From your posts it seems that you may be a federal civilian employee likely embittered because your salary “scale” has been frozen for several years.
Someone up-thread said that federal civilian employees are also subject to the 1% reduction in Cost of Living increases in their pensions. I did some research and found out that is correct for a retirement system called “FERS”. However there is a MAJOR difference in how FERS came about for civilian employees compared to what’s happening now to military service members.
FERS was established in the mid-1980s but only applied to NEW federal employees hired in 1985 or later (apparently already employed civil service employees were also allowed to VOLUNTARILY move to FERS if they desired). Sweetening the deal for these FERS people was that the federal government would provide a free match (of up to 5% of salary each year) of the FERS employees contributions to their 401K plan. So the NEW (1985 & later) federal employees covered under FERS will shortly be completing the 30 years in a typical career and be eligible for retirement and will have 30 years of these 401K matching contributions to help compensate for the annual 1% reduction in their COLA increases.
I don’t think most of us would have a problem with this if the Ryan budget deal made the change only for new (i.e., entering active duty January 2014 or later) service members in a fashion similar to what was done for civilian employees and also offered those new service members some matching of their 401K contributions. But the Ryan budget didn’t do any of this—it willy-nilly covered ALL (future AND current) service members and all current military retirees who are under age 62. This shows how they think about service members relative to how they thought about civilian employees (such as Congress critters who are apparently covered under FERS).
Military retirement pay has not been “cut”.
There exists no entitlement to any specific increase in COLAs.
There have been several years where the COLA was 0, and a few that were in the 10-14% range.
And no, I am not now, nor have I ever been, paid by Uncle Sugar for anything outside of my two terms of voluntary military enlistment.