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Washington
Post
Younger
military veterans are angered by budget cuts to their pension
benefits
By
Lori Montgomery
December
31
After
25 years of service, including a combat tour in Afghanistan, Lt. Col.
Stephen Preston retired from the Army and began collecting a pension
of nearly $55,000 a year. The money made it possible for Preston to
go back to college, get his MBA and embark on a second career in
corporate strategy.
So it
happened that Preston was sitting in his new office shortly before
Christmas when he heard on the radio that he had become the latest
target in Washington’s war on spending.
“I’m
not an angry man, but I was very, very angry,” Preston, 51, said in
a telephone interview from his home in Tampa. “This is a pact
between the greater population of the United States and the fraction
of people who served and sacrificed. If you didn’t want to pay us
what you promised us, then you probably shouldn’t have promised
it.”
The
plan to trim pension increases for working-age military retirees such
as Preston is by far the most controversial provision in a bipartisan
budget deal approved by Congress and signed last week by President
Obama.
The
cut is small — a one-percentage-point reduction in the annual
cost-of-living increase — but it has provoked outrage among
veterans, some of whom argue that the country is reneging on a solemn
pact. And even though lawmakers, especially in the GOP, fulminate
about the need to cut the cost of federal health and retirement
benefits, many have vowed to roll the cut back when Congress returns
to work next week.
The
authors of the budget deal, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan
(R-Wis.) and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray (D-Wash.),
have agreed to amend the provision to exempt disabled retirees and
survivors of those killed in action, eliminating roughly 10 percent
of the $6 billion in savings projected over the next decade.
But
Ryan has resisted efforts to abandon the pension cut entirely,
calling it a “modest” adjustment to a particularly generous
program — and therefore a more sensible choice than harder
decisions that may lie ahead…
Read
the rest of the article at the Washington Post
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