I’ll admit I don’t know how health care coverage works at my current company, because I’ve declined coverage. But if it’s a question of fundamental fairness, then the military fails on so many worse levels than BAH. People of equal rank and time in service get the same pay, regardless of the hours they work, the specifics of their job, or how well they do. It’s just the nature of the beast. I worked next to guys who pulled 32 hour weeks and could barely wipe their own asses, and they got paid the same as combat comm troops who’d put in 60 hour weeks of shit work in the field somewhere. Nobody gave a shit about dependent BAH being “unfair.”
And see? Even the thread starter admits that having dependents isn’t the road to riches that you’re making it out to be.
This thread isn’t about fairness anyway, it’s about saving money. Except it’s not really about saving money, because it’s pretty easy to figure out that it’s chump change. It’s really about eugenics, and the OP’s first-hand experience of seeing moronic 18-20 year old guys get all kinds of women pregnant when they have no business being parents.
However, as we’ve established, while there’s a certain financial (and freedom) incentive to getting married so you can move off base and collect dependent BAH, there’s no financial incentive for having children. Young enlisted guys have kids because they have lots of unprotected sex, or because they want kids, or both.
It’s foolish to think that not covering these additional dependents will prevent them from being born. All it would do is create a small population of uninsured rugrats. Most of whom would grow up without incident, while a small percentage would go on to get sick and financially ruin their parents. This would create even more drama than if we’d just covered them in the first place.
Hell, I’ll take it one step further. An E-3 with two kids and a wife who works checking at a grocery store is broke; no doubt about it (Edit…maybe not broke, but not rollin’ in it anymore, either). Doesn’t mean it isn’t costing Uncle Sam anything, though.
What it DOES mean, is that it’s fucking stupid to try to support a family on E-3 pay. Which makes the incentive to not get married/have kids until 6 years an even better idea. After 6 years, depending on circumstances you’re an E-5, or may -6. Also, your 25 year-old future wife may have finished college, or developed a marketable skill set that your 19 year old pregnant high school graduate future wife doesn’t have.
Another edit: Worried about losing out on good enlistees? Maybe waive the rule for college graduates or enlistees over the age of 28. Something along those lines.
Your proposal is, from what I can tell, based on some degree of envy you felt towards fellow soldiers while in service. It’s based on anecdote and ignorance. Your proposals would save money, but that does not make them good proposals. The amount saved would be trifling.
Every cut in our armed forces has a cost. Cut the Crusader self-propelled artillery program and you save about $12bn. What do you lose? You lose a self-propelled piece of artillery that was designed to be used in raging battles between us and the USSR in the event they decided to roll West into Europe. So basically we lost something we had no business throwing money into during the year 2002 in any case.
Institute the cuts you are proposing–I can’t say exactly how much they’ll save. I would bet substantial amounts of money it would be a small fraction of the money we saved by abandoning the Crusader system. What do we lose? Despite your claims, we would lose morale. We would have a more difficult time recruiting individuals, especially individuals who go into more technical and specialized MOSes. We’ll always be able to round up 11Bs but people that can do some of the more specialized stuff in the military will have no incentive at all to take a job that won’t give them any benefits for spouse or children when there are comparable civilian jobs out there, just won’t happen.
So there are several deeply flawed assumptions:
This will save a lot of money. It won’t save a lot of money in the context of the DoD budget.
This will have a desired impact on Army composition. No, it won’t. It will make recruiting more difficult, and especially more difficult to bring people with skillsets in certain highly technical or specialized MOSes–the individuals most equipped to succeed in the civilian labor force.
This will not hurt morale. This will definitely hurt morale, and creates tons of problems. I was the CO of young men for over 20 years, and the last thing I would want to deal with is new guys coming in who get a girl pregnant and have to decide what’s the best way they can get out of their enlistment early so his family has the benefits they need.
If you want to save money in the military I’ve proposed ideas that are much more realistic and meaningful. They don’t destroy morale or give the Army endless personnel headaches and actually save real money instead of just “stick it to” whatever subgroup of enlisted men you served with pissed you off by “living too high on the hog.”
I proposed this in the past:
If you aren’t talking about stuff like that, you aren’t seriously talking about reducing our military spend.
Lissen up, Cap’n. If that’s what you can tell from reading my posts, your reading comprehension leave something to be desired.
