{"id":19022,"date":"2010-05-08T08:30:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-08T13:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=19022"},"modified":"2010-05-08T08:30:00","modified_gmt":"2010-05-08T13:30:00","slug":"the-pentagon-is-not-your-friend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=19022","title":{"rendered":"The Pentagon is not your friend"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other day, I wrote about “the military’s greatest advocate”, Virginia Senator James Webb<\/a> and his hearings seeking a freeze on military pay and compensation. Today, the Washington Post reports that he has some fellow travelers in that regard.<\/p>\n

Congress has been so determined to take care of troops and their families that for several years running it has overruled the Pentagon and mandated more-generous pay raises than requested by the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. It has also rejected attempts by the Pentagon to slow soaring health-care costs — which Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has said are “eating us alive” — by raising co-pays or premiums.<\/p>\n

Now, Pentagon officials see fiscal calamity.<\/p>\n

In the midst of two long-running wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, defense officials are increasingly worried that the government’s generosity is unsustainable and that it will leave them with less money to buy weapons and take care of equipment. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, now there’s a problem. After a year of spending as much money as fast as they can to shove a liberal agenda down America’s throat, suddenly we can’t pay for the actual things government should do – like provide for the common defense. And what’s first on the chopping block? Military compensation. I don’t see anyone mentioning how we spend too much money on medicare or food stamps. There’s no mention of the bloated federal bureaucracy regarding the useless-ass Education Department. No one is suggesting that we slash the redundancy in the Commerce Department, or the utter idiocy of the EPA.<\/p>\n

Nope they head straight for the pocketbooks of the troops and their families.<\/p>\n

Well, actually, they targeted military retirees and Social Security recipients this year when there was no cost of living increase for those groups this year, which means when the “Obama tax cut” expired, military retirees and Social Security recipients actually experienced a drop in their pay. So the military is next. Can’t cut the pay of bureaucrats or welfare recipients can we? Nope, they complain, whereas the military doesn’t and seniors are so senile, they won’t even notice.<\/p>\n

I warned back in 2008 that Obama would slash military compensation, but nimrods like IAVA and Vote Vets declared that in the first year of his administration, Obama has been better to veterans than any other president, and I’ll concede that – but just like his “tax cut” last year, it was smoke and mirrors. We were set up, we got complacent and now we’re going to get screwed. And IAVA and VoteVets will still rest their support of Obama on his first year in office.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The other day, I wrote about “the military’s greatest advocate”, Virginia Senator James Webb and his … The Pentagon is not your friend<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,89,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-congress-sucks","category-iava"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19022\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}