By Tom Philpott in the Honolulu advertiser
Talk about lousy timing. With President Bush's popularity scraping bottom in opinion polls, with U.S. casualties rising in Iraq in a force surge that has stretched tours to 15 months, the Bush administration has said it "strongly opposes" key military pay and benefit gains tossed into the fiscal 2008 defense bill.
There's more ...
For the hell of it, here are the annual inflation figures for the last few years:
1996 - 2.93
1997 - 2.34
1998 - 1.55
1999 - 2.19
2000 - 3.38
2001 - 2.83
2002 - 1.59
2003 - 2.27
2004 - 2.68
2005 - 3.39
2006 - 3.24
2007 - 2.54 (average to date as of June)
You can see that a 3.5% increase is totally unreasonable. When was the last time they gort a raise? In the meantime, doubling up on their duty obligations is OK, right?
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