Have you heard about the possible military pay freeze?

     Thanks to a wonderful invention of a thing called “Facebook”, it was brought to my attention that there is a presidential commission on deficit reduction and part of the proposal is to freeze military pay increases for the next three years. This would include housing allowance and sustenance allowance. When I read the article from Military.com about the commission to try and make heads or tails of this issue, I came to the following conclusion.

     I realize the senate put a freeze on the congressional pay raise for 2011 back in April. It was championed by Senator Harry Mitchell. However, that is a fraction of the answer. I was a sailor in the US Navy for nine years and I never went without a pay raise. While some of the members of congress have served in the military, those that haven’t have no clue what military life is like. So my solution is to average up the incomes of those the members of congress and the senate represent and make that their annual salary. No expense account, no military G-5 rides home, no pay increases unless your overall approval rating is above 50.1%. The same type of pay structure should go for the President except he would be rated on the national average and receive the average pay of the entire population of the United States. This plan would stop the over inflated salaries of a job that was originally volunteer work.

      The military should still get a pay raise because regardless of whether they are at home or in the war zone, they are called upon at a moment’s notice. They protect our freedoms and volunteer their time in various other manners. I don’t know of any regular paying job that you get paid the same whether you work 8 hours a day or 16 hours a day. Remember, cutting from the military is biting the hand that feeds. That same commission that wants to freeze military salaries probably makes enough to pay the 23 men and women I used to supervise in my last command.