Some Good News For The Troops

[Zam-Zam]

The world's finest fighting force, our guardians of democracy, are at long last getting a meaningful boost in pay:


The U.S. House of Representatives on Friday approved a 2.1 percent pay raise next year for troops.


The measure was included in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, which the lower chamber overwhelmingly backed by a vote of 375-34. The massive $619 billion bill sets policy and spending goals for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.


"This bipartisan bill focuses on our troops, America’s most important national defense resource," Rep. William "Mac" Thornberry, a Republican from Texas and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement.


"It provides them a full pay raise for the first time in four years, it stops layoffs of our military personnel and actually increases the end strength of our Armed Forces, and it starts to stabilize the readiness problems that are making it more difficult for our troops to accomplish their mission and increasingly represent a danger to their lives," he added. "It contains landmark reforms to improve our military’s strength and agility."


House negotiators successfully convinced their Senate counterparts to agree to a higher pay raise for service members in 2017.


The Senate had agreed with the White House to increase troop pay next year by 1.6 percent. The House, however, pushed for a 2.1 percent increase in pay in keeping with private-sector wage growth. Lawmakers in the lower chamber noted the alternative would have marked the fourth straight year troops would have seen a lower-than-expected raise.


Complete text: http://www.military.com/daily-news/2016/12/02/house-approves-21-troop-pay-raise-in-2017.html


Something we can all be happy about, no?

 

[as seen on tv]

how much do they make in basic training, per hour?

 

[Zam-Zam]

how much do they make in basic training, per hour?

Military members are not payed by the hour since, as they inform you early on, you are expected to be ready for duty 24-7-365.

A link to the DFAS pay charts for any year you like:

https://www.dfas.mil/militarymembers/payentitlements/military-pay-charts.html

 

[Arkady]

The world's finest fighting force, our guardians of democracy, are at long last getting a meaningful boost in pay:


The U.S. House of Representatives on Friday approved a 2.1 percent pay raise next year for troops.


The measure was included in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, which the lower chamber overwhelmingly backed by a vote of 375-34. The massive $619 billion bill sets policy and spending goals for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.


"This bipartisan bill focuses on our troops, America’s most important national defense resource," Rep. William "Mac" Thornberry, a Republican from Texas and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement.


"It provides them a full pay raise for the first time in four years, it stops layoffs of our military personnel and actually increases the end strength of our Armed Forces, and it starts to stabilize the readiness problems that are making it more difficult for our troops to accomplish their mission and increasingly represent a danger to their lives," he added. "It contains landmark reforms to improve our military’s strength and agility."


House negotiators successfully convinced their Senate counterparts to agree to a higher pay raise for service members in 2017.


The Senate had agreed with the White House to increase troop pay next year by 1.6 percent. The House, however, pushed for a 2.1 percent increase in pay in keeping with private-sector wage growth. Lawmakers in the lower chamber noted the alternative would have marked the fourth straight year troops would have seen a lower-than-expected raise.


Complete text: http://www.military.com/daily-news/2016/12/02/house-approves-21-troop-pay-raise-in-2017.html


Something we can all be happy about, no?

With private-sector pay rising, in the face of near-full-employment, I think you have to hike military pay just to maintain the same average force quality. So, it seems like a good thing to me. However, the "long last" wording doesn't really line up with what's been happening out here in the real world. The military has been getting pay raises year after year. They never get stiffed. That's something that can't be said for federal civilian employees, who've really been screwed over repeatedly in recent years. This shows the comparison:

More recently, it looks like for 2016 there was 1.3% for the military and 1.0% for civilians:

https://federalnewsradio.com/workfo...izes-pay-raise-for-federal-employees-in-2016/

And for 2015 it was 1% for both:

https://federalnewsradio.com/pay/2014/12/obama-makes-2015-federal-pay-raise-official/

As you can see, in that time stretch, the military got the same or larger pay raises than civilian federal employees every year but two over the course of thirty-three years. And in four of those years, the civilians were frozen out entirely, while the military averaged over a 1.9% raise in those years. In most of those years, the military raises were well above inflation, as well, while that was frequently not the case for the civilians.

So, surely something we could all be happy about is if civilian federal pay were to be boosted, to bring it back in line with the military after all these years of the military pulling way. The net result of all those smaller raises for the civilians has been very significant. A civilian income that was comparable as of 1984 would now need about a 14% raise just to get back into line with the military equivalent . You need to hike civilian pay about 7% just to get them back to where they were at the end of the Bush years, relative to the military.

 

[as seen on tv]

Military members are not payed by the hour since, as they inform you early on, you are expected to be ready for duty 24-7-365.

A link to the DFAS pay charts for any year you like:

https://www.dfas.mil/militarymembers/payentitlements/military-pay-charts.html

its clear that vast numbers of enlisted personnel not only earn less than $15 an hour (assuming a 40 hour week) - they apparently earn less than the minimum wage of $7.50

why didn't Obama fix this while he was president? is he a hypocrite on minimum wage?

