Navy SEAL who killed bin Laden left in poverty with no pension, healthcare or protect

[Warrior102]

Um, nowhere and at no time did anyone say that our military personnel is overpaid. It is the thugs and thieves that are defense contractoes that fleeced American taxpayers out of billions and billions of dollars. And they did it with the help of the Bush administration.

Still blaming Bush for your life's failures?

Get over is son.

 

[bucs90]

The military is not a lifetime welfare program. It is there to protect us from foreign threats. That is it. Just like cops protect us inside the borders. That SEAL, and all his teammates, are heroes. But what makes them heroes are that they did that job KNOWING that there are no riches, no lifetime pension. Sure, get rich writing a book. But the GOVT isn't gonna make them rich.

The cop who shot the Fort Hood shooter didn't get a huge financial reward either. In fact, if she quit today, she'd have no pension. Isn't she a hero also? Should she get a lifetime pension for that 1 heroic act? No. She, too, was a hero BEFORE that day, because she is willing to do that job, risk her life, knowing there is no pot of gold waiting.

 

[Katzndogz]

No. We didn't put Audie Murphy in the movies. Murphy made a decision to go into the movies and was lucky enough for that to work out for him. Nor are we forgetting this man. But the system applies to all military equally, not just to those who got into the spotlight. Now, if you want to improve those benefits I am all for it. Let's figure out what it will cost and raise taxes accordingly. Let's beef up the VA, increase the number of adjudicators, hire a lot more doctors, open up more hospitals. Sound good?

How about we don't raise taxes and cut off the welfare for those 6'3" ex cons who buffed up in the prison gym instead? We could also take money from programs that put shrimp on treadmills to see how fast they run. How about we CUT taxes and force the government to prioritize what funds they are left with? What's more important, the VA or NPR?

So you're desire to help ends at the point it costs you something. I guess we've forgotten the poor guy already.

Prioritizing financial expenditures is something everyone does every day. When you know you have to pay the rent, do you blow the rent money on dinner out? No. You pay the rent. obama's government doesn't correctly set its priorities. We are NOT helping veterans by studying the sex habits of prostitutes in China.

Would you end any of these government programs to help veterans?

#1 The U.S. government is spending $750,000 on a new soccer field for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.

#2 The Obama administration plans to spend between 16 and 20 million dollars helping students from Indonesia get master’s degrees.

#3 If you can believe it, the U.S. government has spent $175,587 “to determine if cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior”.

#4 The U.S. government spent $200,000 on “a tattoo removal program” in Mission Hills, California.

#5 The federal government has shelled out $3 million to researchers at the University of California at Irvine to fund their research on video games such as World of Warcraft. Wouldn’t we all love to have a “research job” like that?

#6 The Department of Health and Human Services plans to spend $500 million on a program that will, among other things, seek to solve the problem of 5-year-old children that “can’t sit still” in a kindergarten classroom.

#7 Fannie Mae is about to ask the federal government for another $4.6 billion bailout, and it will almost certainly get it.

#8 The federal government once spent 30 million dollars on a program that was designed to help Pakistani farmers produce more mangos.

#9 The U.S. Department of Agriculture once gave researchers at the University of New Hampshire $700,000 to study methane gas emissions from dairy cows.

#10 According to USA Today, 13 different government agencies “fund 209 different science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education programs — and 173 of those programs overlap with at least one other program.”

#11 A total of $615,000 was given to the University of California at Santa Cruz to digitize photos, T-shirts and concert tickets belonging to the Grateful Dead.

#12 China lends us more money than any other foreign nation, but that didn’t stop our government from spending 17.8 million dollars on social and environmental programs for China.

#13 The U.S. government once spent 2.6 million dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly.

#14 One professor at Stanford University was given $239,100 to study how Americans use the Internet to find love.

#15 The U.S. Postal Service spent $13,500 on a single dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.

#16 The National Science Foundation once spent $216,000 to study whether or not politicians “gain or lose support by taking ambiguous positions”.

#17 A total of $1.8 million was spent on a “museum of neon signs” in Las Vegas, Nevada.

#18 The federal government spends 25 billion dollars a year maintaining federal buildings that are either unused or totally vacant.

#19 U.S. farmers are given a total of $2 billion each year for not farming their land.

#20 The U.S. government handed one Tennessee library $5,000 for the purpose of hosting a series of video game parties.

#21 A few years ago the government spent $123,050 on a Mother’s Day Shrine in Grafton, West Virginia. It turns out that Grafton only has a population of a little more than 5,000 people.

#22 One professor at Dartmouth University was given $137,530 to create a “recession-themed” video game entitled “Layoff”.

#23 According to the Heritage Foundation, the U.S. military spent “$998,798 shipping two 19-cent washers from South Carolina to Texas and $293,451 sending an 89-cent washer from South Carolina to Florida”.

#24 The U.S. Department of Agriculture once shelled out $30,000 to a group of farmers to develop a tourist-friendly database of farms that host guests for overnight “haycations”.

#25 The National Institutes of Health paid researchers $400,000 to find out why gay men in Argentina engage in risky sexual behavior when they are drunk.

