{"id":31200,"date":"2012-08-01T09:58:51","date_gmt":"2012-08-01T13:58:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=31200"},"modified":"2012-08-01T10:10:48","modified_gmt":"2012-08-01T14:10:48","slug":"a-jimmy-carter-welcome-home-to-the-troops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=31200","title":{"rendered":"A Jimmy Carter welcome home to the troops"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chief Tango sends us a link from Rick Maze at the Army Times<\/a>, reporting the news that the Rand Corporation endorses a pay freeze, a cut back in bonuses and caps to subsequent pay raises, because “Smaller military raises are \u201cunlikely to hurt capability and readiness\u201d”. <\/p>\n

I hear Jimmy Carter applauding loudly, because these are exactly the policies that gutted the military in the late 70s. When I reenlisted for 6 years in the infantry in 1978, I got a $2300 bonus paid out in four increments. If I hadn’t been so in love with the life, I wouldn’t have stayed. Two years before that, there was a $12,000 lump sum bonus for six years, for your comparison.<\/p>\n

When I got promoted from corporal to sergeant, my monthly pay went up $23. And then a month before the 1980 election, Carter gave us a 25% raise. The following year, three years away from the election Ronald Reagan gave us a 36% raise.<\/p>\n

The Rand Corporation complains that there have been years that the military pay exceeded the civilian sector. Gee, that’s too damn bad, isn’t it? If the civilians were so jealous of military pay, why didn’t they join the military – there’s always that option, huh?<\/p>\n

Maze writes;<\/p>\n

Rand, however, says that a one-time pay freeze or one-time pay cap has the best chance of passing because they would be viewed as short-term responses to the high unemployment rate in the civilian labor market and an effort to reduce deficit spending.<\/p>\n

Longer-term cap caps would be harder to sustain, especially if the civilian job market improved to the point that military recruiting became more difficult and mid-career service members decided to leave the ranks to take civilian jobs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, well, unemployment during the Carter years was nearly double-digit and I didn’t see job-hungry Americans flocking to the recruiters’ offices – but, you know, that’s just a real life example, not a Power Point presentation ginned up by a computer model and thunk on by the brilliant denizens of the Rand’s offices who probably have more military experience than me.<\/p>\n

Couple these suggestions with the recommendations for cutting the pay of National Guard, increase the amount of training time that the military will require the Reserves and the National Guard and I see the toothless military that Reagan inherited in 1981. But what do I know…I remember jumping from the tailgates of duece-and-a-halfs as they drove down Sicily Drop Zone so we could practice assembling on the drop zone because there was no money for aircraft.<\/p>\n

I’m sure some of you have your own horror stories of the Carter years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chief Tango sends us a link from Rick Maze at the Army Times, reporting the news … A Jimmy Carter welcome home to the troops<\/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":[84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31200","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=31200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31200\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}