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GAO Seeks MOAA Input On Military Pay
MOAA met with representatives of the Government Accountability Office this week to rebut claims that today's military is overpaid.
Debt Commission Picks Up Steam
The Administration and Congress are coming to a consensus to convene a bipartisan commission that would recommend changes in federal entitlement programs to reduce the national debt. The argument is over how much authority to give it.
MOAA Goals for Veterans
MOAA's COL Bob Norton (USA-Ret) offered five top goals at a House Veterans Affairs Committee roundtable on Wednesday.
MOAA Pushes Medicare/TRICARE Fix
MOAA's CAPT Kathy Beasley (USN-Ret) spoke at a press conference this week calling for immediate Hill action to reverse upcoming Medicare/TRICARE payment cuts.
Army Family Needs Cited
Army Family Action Plan Conference delegates offered their top five needs.
GAO Seeks MOAA Input On Military Pay
For the last decade, MOAA and The Military Coalition (TMC) have led successful efforts to make up most of the 13.5% "military pay gap" that was a big factor in the retention problems of the late 1990s.
In the FY2010 Defense Authorization Act approved last year, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees accepted the recommendation by MOAA and the TMC for a 3.4% military pay raise for 2010 (vs. the 2.9% proposed in the defense budget) to reduce the remaining gap to 2.4%.
Now that budgets have gotten tighter, some have questioned (as the same groups did while military pay raises were capped below private sector pay growth repeatedly in the '70s, '80s and '90s) whether any pay gap exists.
The Defense Department says there isn't one, and that their new pay comparability objective - putting each grade/longevity combination at or above the 70th percentile of similarly educated civilians - has been achieved.
The Congressional Budget Office recently issued a report asserting that, with housing allowances improvements over the last decade, military people are now about 10% overpaid compared to their private sector counterparts.
MOAA couldn't disagree more, telling GAO that we need a more transparent system to assess who the appropriate civilian comparison population is, and what the percentile should be, given that the military:
- Recruits from the top half of the civilian aptitude population
- Finds that only about 25% of America's youth qualify for entry
- Requires career-long education and training advancement
- Enforces a competitive "up-or-out" promotion system
- Imposes severe limits on personal freedoms (e.g., not being able to quit when you want; risking a felony conviction for refusing an order).
Both military pay and allowance principles and service conditions have changed dramatically since development of the Regular Military Compensation (RMC) in the 1960s as the "military equivalent of civilian salary" -- including the value of the federal tax advantage military people receive because their housing and food allowances aren't taxable.
In the 1960s, all members received the same allowances, regardless of location. Now we've turned housing allowances into true reimbursements for housing costs, reflecting actual costs by locality.
Using RMC to assess comparability in today's environment, basic pay - the single most important military compensation element and the only one that drives such important things as retired pay and reenlistment bonuses - would have to "flex" to accommodate other changes.
Because housing and food allowances are now tied to external measures of housing and food costs, and tax rates are determined independently, maintaining a specific RMC total would require bending basic pay to fit whatever amount is left after setting tax and allowance amounts.
Current law says the military should receive a 1.4% raise for 2011. But what if average housing costs (because of disproportional changes in some localities) and tax rates (and thus the value of the tax advantage) both rose significantly? Under the CBO comparison methodology, maintaining a "target comparability" RMC could require reducing basic pay. Would it really make sense to tell military people, in essence, "Your taxes went up, so we have to freeze or cut your basic pay (and future retired pay)?"
Most important, compensation isn't what you're paid. It's what you’re paid divided by what's required of you to earn that pay. If we increase pay 25% but require 100% more sacrifice to earn it, that's not a pay raise.
Today's troops are encountering burdens of sacrifice that were never envisioned 40 years ago by the crafters of the all-volunteer force and the pay and allowances system. Thousands of today's troops have borne cumulative combat deployment time that exceeds the total length of World War II.
The current pay comparability formula proposes a 1.4% military pay raise in 2010 - the smallest in almost 50 years - even while we'll be ordering thousands to a third, fourth or fifth combat tour, incurring ever-increasing risks that they will come back changed, perhaps for the rest of their lives.
Overpaid? Any calculation yielding that result is a wrong one.
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Debt Commission Picks Up Steam
Administration and congressional leaders agreed this week on convening a debt commission that would make recommendations before the end of the year aimed at reducing the national debt.
Everyone agrees that reducing the national debt is a good thing. The issues being argued over are what things the commission should look at and the extent to which Congress would be required to create a special legislative process to consider commission recommendations.
The idea behind such a commission is that, because Congress is too fickle and subject to special-interest pressures to make any hard decisions to cut major spending programs, the country needs something on the order of a base reduction and closure (BRAC) commission whose recommendations Congress has little or no power to influence, but must consider on an up-or-down vote with limited time for debate and little or no opportunity to make any changes in commission proposals.
Budget hard-liners sneer at congressional inertia, and want to write severe limits on congressional debate and amendments into the law - making Congress vote on the package as recommended. Some proposals would require congressional action within a year to implement alternative cuts to save an equal amount of money if commission recommendations are voted down.