#26 The National Institutes of Health also once spent $442,340 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.

#27 The National Institutes of Health loves to spend our tax money on really bizarre things. The NIH once spent $800,000 in “stimulus funds” to study the impact of a “genital-washing program” on men in South Africa.

#28 According to the Washington Post, 1,271 different government organizations work on government programs related to counterterrorism and homeland security.

#29 The U.S. government spent $100,000 on a “Celebrity Chef Fruit Promotion Road Show in Indonesia”.

#30 The feds once gave Alaska Airlines $500,000 “to paint a Chinook salmon” on the side of a Boeing 737.

 

[High_Gravity]

I got my flu shot for free at the VA Hospital.

 

[g5000]

The military has been receiving some pretty healthy pay increases in the past decade. The military is paid far better now than when I served. Way better. Way, way, way better.

As was pointed out, you have to do 20 years to get a pension. But even that pension has been nibbled at over the past couple decades. You basically have to serve 22 years to get the same pension I got for serving 20.

And the medical benefits have been slowly eroded. My cost sharing has gone up, and now they are talking about increasing the premiums we have to pay.

But the way I look at it, we have a $16 trillion shit sandwich and everyone has to take a bite.


To get at what is going on with the particular Navy SEAL, a proposal has been floated in recent months in the military community that perhaps the military should be on a 401k-type program.

You have people who have served 20 years who have never been in combat who get a full pension, while you have guys like this SEAL who have been in combat but are not entitled to anything if they get out before serving 20 years.

With a 401k-style pension, the Navy SEAL would have a least something of a retirement nest egg after 10 years.

There are pluses and minuses to this. I think one of the minuses is that a lot of people are motivated to do the full 20 precisely because of the pension at the end. If there is no golden egg at the end of the 20 years, a lot of people would get out sooner, thus depriving the military of a lot of experience.

As a low paid military man, it used to pain me to know I could have been earning a much bigger paycheck on the outside, and the only thing that kept me going was a sense of actually accomplishing important things for the world, and that pension at the end.

When I finally arrived at the end, I felt like the world's biggest sucker, and frequently still do. I gave up a lot to serve, and it rarely feels like it was worth it.

 

[LilOlLady]

Navy SEAL who killed bin Laden left in poverty with no pension, healthcare or protection ? RT

Remember the speach Obama gave that he would stand by our heroes. Again, another lie from Obama


President Obama Honors Veterans - YouTube

Obama should give him a jobs personally for doing a job he signed up to do? He has not pension, no healthcare and whose problem it that? Rules and regulations that was in place when he signed up for the job. There is no hero pension. He want some special bonus payoff for doing his job? they are all heroes. Obama don't get a bonus for doing his job. Congress should take pay cuts like teachers who don't perform. They would be fired if they were teachers. He did not do it all by himself anyway.

 

[Mr. Peepers]

Still blaming Bush for your life's failures?

Get over is son.

Where in my post is there anything about my life? You RW's really, REALLY need to take a class on reading comprehension. And if you don't believe me, there are numerous credible resources on the interwebs exposing the no-bid contracts and fraud of defense contractors during the Iraq war. They aren't hard to find. Well, you're a RW'er, so I won't hold my breath. Oh, and I'm female.

 

[bucs90]

Um, nowhere and at no time did anyone say that our military personnel is overpaid. It is the thugs and thieves that are defense contractoes that fleeced American taxpayers out of billions and billions of dollars. And they did it with the help of the Bush administration.

Still blaming Bush for your life's failures?

Get over is son.

Is that you in your avatar? Haha....what a redneck.

 

[LilOlLady]

The military has been receiving some pretty healthy pay increases in the past decade. The military is paid far better now than when I served. Way better. Way, way, way better.

As was pointed out, you have to do 20 years to get a pension. But even that pension has been nibbled at over the past couple decades. You basically have to serve 22 years to get the same pension I got for serving 20.

And the medical benefits have been slowly eroded. My cost sharing has gone up, and now they are talking about increasing the premiums we have to pay.

But the way I look at it, we have a $16 trillion shit sandwich and everyone has to take a bite.


To get at what is going on with the particular Navy SEAL, a proposal has been floated in recent months in the military community that perhaps the military should be on a 401k-type program.

You have people who have served 20 years who have never been in combat who get a full pension, while you have guys like this SEAL who have been in combat but are not entitled to anything if they get out before serving 20 years.

With a 401k-style pension, the Navy SEAL would have a least something of a retirement nest egg after 10 years.

There are pluses and minuses to this. I think one of the minuses is that a lot of people are motivated to do the full 20 precisely because of the pension at the end. If there is no golden egg at the end of the 20 years, a lot of people would get out sooner, thus depriving the military of a lot of experience.

As a low paid military man, it used to pain me to know I could have been earning a much bigger paycheck on the outside, and the only thing that kept me going was a sense of actually accomplishing important things for the world, and that pension at the end.

When I finally arrived at the end, I felt like the world's biggest sucker, and frequently still do. I gave up a lot to serve, and it rarely feels like it was worth it.

If the right don't like the rules, then change them.

 

[Crackerjaxon]

My take on this is that it's a biased article slanted to make the government look bad. If he had lived up to his obligations to receive a pension, the government would've paid it.