Where is this envy?? Who was I envious of? I got married and lived off base. IN Hawaii. Three blocks from the motherfucking beach. I got my apartment paid for, and a couple hundred bucks extra to buy groceries to boot. Envious? I WAS the envied…mainly because I had a hot wife and didn’t have a kid to take care of.
I was going to point out…‘safety net’ programs exist. And as mentioned above, Lcpl. Horndog makes a couple thou a month that he can use to provide for the kid, even if he has to shack up in his barracks and eat at the chow hall every meal. He has some means to provide.
I’ve never had a dependent in my life and I’ve never felt “envy” for the benefits guys with dependents receive. In the military the benefits are decently generous, but if you actually break the numbers down it’s not quite so clear cut as many of you are saying.
However, what’s notable is every increase in pay or benefits you may get from having a dependent is vastly offset by the hit to disposable income you suffer from having to provide for that dependent.
I just don’t see any reason, I as a retiree or a taxpayer should support any policy that does virtually nothing to reduce our government spending apparently because someone “feels” that military service members in their early enlistments are getting too much of a good thing if they happen to have a wife and/or kids.
We have too much military, not an overpaid military.
Back in the mid-90s when I was still in the service the annualized cost of operating a carrier battle group was like $1.5bn/year. I’d be interested to know what the cost in 2012 of running just one carrier battle group is, I bet it’s a good bit higher than it was in 1994. The tonnage of our navy is larger than the next 13 navies combined (and this isn’t just an Army guy saying we need to cut the Navy), I’m fine with us having a larger than “necessary” Navy. But I’m not fine with us having a navy so big there is literally almost no reason I can imagine we shouldn’t reduce it a good bit.
The navy is expensive as hell to operate, with all those ships, aircraft, and etc.
You obviously have some sort of personal “issue” with young service members who have children. I say this because you have no factual basis under which your proposals make any sense. They are not a real cost savings, they just speak of being punitive. It’s no different from the idiots who say secretaries working for the federal government making $32,000 a year should have their pay frozen (while their medical copayments increase year to year) because they “have it too good” and we “need to save money.” Those are a red herring and have nothing to do with a budget deficit.
I have absolutely no respect for people who want to nickel and dime any government employee, civilian or military, as though that’s somehow going to fix our budgetary problems. Spending on equipment maintenance and purchasing dwarfs all personnel spending in the military. Spending on dependents is but a small, tiny portion of personnel spending. People who are blathering on about nickel and dime solutions to hundred-dollar bill problems aren’t serious, they just have an axe to grind against certain groups. Be they school teachers, service members, government bureaucrats or etc.
Show me some actual numbers that your proposal can reduce even $10bn/year from the DoD budget and we can start talking cost-benefit. Until then you’re talking something that will create more headache than it will ever be worth.
By the way, I’ve not been “Cap’n” since 1989, so let’s not demote me three ranks if you’re going to refer to me sarcastically by rank.
You have quite the knack for twisting the words of others. Do you work for Fox or something? Pursue a calling? You’re either completely naive or just stupid. Most people join to get a steady paycheck and learn a trade of some sort. There are those who just want to go kill somebody, but they’re in the minority, IME of 23 years. Benefits help retention and enlistments; it’s as simple as that. It’s difficult enough to get people to enlist, let alone stay past their first enlistments. Take away any benefits during their first terms and you end up with lower enlistment rates.
I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt with this thread, but now I see that you’re completely full of shit.
I’ll refer to you how I choose, as long as you continue to imply that I am attempting to punish anyone, and equate me with idiots. It’s not obvious to anyone but you that I have a personal ‘issue’ with anybody; indeed I do not. I am not under your command, so I’d appreciate if you would stop addressing me in a tone that indicates that I am.
Well, then I’ll note that servicemembers don’t enlist out of a sense of duty; they enlist for the paycheck. Is that what you are implying, because I don’t want to twist your words.
I understand that benefits help enlistment. I understand the removing a benefit may result in lower enlistment rates; as stated, I don’t have a problem with that. The military is cutting size, anyway. A quck Google before the edit window closes shows that the military isn’t having a terrible time meeting recruiting goals, anyway. Here.
