Making Promises Hard to Keep

FOR THE MOST PART, when the United States government hires people to work in its massive bureaucracies, civil services and such, and recruits people for military service, it faces a great deal of competition. Competition from a frequently vigorous, robust, and highly competitive private economic sector. Because of this, the government must offer a great deal to lure participants. And this is exactly what it does. Currently, one half of the military budget is targeted for services to retired veterans. Medical services and pensions, and education opportunities such as the G I bill, primarily. One half. One half of paying for the defense of our country is paid to people who no longer defend it, and quite likely never did much to defend it while on active duty, but instead spent their time in the military training....eternally training. This is not a sustainable situation, according to top military brass, and according to common sense. The ancient truth adheres; it is far easier to make promises than to keep them. All across the land of the free cities and states are confronting essentially the same problem; paying pensions to retirees is bankrupting them. The same is true at the state level. Promises are easy to make, hard to keep. Anyone who is married already realizes this, naturally. There are two obvious choices for solutions. Either we must stop making such grand promises, or, we must stop keeping them. Or both. A member of my own family, one of my siblings, enlisted in the military right out of college, and spent three years in the army. then, she transitionede smoothly into the federal civil service, from which she retired at the age of fifty fifty. No 401K for her; a full lifetime pension. Hell, she'll probaly live to be ninety, like her mother. that's forty years of full retirement pension, for thirty years of work. Its insane. At the current rate, this sibling of mine will never see gevernment money beyond her seventy fifth birthday. Neither will anybody else. All this, before even mentioning the problems associated with the solvency of social security, medicare, and medicaid. When the social security system went into effect in 1935, there were something like thirty people working and paying into the system for every person still working. Now the ratio is less than three to one, and shrinking. The United States is a nation in which millions upon millions of people will be expecting to recieve benefits simultaneously, with but few people working to generate the national wealth necessary to do this. Can we say "means testing"?