 

[g5000]

The military has been receiving some pretty healthy pay increases in the past decade. The military is paid far better now than when I served. Way better. Way, way, way better.

As was pointed out, you have to do 20 years to get a pension. But even that pension has been nibbled at over the past couple decades. You basically have to serve 22 years to get the same pension I got for serving 20.

And the medical benefits have been slowly eroded. My cost sharing has gone up, and now they are talking about increasing the premiums we have to pay.

But the way I look at it, we have a $16 trillion shit sandwich and everyone has to take a bite.


To get at what is going on with the particular Navy SEAL, a proposal has been floated in recent months in the military community that perhaps the military should be on a 401k-type program.

You have people who have served 20 years who have never been in combat who get a full pension, while you have guys like this SEAL who have been in combat but are not entitled to anything if they get out before serving 20 years.

With a 401k-style pension, the Navy SEAL would have a least something of a retirement nest egg after 10 years.

There are pluses and minuses to this. I think one of the minuses is that a lot of people are motivated to do the full 20 precisely because of the pension at the end. If there is no golden egg at the end of the 20 years, a lot of people would get out sooner, thus depriving the military of a lot of experience.

As a low paid military man, it used to pain me to know I could have been earning a much bigger paycheck on the outside, and the only thing that kept me going was a sense of actually accomplishing important things for the world, and that pension at the end.

When I finally arrived at the end, I felt like the world's biggest sucker, and frequently still do. I gave up a lot to serve, and it rarely feels like it was worth it.

If the right don't like the rules, then change them.

It's easier to be ignorant and find a hero in bad straits and then blame Obama for a policy that has existed since before he was born, though. COME ON!!! We are not interested in truth or, God forbid, solutions. Are you crazy? That takes work. We just throw our poo and hope it sticks. Don't be expecting more than that.

Did someone say, "Obama"? Grab a handful and throw! Be a real American!

 

[Spoonman]

this is a very sad comentary on the state of our country

 

[LilOlLady]

Um, nowhere and at no time did anyone say that our military personnel is overpaid. It is the thugs and thieves that are defense contractoes that fleeced American taxpayers out of billions and billions of dollars. And they did it with the help of the Bush administration.

Still blaming Bush for your life's failures?

Get over is son.

Cheney's Halliburton and Black water and a thousand other contractors still taking tax payers hard earned money.

How many contractors are now serving on behalf of the U.S. government?

According to the most recent quarterly contractor census report issued by the U.S. Central Command, which includes both Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as 18 other countries stretching from Egypt to Kazakhstan, there were approximately 137,000 contractors working for the Pentagon in its region. There were 113,376 in Afghanistan and 7,336 in Iraq. Of that total, 40,110 were U.S. citizens, 50,560 were local hires, and 46,231 were from neither the U.S. not the country in which they were working.

Put simply, there are more contractors than U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Read more: Contractors in War Zones: Not Exactly ?Contracting? | TIME.com
Contractors in War Zones: Not Exactly ?Contracting? | TIME.com

Who is paying for this? Obama and he did not send them there. Bush did. Add this to Bush spending that carried over to Obama. Get your heads out of your asses so you can see the the light.

 

[whitehall]

Was the Seal forced out of the Navy 36 months before he could receive his retirement bennies? Who in their right mind would voluntarily leave the Service 3 years before retirement, especially in a highly motivated unit like the Seals? He needs to get a lawyer and sue for maybe PTSS disability retirement.

 

[Warrior102]

Cheney's Halliburton and Black water and a thousand other contractors still taking tax payers hard earned money.

Fine. I own Haliburton stock.

 

[Warrior102]

I got my flu shot for free at the VA Hospital.

I got mine free at CVS

 

[g5000]

Contractors bring the latest and greatest technology to the front. They also bring a force that is educated in the state of the art equipment.

Back in the beginning of my service days, we had shit that dated all the way back to WWII. The military's equipment was the oldest shit out there. The civilian sector was decades ahead of us.

When the paradigm was changed, and the contractor presence was increased, our equipment went from medieval to Star Trek. Shit you won't see for years, if you ever see it at all.


Yes, it comes with a much bigger price tag. Much bigger. But we get a force that is light years ahead of the opposition. When the US military comes to battle, the bad guys don't even know what hit them. It's a very one-sided fight, and that's just fine with me.

There were times I actually felt sorry for the bad guys. Poor bastards brought a rock to a laser guided missile fight.

 

[LilOlLady]

Department of Defense Contractors in
Afghanistan and Iraq: Background and
Analysis

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R40764.pdf

Add this to the debt.

 

[LilOlLady]

Was the Seal forced out of the Navy 36 months before he could receive his retirement bennies? Who in their right mind would voluntarily leave the Service 3 years before retirement, especially in a highly motivated unit like the Seals? He needs to get a lawyer and sue for maybe PTSS disability retirement.

Taking more of the hard working tax payer money? He resigned. Get the **** over your self, man.

 

[LilOlLady]

I got my flu shot for free at the VA Hospital.

I got mine free at CVS

You did not get it free, You paid for it without even knowing it.