Congress to overhaul Federal retirement pay
Don’t be ridiculous – they’re not overhauling ALL Federal retirement, just military retirement pay. You didn’t expect them to cut the retirement of those fat Federal bureaucrats, did you? Stars & Stripes writes;
One cut would annually lower the calculated cost-of-living adjustment by an average of one-quarter of a percentage point, which could apply to military and federal civilian retirees, disabled veterans and survivors.
OK, maybe a little bit it applies to federal employees, but you can bet that Congress’ retirement won’t be affected. If they REALLY want to save money, and since they can make any changes to retirement that they want to change, they should do away with retirement for members of Congress.
I’m sure the founding fathers would be majorly upset that there’s a retirement plan for Congress since they never intended for public elected service to be a career.
Do away with Congress’ retirement and we wouldn’t have to institute term limits – they’d limit their terms themselves.
The second option involves replacing the current system in which a servicemember is eligible for benefits after 20 years of service with a new plan that could provide some retirement benefits for as few as five years of service — with payments not starting until at least age 60 for any servicemembers who do not retire on a full military disability, the article said.
So you’d have to wait until you’re 60 to get your retirement benefit – and by that time, your purchasing power would be eaten away by about 20 years of inflation.
Category: Congress sucks, Politics, Veterans Issues
Re: COLA adjustment, we have an awfully flag officer:operational unit ratio. How many guys and girls could we continue to do COLA at the current rate for every Admiral and staff we did away with?
Re:age 60. OK, now why would any one stay on active duty? Might as well go Reserves after the first term. That way, you can actually have that civilian career progress they seem to expect you to miraculously conjure up when you “retire” at age 42 or 45, and you get the pretty much the same retirement benefits you would if you stayed active.
Retarded. If anything, they ought to be looking at reforming the Reserves retirements to better reflect the fact that a lot of those guys have not exactly been part-timers since 2003.
Were I to be given a choice in the matter, I’d rather take 40 acres enough for a house, some outbuildings, and a decent fence. Keep the rest of money, I’m sure some GS-5 in DC needs it to make the downpayment on a Bentley.
That’s the Guard/Reserve retirement system. It sucks.
A good friend of mine was considering becoming a Naval Officer. He’s a disgustingly smart, TS cleareed computer science bubba who has a degree from a top three in the nation undergrad program and he works for Microsoft. Needless to say he makes a lot of money. When calculating his pay over the long term in the military the only thing that allowed it to make any sense from a financial standpoint was the retirement. There’s simply no private sector equivalent and it’s actually worth a substantial amount of money over the lifetime of the benefit. If that goes away expect to see a even more critical shortage of field grade officers than we already have. Combine the retirement scale back with the new post-9/11 GI Bill benefits and you can kiss your best (even mediocre) NCOs goodbye too. It simply would cease to make sense for most families to continue to stay in past four or eight years.
The military life is hard on both the service member and his family. The long term financial and lifestyle security that comes with retirement is the only thing keeping a lot of our people in past the time they get their initial technical training and resume point schoolhouses out of the way.
NSOM – I agree. I would like to see our government offer options, such as land or something else that is tangible. Promises of money and services that keep getting decremented with each Congress is just pathetic.
it kind of seems like Congress and the Dems in particular are shooting themselves in the foot. When the world is becoming increasingly unstable, they are cutting back, and slashing benefits, for people who really do give up their lives.
I think we are going to see in the next couple of years a crisis point where “kinetic operations” are just not possible because the force is poorly trained/equipped, and the most experienced Officers and NCOs are out doing “bigger and better things”
“I think we are going to see in the next couple of years a crisis point where “kinetic operations” are just not possible because the force is poorly trained/equipped, and the most experienced Officers and NCOs are out doing “bigger and better things””
Bingo, and then the lefties will have just what they want, nothing more than a constabulary. One they can turn loose on the citizens. Or, Obysmal’s civilian security force, in camouflage.
Doc & UpNorth,
Think the leaders doing these thing fall into 2 camps: the first that feels it can buy its way into the good graces of whomever would stomp out America; and the second that believes some American(s) would pull us away from the brink, so that the leaders can continue enjoying their lifestyle.
And I’m not ascribing it to just Obama and the Dems. Too many of the Country Club Repubs are just as willing to see us all burn so long as the greens are free of rabble and the martinis are dry.