When Johnny Comes Marching Home
When their tours are finished in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, and they’re back home after being honorably discharged from the armed forces, the troops of today are going to face the shock and awe of tomorrow:
1. Limited if any employment opportunities.
2. Should they find employment, lower pay than they had been led to expect for the skill sets they’ve acquired.
3. Less credit to get themselves and their families up and running.
4. A large dose of the personal and family strife that’s an inevitable result of struggling to make ends meet.
5. Less of a government support system, whether on the federal, state, or local level, as massive decreases in tax revenues cause cutbacks in what used to be considered essential services.
Politicians used to admonish anti-war protesters with the retort that the soldiers overseas were fighting to protect the right of those same protesters to voice their dissent.
This time around, the troops fought for the hedge fund managers and their right to greedily abuse the system. They fought for the politicians and their right to build bridges to nowhere. They fought to maintain the Treasury’s right to devalue the few dollars GI Joe and Jane have in their pockets.
Soldiers of misfortune.
Re-enlistments may rise as soon as those awaiting discharge realize that the easiest way to assure 3 squares a day and a warm cot is to put their lives on the line on a regular basis.
6 Comments
Leave a Response
Additional comments powered by BackType
How could these hard-working, well-trained men and women be meaningfully employed rebuilding our country? Is that a solution?
it would be if there were gov’t funds to pay for it, but tax revenues are way down and we’re busy printing money to prop up the banks and insurance companies. priorities that reflect poorly on us and the regime we elected.
Civilians go into service, civilians go out of service.
The survivors will lick their wounds, move on, and know that civilians really don’t know shit.
i hope you’re right, but it’s not necessarily a matter of resilience, of which i’m sure the vets have truckloads of. it’s the resistance that resilience is going to meet when it runs headlong into a severe economic slowdown, at which point everyone who supported the troops is going to be hunkered down in an i-me-mine mentality.
stay in touch. LK
The statement “i support the troops but don’t support the war” is self deception at best. Come on, which is it?
It’s hard for me to read things like this.
The recent financial fallout had just as much to do with bad policy (see the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and all of its revisions) as it did with greed.
Greed will always be around in business. In fact, without greed, there really wouldn’t be business. If we didn’t constantly search for ways to get more for less, business and specialization would never have come about. Greed is a given, and it always has been. So what changed?
The Community Reinvestment Act. It was supposed to stop banks from redlining minorities. Unfortunately, as with all laws, side effects came about. It forced banks to approve sub-prime loans. I trust all of you can read, so I’ll let you take that from there.
Now, obviously, this put us in some trouble. Loans defaulted, hedge funds and short selling and Fannie Mae and housing bubbles, oh my! Most of these banks had their hedge funds to offset the possible default in loans. Everyone has read the news, so I won’t waste time.
The economy takes a huge hit. What do our lovely politicians in control do? They decide to vote on whether or not to bail out the companies that failed in the market.
They voted against it.
Special interest groups helped to revise it.
Then, it passed through the Congress.
All the while, people sit here and only blame George W. Bush (he is only part of the problem). Why? I mean, honestly, why? Didn’t the people in Congress have just as much to do with it? We let the same party stay in control there.
Then we talk about a “regime change.” Well, I have news for you! We kept the same party in power in the most powerful portion of our government! These are the same people that:
Gave us the Community Reinvestment Act.
Officially sent us to war against terror.
Approved a bailout that involved our money.
So, you want this same government to help out the veterans? Currently, the government is putting them in the same situation as any other citizen. Everyone is affected.
What can we do to help?
We could start by lowering taxes on businesses and corporations, which would allow them to employ more workers. But, then again, that would destroy all the wonderful entitlement programs we have.
We could get rid of some of the entitlement programs that account for a huge portion of our tax dollar. That would help out tremendously, since we have an implicit tax rate of approximately 50%.
There are a number of things we could do that involve making the government smaller. It wouldn’t just help the soldiers; it would help everyone.
Why would you trust the same people that got you into this mess (and keep getting you into these messes) to get you out?