VETERANS PENSIONS…PROMISES NEVER INTENDED TO BE KEPT
(…and Congressional chiseling and welching on its deals with them)

Congress has rarely ever kept its promises with veterans. Even as far back as the Revolutionary War, and George Rogers Clark, it was chiseling and welching on its deals with them, making promises it never intended to keep.

After WWI, the bonus it had promised its veterans (one dollar for every day served), was refused. Faced with some 50,000 veterans and their families, camping out on the Mall in Washington, in protest to that, Congress’s response to such a display of legitimate grievance, was to call out a force of infantry bayonets and cavalry to drive them out of town (the commander of that glorious exercise being none other than a then colonel named … Douglas MacArthur).

So it is doing it yet again today, claiming it can’t afford to pay for the scale and level of pensions for those who voluntarily serve twenty years or more. Really? Did it not foresee that if it opted for an all-volunteer military establishment that, ultimately, there would have to be pensions for it?

What we have here folks is just one more sorry chapter in the tale of a national institution… with no honor. And it has become even more so since we, the dumbass taxpaying voters, have allowed it to become an all-volunteer caste of career politicos with an overriding self-interest in feeding at the trough of “public service” for as long as they can, with no limits on how many terms they can do so.

If Congress is so concerned about paying for such veterans pensions, why is it none of its members has even considered the option of reducing, if not eliminating altogether, its own…pensions…to help pay for it? After all, they aren’t the ones that were sent into harm’s way (…unless having to spend time on comfortable seats and in plush offices is considered hazardous).

Yes, Congress supports our troops…but only if they come home in a flag-draped box.

CENTURION