Military Power

I know we are only supposed to quote up to 3 or 4 paragraphs max, but this article was only 1 paragraph and a sentance long in the first place...

President Barack Obama’s fiscal year 2010 budget proposal includes a 2.9 percent pay increase for U.S. servicemembers. This is significantly less than the 3.9 percent raise approved last year, or the 3.5 percent raise approved the year before. However, over the past few years, Congress has had a habit of approving a military pay raise slightly higher than the presidential proposal.

The bump in pay is part of the Defense Department’s $534 billion base operating budget for fiscal year 2010, which represents a 4 percent, or $20 billion, increase from the previous fiscal year.

Source

What do you think? I'm glad he is giving them a raise, they deserve it.

It's just a shame it isn't more as that would match — not exceed — average wage growth in the private sector. In every year of this decade so far, the military pay raise has been at least one-half percentage point above the average private-sector wage growth, a sustained effort to close a purported gap between military and civilian pay that some say has existed since 1982. They will be able to fund their own pay raise just from the amount of cutbacks they are making. It's all well and good that they get paid well, but if they don't live long enough to spend it, due to sub-standard training and poorly maintained equipment, what is the point? Dems just aren't that big on national security (judging by the laws they pass and what they historically choose to fund), most of the people that hate us know that, and are in fact, big fans of them.