washingtonscene
practical safeguard to prevent it. If A can be substituted for B, then B later can be substituted for C, once you’ve accepted the substitution philosophy. Let’s look at the bottom line. The
COLA Dips Slightly • Inflation dropped 0.2
percent in June, mark- ing the first time in nine months the CPI hasn’t increased. With four months left in the fiscal year, cumulative inflation stands at 3.2 percent.
chained CPI would reduce retired pay and other COLAs by about a quarter of a per- centage point each year. That doesn’t sound like much, until you see how that would compound over a retiree’s lifetime. Military retirees and the disabled par- ticularly would be affected because they start drawing inflation-adjusted pay at relatively younger ages. For a military re- tiree, switching to a chained CPI COLA would reduce total lifetime retired pay by about 6 percent. That’s about $100,000 for an E-7 re- tiring today with 20 years of service. A newly retiring O-5 with 20 years of service would lose double that amount. And that’s for someone living an average lifespan (early 80s). Half will live longer, and expected longevity is rising every year. Three other factors are relevant here. First, the Bureau of Labor Statistics
already made a change to allow some rela- tively modest substitutions (of the peas and carrots variety) several years ago. Second, when COLA changes (delays)
were proposed in the 1990s, the outcry from seniors successfully won an exemption for Social Security, leaving COLA penalties to fall disproportionally on military retirees. Third, smaller COLAs aren’t the only penalty of the chained CPI, because it also would be used for tax threshold adjust- ments. Smaller annual tax-bracket adjust- ments mean … guess what? More people shifting into higher tax brackets every year. For all of these reasons, MOAA is not a fan of the chained CPI. Some think it’s the lesser of the evils
we might face during the coming fiscal crunch, and that might well be true. But that doesn’t make it right.
34 MILITARY OFFICER SEPTEMBER 2011
Female Veterans’
Summit A VA culture change is pushed.
F
rom July 15-17, more than 700 female veterans, female active duty servicemembers, VA employees, vet-
erans’ and military service organizations, and advocates participated in the 2011 VA Women Veterans National Training Summit in Washington, D.C., to discuss issues im- portant to female veterans. Key summit themes included:
• The VA and DoD need better outreach and communication with the new gen- eration of servicemembers and veterans, especially women, and to translate these efforts to being a more agile, responsive, and flexible system for all veterans; • Unemployment and homelessness con- tinue to be the biggest challenges facing the VA, and women are a particularly high-risk population; and • The VA must transform its culture more quickly to better integrate the rapidly growing female veteran population, as women still experience a lack of privacy, safety, and respect from many VA staff members and male veterans in the system. Today, women make up 14 percent of the
active duty population and 18 percent of the Guard and Reserve, compared to only 2 percent in the 1950s. Women are the fastest- growing segment of the veteran population and will comprise 10 percent of veterans by 2020 (versus the current 6 percent). Many active duty servicemembers and
veterans who participated in the summit spoke about the challenges they faced coming home. For some, being in combat was easier because they had the support
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