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We talked about what “food insecurity<\/a>” means a while back, and it became the latest political ploy for Congress to “help” out the enlisted troops. If you don’t recall, food insecurity doesn’t mean you didn’t have food to eat. It means you didn’t get to eat what you want, when you wanted it. I was food insecure all through most of my childhood and for that matter during basic training! I was deprived of McDonalds and that’s not right. Thankfully, our “leaders” have come to the rescue.<\/p>\n Instead of just raising pay for enlisted troops, they’re instituting a new allowance that people have to apply for. I’m sure the services won’t track this and O-3s and O-4s won’t be asked why all their <E-3 troops need the military equivalent of food stamps. There won’t be all kinds of headaches for troops applying for the program and not receiving it in time or being told they need to verify their eligibility.<\/p>\n The $400 monthly allowance is in addition to a housing allowance and the basic allowance for subsistance (which is supposed to be the allowance for food for Christ’s sake). It would apply to any troops that are living under the federal poverty line, which for a family of three is about $30,000 this year. For a family of four, it\u2019s about $36,000. An E-1 with less than 4 months service is making just over $20k\/yr in base wages. By the time you hit E-3 a few months down the road you’re still only at $26k\/yr.<\/p>\n It’s now up to the DoD to decide what qualifies towards calculating how poor our troops are. If that E-3 is getting $1,500\/mo BAH and $400\/mo BAS, their annual real earnings would be almost $49k\/yr. Hardly below that poverty line.<\/p>\n Jeff LPH 3 sends in the Military Times article with the full story.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"