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 taxpayer that is worth an additional
$40/day over what an unmarried service member provides?
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.
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.
The military takes a binary approach to this. You are married, or you are not. If you are married they will do their best to accommodate the spouse (joint assignments, married housing, healthcare, etc). If you are not married, you get none of that.
They highly value commitment. To the nation, to your unit, and to your family.
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.
Why do we even have chaplains? Does every country have them? People have different religions or many of them no religious views, and there is often tension between these different groups.
The First Amendment. The Free Exercise Clause requires Congress to make religion available to all servicemembers regardless of where they are stationed if one of their denomination is not available. Courts have found that not providing that opportunity for religious guidance would be prohibiting the servicemember's free exercise of religion.
Chaplains typically spend more of their time counseling and mentoring than on religious services.
Did you have to do any paperwork with someone else or at a courthouse? I think you're confusing officiating a marriage ceremony, which chaplains can definitely do, and legally marrying two people, which chaplains can not do.
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.
> 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?
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.
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?
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).
You should go post this in the thread from the other day where a lot of people thought it was a great idea to discriminate against employees who have children.
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.
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."
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.
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.
People do make career choices based on whether they'll be able to have a family and support them. I can't imagine how the military would have the same talent pool to draw from if there weren't measures to make having a family more conceivable.
Afaik, there is some benefit in soldiers being married - soldiers with families suicide less. Apparently, it helps to have something you value at home to keep yourself together in difficult active duty situation.
> 2) This is the wrong frame of mind. The answer is zero.
What? That doesn't make sense. At a glance, otherwise, what's the point of marriage versus civil unions? I'm assuming here, and could be wrong, that there's no legal difference - but people still fight for marriage when they can only have civil unions.
Even if you got rid of all the legal and pay advantages to marriage, people still find it valuable and enriching. It may be an ephemeral benefit, but it's still articulable.
> what's the point of marriage versus civil unions? I'm assuming here, and could be wrong, that there's no legal difference
Yep, there are/where legal distinctions (sort of irrelevant now in the US with federalized same-sex marriage). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_union#United_States . The main problem is that unlike marriages, there is no requirement that states recognize civil unions granted in other states, because:
> The federal government does not recognize these unions.
Not a direct legal distinction, but:
> Civil unions are commonly criticised as being 'separate but equal', critics say they segregate same-sex couples by forcing them to use a separate institution.
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?
Yes, the increased pay is accounted for in the extra housing allowance. Those who live on base give up the housing allowance. If there are no accommodations on base you might have to rent in town, or you can choose to do so depending on rank. Typically there are waiting lists for base housing, but that depends on location.
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.
It encourages folks to build families, which generally leads to folks having kids. Societies need workers, and militaries need future boots on the ground.
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;
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.
Much more likely to have children, thus creating a generation of workers to pay future obligations of the nation (often incurred from military expenditures).
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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?