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1) Doesn't the US military have chaplains who could perform marriages? Why don't they? 2) What additional value does a married service member provide to the t

• lovich 8y ago
  for #2 id imagine that less likely to commit suicide would be the calculus the military came up with
  • dmckeon 8y ago
    I would have thought more likely to be making progress in additional training, remaining a stable member of the forces, and climbing the rank ladder, and less likely to be out getting into trouble of some kind (no, not every unmarried service-person, indeed).
    • fjsolwmv 8y ago
      Wouldn't it be more efficient to directly pay people for good behavior? Or, if climbing the rank ladder is more important, pay low rank people less instead of incentivizing them to give their money to someone else to create pressure to earn promotion.
      • sjg007 8y ago
        I'm pretty sure lower ranked soldiers make less than higher ranked ones.
      • watwut 8y ago
        They have up or out policy. For others: I dunno why this is downvoted. The military actually does what he suggests.
  • rbanffy 8y ago
    You obviously don't know my first wife. ;-)
• cimmanom 8y ago
  If the military member is overseas and the spouse is stuck in the US, the chaplain isn't much help.
• rayiner 8y ago
  Much more likely to have children, thus creating a generation of workers to pay future obligations of the nation (often incurred from military expenditures).
  • fjsolwmv 8y ago
    There won't be a new generation of workers to pay future obligations. Automation means people on average won't generate marginal value in excess of the cost to support them.
    • rbanffy 8y ago
      That's enlightened thinking beyond most governments on the planet. They'll just happily ignore it because it'll probably happen after they can conveniently retire.
    • rayiner 8y ago
      Citation very sorely needed. Even if it happens eventually, it’s highly unlikely to happen within the next generation.
• torstenvl 8y ago
  1) I don't understand the thought process behind this question. Having the title "chaplain" doesn't magically confer teleportation abilities. 2) This is the wrong frame of mind. The answer is zero. There is zero articulable additional benefit for a service member to be married. It is a worthwhile expense anyway.
  • simonh 8y ago
    Bilocation actually, but I'm with you.
  • fjsolwmv 8y ago
    Why is it a worthwhile expense?
    • mieseratte 8y ago
      It encourages folks to build families, which generally leads to folks having kids. Societies need workers, and militaries need future boots on the ground.
    • torstenvl 8y ago
      For the same reason maternity leave and other family-oriented benefits are worthwhile in the private sector: organizational performance requires expertise; expertise requires experience be retained in the organization; experience remaining in the organization requires that people not leave when life happens. The issue isn't that an individual married Marine is worth more than an individual unmarried Marine. The issue is that a Marine Corps where good Marines stay when they start a family is better than a Marine Corps where good Marines leave.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  • cascom 8y ago
    2) perhaps someone with some actual experience can shed some more light, but I think it might have to do with potentially losing on base housing accommodations that may not always be provided for married couples?
• jandrewrogers 8y ago
  The military encourages marriage because it is seen as having a stabilizing influence on young men. The expectation is that, on average, it is correlated with changes in behavior that improve reliability and performance while reducing the prevalence of risky behavior.
• DanBC 8y ago
  > What additional value does a married service member provide to the taxpayer that is worth an additional $40/day over what an unmarried service member provides? They have a cheap caregiver ready for when their leg is amputated.
• AviationAtom 8y ago
  Because far fewer people would join or remain in the military if marriage weren't allowed. You honestly would have to have been in the military to really understand it.
• drblast 8y ago
  2) A married service member gets extra housing allowance for dependents. Traditionally this was for a non-working spouse who lives at home and kids. More recently both people could be service members, first with women joining and then with gay marriage, so both service members get increased hosting allowance. The additional value that the taxpayer receives is that the spouses and kids of service members, who follow then around from duty station to duty station, aren't homeless, so that the service member can concentrate fully on the 16 hour work day for shit pay.
  • loeg 8y ago
    > The additional value that the taxpayer receives is that the spouses and kids of service members, who follow then around from duty station to duty station, aren't homeless, so that the service member can concentrate fully on the 16 hour work day for shit pay. The servicemember can have the partner and kids either way; what value is the marriage license specifically adding?
    • drblast 8y ago
      Not sure what you're asking; if you're against the idea of government being involved in declaring who is and who isn't married and defining special benefits for married people, then great, me too. Let's abolish marriage and in the cases of government employees either pay them enough to support a family or have a way to declare dependents, married or not. But we don't live in that world so a marriage license is the way to declare to the government "I have legal dependents now." This is part of the reason why the legality of gay marriage was a big deal. And regardless of what you call it, it's probably a good idea for the well-being of those in the military to pay for their dependents' housing. As a U.S. taxpayer you're pretty much getting a deal by underpaying those in the military who aren't married. It's not a place to go to get rich.
    • astura 8y ago
      If the servicemember, married or unmarried, has a child they will get the "with dependants" BAH pay. A marriage license is for legally making your relationship "for realsies."
