Military used to be a plumb deal, growing up I knew families where mom and dad were both in the National Guard, they did their one weekend a month, and easily doubled their income. But then the first Iraq war happened, and they started deploying the National Guard, and suddenly kids were left alone with both parents in active war zones, and that killed the deal.
The claim here is that the military families are /so much more stable/ that it explains their kids (collectively) performing better than every other state in the country.
Obviously the military provides some sort of economic lower bound. But it also applies a pretty harsh upper bound, and has all sorts of other effects that you would expect to push the mean down.
Grew up lower class, and am now comfortably making 120k a year. Family and extended family is all still lower class. The military gave me structure, discipline, and then a GI bill. Only catch was to survive a deployment in 07. But yeah, my case is not unique, and most the people I served with are doing well now compared to where they would have been without it.
What a terrible smear on everyone actually in the military for reasons other than the money. 4 people in my extended family are in the military and 1 was turned down becuase he has a titanium screw from a sports injury. All of them make less money than they would have if they didn't join the military, but all joined anyway.
On the other hand, I've never actually met anyone who was in the military for money except for those in the ROTC - i.e. those capable of getting a college education that would put them in the segment of the population with lower unemployment than average.
It would be interesting to see how many of the remaining 23% are in the slice of society where a military career makes financial sense. When I joined the Army I was going from having been fired from McD's last month to making $1K a month with food and shelter taken care of. That made sense at the time. My kid is plenty skinny, mentally stable, and drug free, but he's also a successful college student and budding entrepreneur, so he's not going to be wearing a uniform unless we go full WW3 conscription.
Not a bad point. Military service is actually one of the most reliable paths for upwards economic mobility, and it is absolutely not tied to any natural demand or market. In practice it does serve a welfare-like function, albeit inefficiently.
And, again, personal expenses go down to almost zilch while living on-base.
My mom's boyfriend is in the National Guard. Every few years, he gets activated and deployed somewhere for a year or two. Every time he comes back, he takes the money he saved by not having to pay for anything for a year and buys himself an expensive new car. Last time, he bought a Dodge Challenger SRT8.
Retention. A trailing spouse often can’t easily work/find a job at new duty stations every few years, so married service members get paid additional to compensate for that. Being married to a servicemember is extremely tough — without that financial benefit, many married people would leave the service since the base pay is nowhere near enough to support a family not compensate for the difficulty faced by military families. That then creates a problem with retention — it is very expensive to train soldiers and very difficult to gain real world experience — so decreasing retention results in a far higher cost in both real dollars as well as readiness.
We could ask ourselves instead why service members are vastly underpaid. The average salary/benefits for a US soldier works out to about $44,000 per year, exactly the same as a mailman. Yet a mailman works defined hours and, except for the occasional angry dog, doesn’t have a real risk of being severely injured or killed, nor separated from family for months or years at a time. The mailman also doesn’t suddenly get deployed to foreign hellholes for months or years. Yet, we pay the mailman as much as soldiers. When I was a lieutenant, my pay was $36,000 per year — that’s with a college degree and having been an E4 before that. That was officer pay and it is about the same level of pay as an entry level teacher. And we didn’t get summers off. I am not complaining — I knew what I signed up for, but asking questions such as what additional value a married soldier provides is interesting because do we question what extra value pregnant women provide a company? Because paid maternity leave is effectively paying them more money since they are getting paid to not work. Which means they get more compensation per unit worked than a woman who had not become pregnant. Should we question the additional value provided by offering paid maternity leave?
Army vet here! This is GREAT for a couple of reasons:
1. Moving around made building a career an impossibility for my brilliant wife, because military bases are typically situated a ways away from major economic zones.
2. This will improve retention because there is a lot of pressure on the (relatively underpaid) service member to make ends meet, especially when the best your spouse can do is like, become a realtor.
3. Great for employers. IMO (and you can fight me on this one) military families embrace duty, leadership, and hard work. If you can hire a vet or their spouse, you're going to get more out of them.
4. Great for military bases/areas which are typically economically depressed.
5. Great for family life. When I was in I was deployed for almost half of our marriage. That was really tough on my wife with nothing to do. A lot of spouses can't handle that, get into trouble, put undue pressure on the marriage, etc. For those of you who've ever been in an FRG you know what I'm talking about ;)
The national guard requires less intense long term commitment and let's you pick your school. It may not cover everything(you still qualify for parts of the GI bill)[0] but a couple weekends a month is generally much easier for most to agree with.
My dad, career Air Force, was once given the job of coaching the privates on the Air Force base. It seems that about 50% of them were unable to pay their bills, which caused friction between the base commander and the local merchants.
The privates were all paid the same, every two weeks.
Half were able to pay their bills and did well. The other half would spend their paychecks as fast as possible, and would run out of money after 1 week. The 2nd week was spent begging, borrowing, and in general being a deadbeat.
My dad would sit down with them, go over their spending, and prepare budgets for them. Literally none of them were able to adhere to those budgets.
I'm in the national guard, and have numerous friends who joined the military right out of high school and been able to make a great living. Serve 20+ and get a pension, healthcare, and you're set--something few jobs in the private sector even offer. Sure you wont be making millions of bucks, but you have a nice steady income.
My daughter is going into the Air Force, getting her degree at night for nothing in 2.5 years, going back in as an officer, effectively doubling her income all the while not paying for food, lodging, medical/dental. She plans on doing 20. She'll likely marry an Air Force officer, and two people retiring at 39/40 YO will have a combined retirement of just under 100k (today's money), all the while not wasting precious money on medical/dental. She'll be young enough to have a second career in her chosen field and if the legislators don't screw up SS, she'll have three retirement incomes.
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