 

[as seen on tv]

With private-sector pay rising, in the face of near-full-employment, I think you have to hike military pay just to maintain the same average force quality. So, it seems like a good thing to me. However, the "long last" wording doesn't really line up with what's been happening out here in the real world. The military has been getting pay raises year after year. They never get stiffed. That's something that can't be said for federal civilian employees, who've really been screwed over repeatedly in recent years. This shows the comparison:

More recently, it looks like for 2016 there was 1.3% for the military and 1.0% for civilians:

https://federalnewsradio.com/workfo...izes-pay-raise-for-federal-employees-in-2016/

And for 2015 it was 1% for both:

https://federalnewsradio.com/pay/2014/12/obama-makes-2015-federal-pay-raise-official/

As you can see, in that time stretch, the military got the same or larger pay raises than civilian federal employees every year but two over the course of thirty-three years. And in four of those years, the civilians were frozen out entirely, while the military averaged over a 1.9% raise in those years. In most of those years, the military raises were well above inflation, as well, while that was frequently not the case for the civilians.

So, surely something we could all be happy about is if civilian federal pay were to be boosted, to bring it back in line with the military after all these years of the military pulling way. The net result of all those smaller raises for the civilians has been very significant. A civilian income that was comparable as of 1984 would now need about a 14% raise just to get back into line with the military equivalent . You need to hike civilian pay about 7% just to get them back to where they were at the end of the Bush years, relative to the military.

as the enclosed government chart clearly shows - US labor participation has fallen dramatically during the Obama years. It's down about 10%.

those 10% don't show up in the unemployment stats because they

- have stopped looking for work
- claimed disability
- no longer eligible for unemployment benefits.

if these people were properly counted, the unemployment rate would be over 10%, not around 4%.

 

[Arkady]

its clear that vast numbers of enlisted personnel not only earn less than $15 an hour (assuming a 40 hour week) - they apparently earn less than the minimum wage of $7.50

why didn't Obama fix this while he was president? is he a hypocrite on minimum wage?

The military has an odd structure, in that compensation is very heavily skewed towards benefits, including long-term benefits, rather than immediate pay. For example, how many minimum wage jobs do you now of that come with full health and dental care benefits, like the military gets? How many come with a defined-benefit pension plan?

Think about this. You can join the military at age 17. By age 37, you can be retired on half pay with a lifetime of high-quality affordable healthcare. What other career for someone with no college offers that?

Then there are all the other benefits. For example, you can shop on-base without state taxes, even as a retiree. You have access to preferential hiring in other government jobs. You have access to subsidized home loans. You have access to a network of VA healthcare providers. You have heavily subsidized college and training options (reimbursement of up to $22,805 per year, at last count). You have access to heavily subsidized military recreational facilities. You can fly standby, nearly free, on military planes. Your spouse gets a lot of benefits, too, and even your grown children get some. And that's in addition to the private-sector companies that offer veteran discounts for everything from meals to cruises.

There's also the fact that a lot of day-to-day expenses that come out of pocket for civilians are covered by the military, or very heavily subsidized by them. That includes healthcare, childcare, living quarters, clothes, and even food. If you're living in military quarters, eating some meals at the dining hall (and buying others, subsidized, at the commissary), being issued uniforms, getting access for your kids to private-school-quality DoD schools, etc., your expenses are lower.

So, there's a reason that the minimum wage considerations aren't the same with soldiers as with civilians.

I grew up in that world. We lived in a military-issued house, I went to DoD schools and on-base summer camps, and had access to the base pool, and the base movie theater, all at no cost or a fraction of the cost of private sector equivalents. We even had fantastic vacations that were heavily subsidized by Uncle Sam:

https://www.edelweisslodgeandresort.com/accomodations/eligibility

 

[Arkady]

as the enclosed government chart clearly shows - US labor participation has fallen dramatically during the Obama years.

Well, first, there's no need to rely on a dated chart. Here's an up-to-date one.

That adds some valuable information, since you can see that the rate's been pretty much stable for the last three and a half years. Second, it's not just that it fell dramatically under Obama. It's that it fell dramatically starting with the Bush presidency. Right-wing stooges tend to forget about the first half of that story, because they'd never even heard of the labor force participation rate until their conservative propaganda outlets ordered them to get bent out of shape about it, in the Obama years. But what we've seen on Obama's watch is part of a long-term trend of the unusually high LFPR we had when Boomers were in their peak working years falling back down to more normal levels now that they're past the peak.

To be clear, I'm not blaming Bush. It was largely demographic. People in their mid-50s have lower labor participation than people in their mid-40s, and it drops still further in people's 60s and beyond. In 2001, the first Boomers started hitting "early retirement age" of 55. As more and more of that bulge reached those years, it was bound to push labor participation down. In more recent years, we've stabilized, because there are two roughly balancing effects: unemployment is dropping fast, but more people are checking out of the labor force entirely. However, since unemployment can't drop that much farther, while the number of people in their senior years can still grow considerably, I expect LFPR to start declining again before long.

if these people were properly counted, the unemployment rate would be over 10%, not around 4%.

To spot the hilarious flaw in your "reasoning," ask yourself this:

What would the unemployment rate be in 1965 if we counted the people who weren't in the labor force as unemployed? Keep in mind, that today the labor force participation rate is 63.0%, whereas in 1965 it was 58.6%. So, however much you push up our official unemployment rate to reach your adjusted level, today, you'd need to push up the mid-1960s rate by 4.4 more points. So, if you add 6 points today, it would be 10.4 points back then. Of course nobody does those kinds of ad hoc adjustments for unemployment rates in earlier eras, because it wouldn't make sense. Similarly, it makes no sense today, but people do it anyway in order to find grounds for partisan criticism.