"Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) wants to look tough on budget issues. In an editorial published in USA Today explaining his decision to lead the passage of a budget that reduced vested veteran pensions by an average of $84,000 to $120,000, Mr. Ryan founded his message on the urgent need to "do the right thing." In doing so, he created a painful irony; Ryan's budget seeks to save $6B over the next 10 years – equivalent to less than six-tenths of one percent of projected federal spending over that period — by extracting it from compensation already guaranteed to people who earned it risking their lives and defending their country. In other words, despite his assurances to the contrary, he wants to do exactly the wrong thing.
The military and veteran population stand in awe at Ryan's explanation. He apparently believes we are not only naive enough not to overlook the gaping moral maw between his words and actions, but also dumb enough not to see this for what it is: just the beginning. If he can decouple vested veteran pensions from inflation while we still have people dying in combat, there will be nothing to stop him from continually enlarging the legitimacy of promise-breaking until veterans wake up one day and realize the pension package they're getting bears no resemblance to what they and their families earned.
Ryan presents a classic false dilemma. He wants us to believe the nation must choose between keeping promises to veterans and remaining secure. He admonishes us that "since 2001, excluding the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the cost per service member in the active-duty force has risen by 41% in inflation-adjusted dollars." What he doesn't mention is that when the $6T eventual price tag of those wars is counted, personnel costs will define a tiny percentage of their total price tag, despite the fact that any success we register from those conflicts will have been wholly earned not by machines, but by the people who fought and died to carry out the nation's will. Paying people isn't something we do instead of staying secure as a nation . . . it's the very way we stay secure. People win wars, not machines, bureaucracies, or defense contractors."
No comments:
Post a Comment