Federal law says that military pay raises must be based on the Employment Cost Index which ties military raises to private sector pay growth. Under that formula, military personnel should be getting a 1.8% payraise beginning January 2014. Unfortunately the law also says that a president can inform Congress of an alternative pay adjustment using “national emergency or serious economic conditions affecting the general welfare. . .”
In another example of love of our military, Obama has informed Congress that he has decided to cap military pay raises next year to 1% but not to worry because this will absolutely have no “material effect on the government’s’ ability to attract and retain well-qualified members of the military.” But the best part of the lie “I am strongly committed to supporting our uniformed service members. . .” but, “as our country continues to recover from serious economic conditions affecting the general welfare, we must maintain efforts to keep our nation on a sustainable fiscal course.” If that doesn’t make you gag nothing will.
Since when does a sustainable fiscal course involve throwing money at the Muslim Brotherhood, and Syrian terrorists or using hard-earned taxpayer dollars to prop up his “green” energy fallacy, or throwing money at Planned Parenthood to murder innocent babies or saddling Americans with socialized health care?
Obama’s committment to the military is out there for the world to see. Veterans Department case workers received $5.5 million in bonuses while veteran’s claims languish. Then there is the Veterans Hospital project in Salem, Virginia, where 6,000 solar panels are being installed at a cost of $5 million to provide 10% of the hospital’s electrical needs, a project that will take 25 years to recover the initial cost. The green project at Norfolk Naval Station recently completed cost $21 million to provide 2% of the base’s electrical needs. These green projects are in full swing all over America thanks to Obama.
All that money would have been better spent on upgrading Veterans’ hospitals and hiring medical personnel and new case workers to clear the backlog of veteran’s claims and providing decent pay for our soldiers. Since when is the “greening” of America more important than the needs of our military veterans?
And let’s not forget the proposed Syrian action that Obama and other far-left war-mongers in D.C. are itching to jump into that could cost taxpayers close to a billion dollars, and many, many more American soldiers lives just to displace an Islamic dictator with another terrorist Islamic government.
Since the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, about 2.5 million members of the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard and related Reserve and National Guard units have been deployed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, according to Department of Defense data. Of those, more than a third were deployed more than once. In fact, as of last year nearly 37,000 Americans had been deployed more than five times, among them 10,000 members of guard or Reserve units. Records also show that 400,000 service members have done three or more deployments.
These wars have produced more disability claims per veteran than other wars on the books, including Vietnam, Korea and World War II. As of last September, more than 1.6 million military members who’d been deployed in what’s classified as the global war on terror had transitioned to veteran status, according to VA records. And of those, about 670,000 veterans have been awarded disability status connected to their military service and another 100,000 have their initial claims pending. Those numbers are constantly climbing – and might continue to rise for decades.
We have a moral obligation to take care of every veteran who has been injured in war. It’s shameful that those with the power to send these men and women into harm’s way would rather waste our tax money on projects to push an agenda rather than give these underpaid and over-utilized servicemen a decent raise or the medical care that they have earned and continue to earn.
“The military is the key to America’s security. If America is to be brought down, our military must be emasculated, neutered, feminized, and weakened beyond repair. That process is happening at warp speed under the direction of our current commander-in-chief, and it is impossible to believe it is anything other than a deliberate strategy of sabotage on his part. He is Samson at the pillars, pushing with all his energy to bring the roof down on all our heads.” Brian Fischer