Most think Congress won't vote to give up that much power to a commission. But Congress has done similar things in the past, such as the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings initiative in the 1980s that would force across-the-board cuts if certain budget targets weren’t met. Such rules forced significantly disproportional COLA delays for the military community in the mid-1990s.
MOAA believes Congress will have to face up to action on geometrically rising deficits one way or another, and the coming baby boomer population will force some tax and benefit adjustments to accommodate the wave of baby boomers who will start becoming eligible for Medicare and Social Security in this decade.
But there are lots of extreme ideas out there on how to address such issues, and the fewer people there are on a commission and the more congress' powers to adjust any recommendations is limited, the higher the likelihood of grossly inappropriate outcomes.
MOAA believes voters must hold Congress accountable for addressing these extremely difficult budget challenges in the fairest and most effective way possible.
Appointing an independent panel to review the problems and come up with options for action is a time-tested way to examine serious national problems. Almost certainly, any such panel would come up with some reasonable options for action. But there's also no small potential, based on past experience, for extreme recommendations that inadequately account for competing needs.
MOAA believes strongly that citizens must hold their elected officials accountable to find the most reasonable solutions. Allowing them to abdicate their oversight responsibilities, and later claim that any disastrous outcomes weren’t their fault, but the responsibility of some independent, appointed commission, is not the way American government should work.
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MOAA Goals for Veterans
House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Bob Filner (D-CA) and Ranking Member Steve Buyer (R-IN) welcomed MOAA and other military and veterans groups Wednesday for a wide-ranging discussion on 2010 legislative priorities for veterans. MOAA Deputy Director Bob Norton, USA-Ret. testified for the Association.
More than a dozen legislators participated in the session.
MOAA-cited goals included:
- VA caregiver compensation and benefits legislation
- Readjustment of wounded warriors - 'seamless transition', with priority attention for veterans with PTSD/TBI, women veterans and those at risk of becoming homeless. A separate joint DoD-VA agency should be created to oversee multiple initiatives
- Overhaul of the VA claims system. MOAA recommends moving to a paperless, integrated system as quickly as possible to address a backlog expected to approach a million claims
- Survivors' benefits upgrades, including increased dependency and indemnity compensation (DIC), allowing DIC retention for survivors who remarry after age 55, and creating a housing allowance for survivors who use survivor educational benefits
- GI Bill Upgrades, including coverage for full-time National Guard servicemembers on state active duty orders, allowing NOAA and USPHS officers to transfer benefits to family members, and streamline the rate mechanism for the cost of attending a public college
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MOAA Pushes Medicare/TRICARE Fix
MOAA Deputy Director CAPT Kathy Beasley, USN-Ret., joined representatives from the AMA and AARP at a January 21 press conference calling on the Senate to reverse the impending 21-percent cut in Medicare and TRICARE payments to doctors.
Such large cuts would cause significant numbers of doctors to stop seeing elderly and military patients. Without Senate action, the cuts will go into effect on March 1.
"Access to health care is already the single biggest problem for military beneficiaries of all ages, and these cuts will make the problem worse," said Beasley. "The last thing troops in combat should have to worry about is whether their sick spouse or child can find a doctor to treat them."
Congress has suspended similar cuts each year for the last five years, and most recently delayed the cuts from January 1 to March 1.
But the law requires compounding annual cuts - so fixing the problem one year at a time only leads to even larger proposed cuts a year later.
MOAA supports a permanent solution to this problem, and we encourage all of our members to send a MOAA-suggested message in support of a permanent fix to this issue.
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Army Family Needs Cited
On January 15, Army Family Action Plan (AFAP) Conference delegates announced their top five new initiatives, narrowed down from more than 80. Their recommendations, in order, are:
1. Provide a monthly stipend to soldiers who do not qualify for traumatic injury insurance coverage (e.g., those with significant PTSD or traumatic brain injury) and are certified to need assistance from a non-medical caregiver.
2. Provide service dogs to help wounded warriors recover from wounds, injuries and illnesses, both physical and psychological.
3. Increase the number of readily available behavioral health providers and services, and increase the use of alternative methods of delivery such as tele-medicine.
4. Authorize Family Readiness Groups to fundraise in public places (current military regulations restrict such activities to National Guard armories, Reserve Centers and military installations).
5. Authorize Reserve Component soldiers to be enrolled in the Exceptional Family Member Program to be eligible for respite care and additional special educational needs. "The most important thing we can do to restore balance is to increase the time that a soldier has at home."
Army Chief of Staff General George W. Casey, Jr. who spoke to conference attendees. Secretary of the Army John McHugh also spoke at the conference.
The conference also cited the most significant deployment and family readiness challenges as:
1. High suicide rate.
2. Length of deployments.
3. Impact of deployment on children.
4. Duplicate programs.
5. Funding for family and deployment support programs.
Many AFAP recommendations are still pending from previous years. Conferees identified the most important of those as:
1. Military spouse unemployment compensation eligibility upon PCS.
2. Reserve Component post-mobilization counseling for one year for soldiers and famies.
3. Convicted sex offender registry needed for OCONUS.
4. Allow retroactive Traumatic Service Member Group Life Insurance for non-combat-caused conditions.
5. Authorize bereavement permissive TDY.
6. Medical coverage for college-age family members through age 25.
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