Originally Posted by
Marlin
Your right, lets talk about compensation. As senior enlisted, I bring home 60K a year in actual money, all allowances included. Now, lets say my medical insurance is worth 700 a month. Lets make it an even 10K a year with dental. That puts me at 70K a year. I stand duty every 4 days, plus full work days. That is 7-8 duty days a month, we are at 168 hours. So just in duty days, I am already working more hours than a civilian. Now, I still have 16 days of work days left, we usually work 0700 to 1600. Thats another 144 hours a month. This does not include PT time (0530-0630) and so on. We do not get mandatory breaks, we have no OSHA stuff, or working laws or whatnot. We are now at 312 hours a month. I do get 30 days of paid leave each year. That leaves 11 months of this schedule. 3432 hours. That is 20 bucks an hour with all compensation included. That is while we are in port, not deployed. Now, lets say its a deployment cycle, on the CVN76, I did 2.5 deployments in 2 years. So basically, 6 months each year. Those years I put in about 6020 hours, for the same pay. That means I am down to 10 bucks an hour, actual cash is below minimum wage pending what state you live in.
I operate a nuclear reactor, my civilian counter part makes close to double my income, same medical benefits, and only does about 200 hours a month at work. (I used 4 weeks for the sake of simplicity) That is 2200 hours a year. That means he is making around 65-70 bucks an hour to do a much easier job. They only do their actual job, no training, no ship's quals, no maintenance unless they are a maintenance guy, no dealing with NUBs, no going to sea, no threat of life and limb, air conditioning and so on.
Now having said all that, seemings that a DB TSA agent makes 13 an hour starting, I am way under the curve. I am a licensed nuclear operator, 12 years experience, 2 classes away from a bachelors.
Now, I will grant you that there are folks like Yeoman, basically secretaries, that get the same pay I do. There are cooks and all the other menial jobs that are WAY overpaid. They are doing alright compared to their civilian counterpart. They also do no represent the bulk of our armed forces, nor do they represent the most important parts. Without our engineers, mechanics,electronics guys and so on, we would be nothing.
Anyway, back to the welfare thing. Whites account for a little over half of the people on welfare. Made me kind of sad to think that you were right when I saw that on the census site. Then I realized, whites account for 72.4% of the US population. That means, although whites are half the welfare recipients, that means the other half comes from the remaining 28% of non-whites?
Prior to the recession, 1 in 3 blacks were on welfare, or rather 30%. Only 5% of whites. Hispanic/asian were about the same as the blacks. That number has not changed, yet the ratio of whites/nonwhite is getting smaller and smaller, soon to be overtaken and become less than one.
Taking all that, that means that our entitlement will only get more expensive, unless there are some MAJOR cultural changes at a familial level for the minorities.
So explain to me how this is just ranting? Show me some numbers that show otherwise. I pulled my data straight from the US census website. Lots of neat stuff on there. So *gasp* away, now that I have the percentages, it makes me feel worse.
I would love to see data about how many folks on welfare/state/federal aid, regardless of color, have cell phones, internet, cable, drink alcohol or smoke. How many wants do they have while I pay for their needs? Wish there was some way to actually quantify it, but since our government can't cut the wants when we are broke, how can you expect an individual american to do it?
Taxes!
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