$11 per week raise vs. $277,000 per ballgame

A reader charged me the other day with comparing apples and tennis balls. I prefer to think of it as an imaginative mind making profound connections between two seemingly unrelated phenomena. But that’s just me.

So let’s compare pay and what people are worth, an absurd debate if there ever was one, based on two stories this week.

A member of Congress, Rep. Susan Davis (D-Calif.), has made a connection about two halves of the same apple. She’s worried the 2.1 percent pay increase for uniformed armed services members, if it becomes law, would have to be paid for with money from military readiness accounts. Davis was off in her arithmetic. An E-4 specialist or corporal, who earns $24,000 per year for the first two years, would have $42 a month more, not $11. Maybe she meant $11 a week. Regardless, not enough to cover payments on a new F-150 Lariat. $42 is about the price of a box of 148 Pampers Swaddlers with wetness indicator. If you invested the $42 each month for two years, and could guarantee a 3 percent return, eventually you’d have … not very much.

But Davis has a point. She said, presumably quoting an authority like the Congressional Budget Office, the raise would cost the military $330 million in 2017. And wonders where it would come from.

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