Taxes!

[Osteomata]

I have a tendency to ignore areas of agreement in favor battling out the disagreements because frankly, whats the fun telling each how much we agree when you can angrily counter and debate, heh? But let me break character and suggest the things that we are in general agreement about, so as to proceed from some common ground:

1. I think the current model of revenue vs expenditure is unsustainable and will require major structural change to make us solvent. I wish more people were aware of the $40T expenditure for the next ten years, and that even with the GOPs political victory on the debt ceiling, that plan will not in any way make us solvent, it merely delays an inevitable reckoning.

2. Entitelment reform MUST be part of the solution, and will probably take the form of raising Social Security full payment age, adjusting the cost of living method of calucuation for SS, means testing for Medicare, and reducing block grants to states for Medicaide. I do not, however, see any way of maintaining a reasonable, i.e., lower than most of the rest of the industrialized developed world, social safety net without revenue increases (tax code revision) and defense budget major cuts. If you want grandad to get his SSN check, a check that he invested decades of working towards, and his medical need attended to, something else he invested toward, and wish to avoid a dramatic increase in roving packs of diseased illiterate children (im getting hyperbolic for effect here), then we need to not only restrucgure the core programs, but also to fix the utterly captured by special interest (including both corporate and other) tax code and revenue shortfalls.

Where we disagree:
1. I don't particlarly concern myself with an obsessive race breakdown for the poor, but rather try to maintain some respect and compassion for those that are less fortunate than I am. It serves no purpose, and strikes me as spiteful, to dismiss those that are receiving public assistance, as a whole or even generally, as lazy and weak blood suckers, regardless of the ethnic demographics. I try to remember that a large part of the justification for public assistance, particularly those "cradle" programs that so irk you, is that the are intended for the children of the poor, and are intended to serve as an investment. For instance, providing early education intervention, community child rearing classes and infant health check ups tends to reduce later health and development issues which end up costing the state and community even more, much more, down the line. Now maybe you are skeptical of the utility of these programs and believe the benefits are exagerrated. OK! Skepticism is good! But the advocates of these programs are pretty mainstream and not just a bunch Trotskyites in Che Guevara shirts. These programs are rather small potatoes in the whole entitlment program debate, they pale in comparison to the need to revise Medicare, Medicaide, and SS. Now

2. Military compensation: I don't trust your numbers, and I think you have drastically moved the goal posts. You started with "paid way under minimum wage" and have chaged it to "my specific situation, during a specified window of my career does not equal what I would make as a civilian." These are radically different questions, the first is indefensible, the latter is possibly true but not representative for the majority of service members. I served for two decades as well and continue to work on base, and I am all too familiar with the cherry picking of data that goes on to justify how poorly paid service members think they are. Even if I accept your situation at face value, I absolutely do not think it representative, you leave our a number of critical factors, you ignore civilian equivalent requirements, fail to include full compensation, do not include intangible benefits of which there are many, and seem to be all in favor of market determinations accept where it comes to the voluntary service. What about including the wide spread Navy transitional rotations between ship and shore duty? You know as well as I do that shore duty entails WAY less hours, almost no duty section rotation, and no deployments, etc etc. Why not mention the plethora of bonuses and tax advantages? Granted, not everyone of these is applicable to all service members at all times, but a heck of a lot of them are very widespread, and apply to you.
Base Pay
Variable Houseing Allowance (untaxed)
Uniform allowance (untaxed)
Basic Allowance for Subsistance (untaxed, not provided while at see/in the field)
Family Seperation Pay
Hazardous duty Pay
Hostile Fire Pay
Tax exemption for most pay while deployed in our major conflict zones
Health/Dental
Health/Dental for family
G.I. eduction bill
Reenlistment bonus
Nuke pay
Flight pay
SGLI
TSP program
20 retirement plan
Advanced education opportunities.
The hearfelt thanks and appreciation of complete strangers.

There are others, and a whole slew of difficult to monetorize ones. They all have a legit reason (accept those damn pilots sucking down aviator pay while in non-flying status, those guys suck, heh.). I am not arguing they should not exist, but they need to be included in the calculations.

3. This is a minor point towards a larger issue: Cell phones are completely ubiquitous, and nearly required to compete for a job. They cost little more than a land line and are far more utilitarian. If you are honestly gonna get wrapped around the axle on whether a guy on public assistance has a mobile, then we are unlikely to find common ground.

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?