washingtonscene
some of these players also bring some long-held predispositions to the table. In 1995, before he became a leader on the
budget committee, then-freshman Senator Gregg proposed eliminating any COLAs for military retirees until age 62, eliminating COLAs on any retired pay amounts above $14,000 a year, and capping COLAs a half percentage point below inflation every year. And he wasn’t alone. Between 1993 and
1997, MOAA and The Military Coalition fought off that and 16 other budget-generat- ed proposals to whack military retirement. We first heard from Williams 10 years
ago, when her opinion piece (“Our GIs Earn Enough”) in The Washington Post railed against MOAA and The Military Coalition’s efforts to reverse the two decades of mili- tary pay-raise caps that had left military pay 13 percent below private-sector pay, posing a serious threat to retention and readiness at that time. The point isn’t to drag up old grudges,
though it’s still aggravating when critics try to make data seem worse than they are — such as citing cost growth since the year before TFL was implemented (what a sur- prise that adding health care and pharmacy coverage for people over 65 raised health care costs) or making costs far in the future sound outlandishly large (e.g., if TFL costs double by 2028, as the CBO projects, that’s about a 4-percent annual growth). The looming debt crisis is far more
daunting than any such problem in the past, and it’s going to require sacrifices from every segment of America, including the military. It’s entirely possible those sacri- fices might be steeper than we’ve been pre- pared to contemplate in the past. But that crisis, and the debt commis- sion being appointed to recommend ways to address it, will provide an excuse for every critic to trot out time-worn “solu- tions” that ignore the realities of military requirements and careers. We all need to be ready for the February budget committee hearing, as every budget-
3 8 MI L I T A R Y O F F I C E R MAY 2 0 1 0
cutting proposal ever leveled at the military in the past — and then some — will be com- ing up again in the next year or two. The real challenge will be distinguish-
ing the reasonable (and perhaps neces- sary) ones from the bogus ones.
No Thanks on
Pay Plus-Up?
Leaders are OK with a 1.4-percent raise.
T
he service personnel chiefs
told a House Armed Services sub- committee at a March 17 hearing
that troops are “very satisfied” with their compensation compared to the broader economy, and there’s no need to plus up the 1.4-percent pay raise the Pentagon proposed for 2011. Each year since 1999, Congress has
increased the military pay raise by at least 0.5 percent above private-sector pay growth, in a plan to restore full military pay comparability following repeated capping of military raises throughout the 1980s and ’90s. Subcommittee Chair Rep. Susan Davis
(D-Calif.) asked whether Congress should continue this practice. Dr. Clifford Stanley, undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, said, “[My] personal opinion is you can’t pay people enough,” but noted he’s trying to balance pay with all other things the de- partment provides. Stanley’s written testimony said DoD
generally would oppose continued entitle- ment growth beyond index levels (in this case, the 1.4-percent increase in private- sector pay for 2009, which drove the bud- get submission for 2011) in the absence of alternatives supported by studies. MOAA strongly believes Congress needs to continue adding at least 0.5
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