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.
This seems like blatant discrimination against partnered-but-unmarried servicemembers.
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.
They highly value commitment. To the nation, to your unit, and to your family.
Chaplains typically spend more of their time counseling and mentoring than on religious services.
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?
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.
A marriage license is for legally making your relationship "for realsies."
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
And yeah, my point is about the "separate but equal" sort of thing - it's not a legal distinction, but it's one people definitely care about.
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.
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;
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.
You honestly would have to have been in the military to really understand it.
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.
For others: I dunno why this is downvoted. The military actually does what he suggests.
They have a cheap caregiver ready for when their leg is amputated.