President Obama: Military Pay Raise FY2011& Individual Responsibility

President Obama's administration recently released its proposed military pay increase for fiscal year 2011. They have proposed an increase of 1.4% which, according to www.military.com, will be the lowest annual pay increase since 1973. If approved by Congress, civilian federal employees can expect an increase of 1.5%. This proposed pay increase is a slap in the face to our military. Less than 1% of our nation's populace has borne the brunt of our country's battle against Al-Quaida and Islamic fundamentalism and yet, they are now expected to endure slipping even further behind their civilian counterparts financial recompense. We all know that our land is traveling through troubled economic waters however; why should members of our military still work for income levels well below that of their peers in the civilian world? In my opinion, this pay raise proposal reflects our President's disdain for our military.

By now, an individual would have to be either deaf or blind for he or she to not realize that our President loves to spend a buck on those that he views as disenfranchised. It seems to me that his world view is ever hesitant to affix any responsibility for individual effort. Why does he refuse to demand that people take charge of their own lives? The word "disenfranchise" alleviates any sense of personal responsibility for a person's position in life. Whatever happened to our nation's ethos that the government provides all of us an equality of opportunity, and not equality of circumstance? The government will forever be unable to correct a person's plight. It can enforce laws protecting the equality of opportunity as guaranteed by our Constitution but, at the end of the day, it is the individual who will provide the energy to rise or fall in their personal endeavors.

The bizarre adventure of federal health care reform plods along and somehow, they are going to spend a fortune to "rescue" a small percentage of our nation's population from any personal responsibility to provide for their own basic human needs. When I juxtapose the proposed federal spending on health care reform to the 2011 military pay raise proposal, I come away with yet another confirmation of my opinion that this President and his cohorts in Congress are disconnected from our nation's heritage and seem intent on redesigning our country based on Europe's failed experiments in social democracy during the last three decades of the 1900s.

All is not lost. I am an optimist and I believe that contrary to what one may think, the people of this great land are paying attention to the feeble political vacillations emanating from Washington D.C. and are growing ever more irritated by the day and November 2010 will send shock waves from the Atlantic coastline to Hawaii. All of us just need to remain focused, and observe what is done and not done by our representatives and senators. Just as all of us are solely responsible for our actions, so must we expect nothing less from our politicians. All of us must live within our means, including our government and; the era of federal freebies is over!

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