Returning Iraq Vets Spending Big
The Christian Science Monitor has a page 1 feature today on soldiers coming back from Iraq with money to burn.
While deployed to war zones, soldiers can build up a small fortune. For each month in Iraq and Afghanistan, they receive $225 of hazard pay and $100 of hardship-duty pay. Those in the most dangerous jobs can get an additional $150 a month in hazardous-duty incentive pay, while soldiers with families can apply for a $250-a-month Family Separation Allowance. Reenlistment bonuses range from $10,000 to $40,000. All this money, as well as their wartime salary, is tax-free.
That’s a welcome change. When I was in Desert Storm, the enlisted troops got paid tax free but officers only got the first $150 a month, a figure that hadn’t changed since Vietnam, exempted. Indeed, most of us wound up having to write a big check come tax time since there was no withholding.
Free-spending soldiers have always been a part of the Army, both after wars and in peacetime. “There has been a longstanding problem of soldiers buying expensive stereos, motorcycles, and muscle cars (and frequently going into debt),” writes David Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland in College Park, in an e-mail.
Soldiers are no different in that regard than other young men getting their first real paychecks. And, certainly, these men have earned the right to splurge.
It’s about damn time that our military is treated properly!!!
And, according to this sociologist, this is a problem? How?