3.5% raises are a near certainty
By Tom Philpott
The Senate Armed Services Committee practically assured military personnel a 3.5 percent pay raise in January by including that figure in the fiscal 2008 defense authorization bill it approved last month.
The House of Representatives already had voted to give the military a 3.5 percent pay raise next year, which is a half percentage point higher than proposed by the Bush administration.
After the House vote, the White House's Office of Management and Budget said the bigger pay raise was "unnecessary" and urged congressional leaders to instead back a 3 percent increase, which would match recent wage growth in the private sector.
Senate Republicans ignored the White House pleading and joined with Democrats in supporting the bigger raise. It now appears likely that 2008 will be the ninth consecutive year of military raises set at least 0.5 percent above private-sector wage growth as measured by the government's Employment Cost Index, or ECI.
The House voted to sustain this string of ECI-plus-a-half-percentage-point military raises through 2012, long enough nearly to wipe out a perceived pay gap with the private sector. The Senate committee's bill deals only with the 2008 raise. Any differences in the bills will be ironed out by a House-Senate conference later this summer.
Here are some additional details from Senate committee bill:
This change, at first glance, looks like a boon to career reservists mobilized for Iraq and Afghanistan. But the committee could find no money to apply this change retroactively to deployments since the 9/11 attacks. This change, therefore, only would lower retirement age for reserve and National Guard personnel mobilized after the date the bill is signed.
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