It's Tommy This and Tommy That...

I spent a major portion of my adult life in the nation's livery and serving on foreign shores. I truly loved the life. But during my tenure I experienced some fiddling and broken promises. I weathered the storms, but kept the memories.

During the Carter years we experienced three consecutive years of freeze on our pay and allowances. There were no cost-of-living increases and in a period in which inflation soared to nearly 20% that made a difference in what went in the pot. Most of that time was spent living in Europe and that meant dealing not only with US inflation but also with erosion of the exchange rate so that as months went by the rent inexorably crept upward as the dollar slumped. In a valuable illustration of the impact of a President on the situation we saw a restoration of our pay to comparability within a few months of Ronald Reagan taking office and a nearly 40% jump in the dollar to Deutschmark exchange rate.

There were proposals to drastically revise the retirement system and they thankfully were defeated but not without a shift from retirement based on pay at the end of career to a pay based on top three years of pay--a not insignificant reduction. And, few people are unaware of the vacated promise of lifetime free healthcare for retirees. Tricare premiums and Medicare payments weren't supposed to be part of the guarantees.

Regardless, all things considered it was a good life. We always knew we would get paid. There might be some finagling like moving a payday from end of the month to first to float an entire payroll month into a new fiscal year. We still always got paid.

No Cash in Pentagon Accounts Soon

Now with combat troops fighting in two incredibly difficult theaters we've got an administration that plays games like "deeming" a budget passed without a budget. We've got posturing and sound-biting as we recess to allow the pols to visit their district and lie to the voters yet we don't have authorizations for the military.

The SecDef has not been remiss in letting the Congress know the situation well before the critical point, but the leadership refuses to act. When the few responsible representatives try to clean some pork out, the President threatens to veto the slimmer bill. At the end of the day we apparently are facing a situation in which warriors in battle are going to be fighting for free as their families go without with an empty checking account.

The priority appears to be a continuation of the dispensing of bread and circuses to the core support of the administration.

You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!