You do know there exists a statutory provision for NO negative COLA, for anyone, including the military, right?
There have been several years when COLA was 0.
There were a few years it was as high 10-14%.
If you did not retire at exactly 20 years, you worked each year thereafter, needlessly, for 50% of the income you were already fully entitled to receive.
Before you castigate me for my differing views of this “outrage”, you should know I am a USAF veteran, with two honorable DD214s.(I had a break in service, and volunteered for a total of two 4 year enlistments)
That said, if you are as smart as you think you are, you already knew Uncle Sugar was going to break up with you as soon as possible.
Pity the poor civilians who are still working now, and seeing negative results in their actual working wage incomes,(No COLAs for us) and still they(we) are forced to keep paying for Uncle Sugars schemes.
I'm older, and now qualify for the over 55 senior discount rates.
As a member of the “baby boomer” generation, albeit the tail end...I can tell you the reckoning is coming, on schedule.
And you complain about a 1% reduction in an unearned and a never guaranteed annual retirement pay raise formula?Are you sure you are a conservative?
Assuming retiring at 40, 1% each year until 62 means a military retirement check will be worth approximately 22% less. Even this, I could accept if it was part of a massive reduction, but it is not. Effectively, other than the pension cuts, we are continuing down the same road of deficit spending that will bankrupt our nation.
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).