Coming to the conclusion that I’m full of shit because this proposal will hurt recruitment and retention in some way is kind of a stretch. Or am I full of shit because of my assertion that people enlist in the military out of a sense of calling or duty?
I’m simply addressing you in the appropriate tone befitting someone who makes proposals that would only outrage individual service members and for which you have done no cost benefit analysis. A deli shouldn’t run a new discount before doing a cost benefit analysis, and we sure as hell shouldn’t radically alter the structure of military benefits without doing one. Especially not on the insistence of someone who says it is “stupid” to have a kid on “x” amount of pay.
Benefit schemes are not generally designed based on how wise it is fiscally to have children at any given rate of pay, but are instead designed for employee retention. That’s why employer benefits were created in the first place, going back to the earliest military and corporate pension programs.
Occasionally people sign up for very altruistic reasons. In the history of warfare the true altruists are probably less than 1%. Now, I like to think in the 20th century and 21st century, a decent portion of that 1% are American servicemen, but I certainly know it’s not the majority of people in service today. Prior to the age of nationalism and revolutions almost all military service was due to: compulsion, food/survival, and chance at glory/wealthy.
I think we should stop providing body armor and helmets to service members for free. I see no reason they should not be given those upfront in exchange for a reduction in pay until they have paid off the cost of the equipment.
This would save money.
Should we do it?
That’s essentially as far as you’ve gotten. You’ve said “let’s stop doing something” and you’ve said it would save money. I don’t see where you’ve made any sort of argument it would be a good way to save money. And with this example maybe you see that not all cuts are good, if you want to have a military you have to spend money. So you can’t cut to zero, so in fact not all cuts are good. Some cuts are, and some cuts aren’t. If all cuts were good then you’d be saying nothing is worth paying for, and that’s just not the case.
Because it’s INSANE to throw out a proposal without hiring an accounting firm, right! Congresspeople do it all the time.
And in case you haven’t noticed, I don’t actually have the power to radically alter anything. So while you’re correct that we shouldn’t change anything before such an analysys, it’s a little silly to get worked up about. Or at least a questionable way to frame your argument.
And I continue to insist that it’s stupid to have a kid on E-3 pay.
Facetiousness alert: So, we should stop thanking them for their service? After all, it’s just for a paycheck. I’m being absurd, but I hope you see what I’m getting at. Is it just a job that people enlist so that they get a paycheck? I like to think it’s not.
It might save some money, but it would compromise effectiveness.
I shouldn’t have phrased my comment as I did, I didn’t mean that anything can be cut without consequences. What I intended was that it’s a cut, cuts need to be made, and in my view I think it’s worth analyzing.
A little background for those that might not be familiar:
Single soldiers always bitch about the benefits of being married. It’s almost always junior enlisted, but they’re simply jealous that there are benefits out there that they can’t have. For some reason, “If you go to school, you too can use education benefits” keeps them from bitching about the soldiers going to free night school, but “If you get married, you too can get married benefits” doesn’t.
Kimmy_Gibbler hates the military, especially when talking about money. Whatever the military does is wrong. He’ll take the “screw the servicemember” angle in any military thread he sees.
Dude, seriously? Everyone in America can send their kids to free public schooling, even if they’re not here legally. And you want to add in that cost for our fucking military?!
First of all, servicemembers pay for TriCare coverage. Second of all, some employers pick up the entire tab for medical insurance with or without dependents. You know what we call that? A benefit. Just like what SMs get.
On the topic of service members who are in it for the pay and benefits, that’s exactly who I wanted under my command.
To be honest the rare breed of soldier that is “idealist” “ultra gung-ho” and et cetera, more often than not they were not easy to deal with.
The guys who came in because they were willing to serve their country (with all that entailed) but who looked at it as a professional job that yes they were doing in part for pay and pension tended to be a lot more grounded, a lot easier to manage, and typically and frankly less prone to being mentally unstable.
I’m not saying the noble soldier whose only thought is country and who dreams each night of valiantly dying while taking down dozens of the enemy and then being escorted to Valhalla is a terrible ideal (well after typing it out I’m not actually sure it isn’t), but in the real military I knew most people weren’t like that. The ones with a strong idealistic streak often also had some pretty negative characteristics too.
Of course ideals get talked about by soldiers in bars long after retirement, most people I knew in service would not be talking about that kind of thing on a regular basis.