends and holidays. When our daily shift was over we were on 20 minute recall. Leave was not allowed. During our two days off we were subject to and were called to duty.
I’m hope I don’t sound like I’m whining or bragging; I look at my pension as overtime owed.
Dennis: I look on it more as deferred compensation in general – compensation for being told, at what is typically one’s peak earning years (40s and 50s), “Thanks, but you’re now too old and we no longer want your services. Go find another job, you can’t keep working for us any more.”
The military is one of the few places – if not the only place – where that is legal. Most anywhere else, that kind of policy would doubtless be ruled to be blatant age discrimination, and thus unlawful.
Hondo, that 63 pay raise did away with overseas pay in USAREUR except for designated “hardship posts”. I got to Germany a few months too late, I’m unsure how much it was, but seem to recall something like $8. Doesn’t sound like much but as an E2 getting $85, it was significant. People drawing overseas pay continued to do so until any increase (promotion or longevity) in pay compensated for its loss. It’s a small thing, but back then, that $8 represented about 32 beers.
That same old argument…”The civilian sector has no such pension or compensation.”
First off the assumption is that those in the military are unskilled idiots that could only find employment by joining the military. We are a bunch of apes who should be lucky to get that 12-25K retirement at the age of 40.
Second is there are plenty of civil-service/government jobs that beat the living shit out of military retirement. There are probably just as many California State employees drawing retirement as there are retired vets in the whole country.
Well, thanks for the work up. I am not an ingrate and will not dispute your stuff. I suppose one could tweak a great many things on the pay comparison and contrast ledger between military and civilian pay. (And, hey, prison also accords one free healthcare, food, lodging and, occasoionally, transportation, so the military has no monopoly there!)
2/17 Air Cav: and prison even provides a free love life, too. What a deal! (smile)
My whole point: apples and oranges. Comparing the two just ain’t as easy as looking at salaries; there’s a whole lot more involved.
The comments about delayed compensation remind me of another way the government screws over the military. In a divorce, the military retirement is considered delayed compensation and a portion is permanently awarded to the spouse.
However, the government considers active military to be vested in a retirement plan (regardless of the number of years on active duty) for the purpose of determining the eligibility to make deductible contributions to a regular IRA.
@38: No one ever mentions what a cop gets after retiring at 20 years from a major city dept. I wonder why?
@42 Good point Old Trooper. I wonder what the comparison is between the average 20 year LEO pension and 20 years in the military at the highest rank an NCO could reasonably achieve? I know there is a top out program but have not kept up on the ranks and maximum years of service in a long time.
@33 Hondo — I see your numbers and they make sense. There is a difference. Shooting somebody and getting shot at was not part of my civilian job. Rarely did my friends come home in a steel box. When I went to work, most likely I would come home with same number of limbs than I had when I left. And if that mean ol’ boss yelled at me again, I could walk away and find a better boss.
There is a reason why the military has their own medical system — the injuries that typically happen to military “employees” are not normally seen in civilian hospitals.
It is not the same and pretending that it is the same fails to honor the limbs and lives given so that non-veterans did not have to go, so that Americans did not have to fight on their own soil.
I think that we are all in violent agreement here. I am royally pissed off that we even have to talk about this — that it even came up.
Mr. Ryan’s aw-shit cost him all of his atta-boy points with me.
Favor prison for officers but will settle of pension cuts. A two grade cut for all officers. If they want to go on strike to protest I do not think that it will be to difficult to find scabs to replace them for the work that they do.
Richard: agreed, amigo. The comparison is truly “apples and oranges” – and damn near impossible to make in any meaningful manner. The two are simply too different.
Sadly, this hits our enlisted men hardest. Us in the officer side of the house have degrees to fall back on, and that helps mitigate the impact financially. So, here we are as a nation depending on a volunteer military to defend us….Yet it appears to me that some people don’t understand that in order to get people to volunteer, you must provide conditions that will entice people to do so. This is heading for a pad place; I listen to my old NCO’s and the vets I work with that tell me about the military of the 70’s. Is this where we’re heading if we start to loose quality recruits? Some of you old soldiers throw some perspective out here for us. (I commissioned in 06).
@42. I retired from a city PD. Minimum age to retire was 50, unless it was a disability retirement. So, I had 27 years when I retired, with a broken leg and two ruptured cervical discs over the years. With the multiplier in place at the time, I was eligible for a pension of 67.5% of my last best 3 years of work, no overtime, payout for vacation time or comp time figured in. Then, one had to figure out if one wanted to take 100% of that pension, leaving nothing if there was a surviving spouse or dependents when the retiree finally checked out. Or a graduated percentage, with something for said spouse or dependents. So, I got 70% of my 67.5%.
No complaints, that’s just the way the pension worked. It is a fully-funded pension plan, paid for by the police officers and fire-fighters.
USA Yesterday, just another liberal rag i wouldn’t even waste my time pissing on at the newsstand!
I don’t mind them reforming the retirement system but you do it forward looking not on the backs of those who’ve served their time base on certain expectations. There was a suggestion in the Army Times a while back about a menu of benefits option where members with different plans for their lives could make different choices concerning education, medical, and retirement benefit ect. I like the idea of matching TSP instead of fixed benefit retirement as an OPTION myself. BUT changing the rules on the backs of soldiers is wrong.