A proposal

I got in another argument with a libertarian today about bringing back the draft. I won't bother to recount the details, as it was the same old same old.

I did hit on an idea, though. Forget the draft - why not raise military pay really high? Like, say, $100k to start or so, or roughly about what the most high-paid college graduates get to start. It'd achieve the liberal goal of broadening the responsiblity of defending the nation across a broad, representative cross-section of the population, instead of imposing it strictly on the lower middle class and poor.

According to this PDF, the 1.2 million enlisted soldiers get about $37,000 right now, so it'd cost about $100 billion a year to give them all a $100k raise, or a one-time increase of about 20% in the Pentagon budget. Not sure about officer salries, but there's no where near as many of them, so it'd wouldn't be much.

Sounds like a good deal to me.
- posted by Jason @ 1:06 AM