• briandear 8y ago
  Retention. A trailing spouse often can’t easily work/find a job at new duty stations every few years, so married service members get paid additional to compensate for that. Being married to a servicemember is extremely tough — without that financial benefit, many married people would leave the service since the base pay is nowhere near enough to support a family not compensate for the difficulty faced by military families. That then creates a problem with retention — it is very expensive to train soldiers and very difficult to gain real world experience — so decreasing retention results in a far higher cost in both real dollars as well as readiness. We could ask ourselves instead why service members are vastly underpaid. The average salary/benefits for a US soldier works out to about $44,000 per year, exactly the same as a mailman. Yet a mailman works defined hours and, except for the occasional angry dog, doesn’t have a real risk of being severely injured or killed, nor separated from family for months or years at a time. The mailman also doesn’t suddenly get deployed to foreign hellholes for months or years. Yet, we pay the mailman as much as soldiers. When I was a lieutenant, my pay was $36,000 per year — that’s with a college degree and having been an E4 before that. That was officer pay and it is about the same level of pay as an entry level teacher. And we didn’t get summers off. I am not complaining — I knew what I signed up for, but asking questions such as what additional value a married soldier provides is interesting because do we question what extra value pregnant women provide a company? Because paid maternity leave is effectively paying them more money since they are getting paid to not work. Which means they get more compensation per unit worked than a woman who had not become pregnant. Should we question the additional value provided by offering paid maternity leave?
  • azernik 8y ago
    In a more general sense, sometimes the benefits provided to certain sub-populations aren't about any extra value those particular people bring to the job; they're about the extra costs those people have to pay to hold the job. Employers of all kinds want to have a broader labor market, so they pay commuter allowances (so they can hire people living farther away), parental leave (so they can hire and retain parents), and moving costs (so they can hire people who don't originally live in the area).
    • 8y ago
• rhizome 8y ago
  1) Marriage is a state function; there is no federal marriage license.
• drawnwren 8y ago
  Lots of uninformed responses here. 1) Yes, but Chaplains are strictly religious, not legal, entities. Further, they are employed by the federal government and would have no ability to marry even if there were some legal status. Marriage is a function of state governments. 2) It's important to keep in mind that military is a case where the free market is generally not at work. Servicemembers take long contracts that they can not negotiate their way out of and surrender all control of most of their lives. In exchange, the military generally takes responsibility for a standard of living on top of their salary. In Spc Lloyd Baker's case, he is probably assigned a barracks at his home base and hence not eligible for a housing allowance. Once he is married, the military recognizes his need to cohabitate with his wife and now pays him a Basic Allowance for Housing. Keep in mind, as a military spouse his wife will be unable to pursue most professional careers due to having to move with her husband at the beck and call of the military.
  • loeg 8y ago
    > Once he is married, the military recognizes his need to cohabitate with his wife This seems like blatant discrimination against partnered-but-unmarried servicemembers.
    • drawnwren 8y ago
      It is. Unfortunately, I don't think 'people in a casual relationship' are a protected class. It leads to interesting scenarios where service members will specifically marry each other so they can get the housing allowance. The Defense Language Institute (DLI) is called the Desperate Love Institute by service members because of its abnormally high marriage rate. Students at DLI get to move off base and away from the watchful eye of their training instructors if they have a spouse.
    • astura 8y ago
      Right because, frankly, that's the point of marriage, to legally declare "this is a permanent relationship and we are totally serious." If you don't wanna make the legal commitment to marriage, you don't get benefits of "committed relationship." The military isn't the only governmental or non-governmental organization to treat married partners different from unmarried partners. You'll be shocked to learn that you also can't collect spousal social security if you never married your girlfriend.
• DoreenMichele 8y ago
  2) What additional value does a married service member provide to the taxpayer that is worth an additional $40/day over what an unmarried service member provides? There are two answers here. The first is that being married means you get housing allowance instead of being expected to live in the barracks. You lose that housing allowance if you get into on base family housing. Either way, the military takes responsibility for making sure you are housed in a way that is not the norm for a civilian job. The second is that being in the military makes you property of Uncle Sam and the US government has long used this fact to encourage social outcomes it desires. This is part of why the GI Bill provided mortgage assistance and help going to college: Because it is a very effective means to promote home ownership and education which helps stabilize communities, build social capital, reduce crime etc. It works vastly better at furthering such goals than most of our welfare programs, in part because it is tied to specific outcomes and in part because character and honor are a big part of what you need to develop and prove you have to make it in the military. We do distinguish between "Honorably discharged" and "Dishonorably discharged."
• astura 8y ago
  1) If the two were in some sort of physical proximity to each other they would be able to go to City Hall during their lunch break to get married. The physical separation was the issue here. 2) A Servicemember doesn't become more valuable when she picks up playing tennis in her spare time. That doesn't mean we shouldn't spend money building and maintain tennis courts and other recreational facilities for the morale and welfare of servicemembers.
• dmckeon 8y ago
  Summary of some answers, with my thanks to respondents. 1) US states issue & register marriage licenses. Chaplains could officiate, but would usually expect both parties to be present. 2) Benefits to uniformed services & thus taxpayers: retention - less turnover & training costs; increases pool of available talent; stability, commitment, reliability; Benefits to service-people with dependent(s) (spouse, and/or children) paid an allowance (BAH) for off-base housing; family separation allowance if separated from dependent(s); health care & benefits for non-service spouse, children; less likely to be assigned less desirable duties/shifts; Detriments to married service-people impacts to non-service spouse's career due to relocations of service spouse; marriages of convenience to get benefits may have side-effects;
• diggernet 8y ago
  There are a lot of good answers to #2 already, but most talk about abstract benefits and don't directly address the purely fiscal nature of the question. So here you go: There is no additional $40/day cost to the taxpayer. For a single servicemember living on base, the taxpayer is paying for their housing (the building may be paid for, but has limited capacity and ongoing repair & maintenance costs), their food, their water, their power, their garbage collection, their cable tv, and on and on. While it would be a pretty dull life, it is possible in some facilities to have all your needs met with essentially $0 living expenses (depending on availability of things like non-coin-op laundry machines). When a servicemember moves off base, for example to live with their spouse, all those become out of pocket expenses. The housing allowance is simply an offset to what otherwise would be a pretty drastic cut in total compensation.