Yet another way for people to support people who don't need it.

Click this.

Provide diapers to military families in need. ARE YOU HIGH?!! How long is it going to take the nation to realize that the military is better off than most of the non-military people out there, and that IF a military family is "in need", it's probably because they were stupid with their money (this is incredibly common, rampant, even), and is that really the kind of thing we should be rewarding? No. No it's not.

I also would like you to click here<--- THAT, my friends, is a military pay chart for all enlisted ranks. This is just base pay. It does not count housing allowance, which every soldier with dependents receives. It also does not include food allowance, which again, every soldier who doesn't carry a meal card, receives. Food allowance tacks on an extra $300 a month, and housing allowance varies by location and rank, but let's call it an even $1000, just to be conservative. So each number in that chart, add $1300 (tax free) to it, and you've got what those people are actually taking home in a month.

Sure, for some of the lower ranks, it doesn't seem like much, but when you consider the credentials of the people filling those ranks, you see that it's actually a lot better than they'd do anywhere else. Like, an E1, the lowest of the low, a rank nobody stays in for more than 6 months (no, really, they automatically get promoted after 6 months of service) is bringing home a good $2700 a month. When you consider that your average E1 is about 18 years old, without a single day of college, sometimes a GED instead of a diploma, and not always the best scores on the aptitude tests, that's pretty good pay. Again, that's also only for the first 6 months. After that, it only goes up.

Now, add to this, that a lot of soldiers don't even get married until they hit about E3 or E4 (Thak was an E5 when we got married), and most don't have kids until after they're married. I'd say the majority of births are to people in ranks E3 through E6 and on the Officer side, Lieutenants and Captains. So you figure what these people are actually making. They're hardly destitute.

But circumstances! Those could screw up finances! What if there was an illness in the family?! There's this magical thing called Tricare. It's free medical, what the rest of the nation wishes they had. The military has it, and bitches about it nonstop. You can get as sick as you want, and you won't pay a dime for your care. With other emergencies, Uncle Sam is the owner of 1000 safety nets. Soldiers really don't have to pay for much that comes up.

I maintain that any soldier who is "in need", got there by their own stupidity. I can say this from experience. Our financial situation used to be ridiculous because Thak was paying a crazy amount of alimony to his ex-wife. That was due to his own stupidity. What kind of fool marries someone they'd only known a couple months? Thak, at age 25, that's who. He'll tell you it was stupid. He tells everybody not to do stuff like that because of how stupid it was, and how much it screwed things up for him, and for us, for years. It's stuff like that, which lands soldiers in a bad financial situation, NOT the fact that they're not paid enough.

Of course, if you want to donate to things that give free stuff to military people, that's fine. It's your money, your choice, a free country, and all that other jazz. I'm just telling you, the people you're donating to are probably making more in a year than you are. Isn't that crazy to think about?