Smaller pay raises in the troops’ future

How many times have I written in the last year that the military is going to suffer as a result of a Democrat Administration? Now that Obama has released his budget plans, we can see how he plans to pay for all of his pie-in-the-sky social programs. This is from the Congressional Quarterly;

The administration’s budget blueprint, released Thursday, lays out some of its strategic thinking on how the Pentagon should operate. Obama intends to speed up increases in the size of the ground force, give a smaller pay raise to soldiers than last year, and overhaul the defense acquisitions process, but the administration deferred potentially controversial decisions on major weapons programs.

“As we look to the challenges facing our nation, it’s imperative that we invest our defense dollars effectively and wisely,” the budget proposal said.

Complete defense budget details will not be released until later this spring, when the Obama administration submits its formal fiscal 2010 request to Congress. That document will weigh in on the fate of many of the Pentagon most expensive and controversial programs.

Now, when Bush increased spending in a particular program, like education or healthcare, but not as much as Democrats wanted, it was called “a cut” in that particular program. So even though Obama will give the troops their pay raises, but intends to give them less they should be getting, can we call that a cut in the troop’s pay? I will.

Regardless, I warned that the troops would suffer to the benefit of worthless social programs and it’s coming true.

I emailed Paul Reickhoff of IAVA a few weeks ago to ask him where his Huffington Post and Daily Kos posts were criticizing the Obama Administrations’ plans for cutting the personnel costs of the military in healthcare and compensation – Reickhoff merely pointed me to their FAQs page and told me to direct my questions to his (civilian) media relations chic in the future. Funny, but I thought IAVA was a non-partisan organization – but Reickhoff is more interested in staying on Obama’s good side.

It pays off for IAVA, though – Phil Carter, the former IAVA founder who ran the veterans’ side of the Obama campaign and helped Reickhoff manipulate the IAVA’s “scorecard” to trash McCain before the election has been nominated to be the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs from what I hear from a couple of sources.

Category: Politics