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this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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The US military is quite comfortably middle class in background and enjoys robust welfare benefits along with being housed in literal gated communities with some of the best public works infrastructure in the country
The US army has rich and middle class members, and also lures in people who come from poverty. The first two are borderline unreachable, the others are desperate for money or safety. Massive gulf in individual interests. Those ones in particular need to be carefully guided away from enlisting with better alternatives. We're literally just talking about Dual Power here. No more paragraphs or grandstanding needed. It's literally that simple. A low percentage doesn't mean a group of physical beings does not exist, Hexbear.
This is me addressing the entire thread because it's useless to participate in this a hundredth time.
i guess i was biased. i don't know how reliable this source is but it states that in the past it was true that poor income neighbourhoods were responsible for the majority of the military but it's been changing gradually in the last decades.
I know that Native Americans were the largest racial group to join the US military by percentage of their population. Not sure if that's still the case but most of it was due to poverty and those living on reservations not having much opportunities anywhere else.
A lot of people enlist due to lack of opportunity. I think the difference is once you join, you do indeed get a lot of opportunities for serving in a military that treats its soldiers pretty kush. I used to live in a neighborhood with a bunch of Puerto Rican vets, all of whom grew up poor, but the GI bill made them all landscaping company owning CHUD fucks even worse than the whites in the community.
That's a lot less fertile of a recruiting ground than a military that crews up and spits out peasant boys into a life equally as shit as the one they were pulled out of.
Its gotten better in the past few decades but rez life can be bleak as shit and you mix in "military families" and a bit of the "you aren't an adult until you do military things" mentality (particularly with young native men) and you end up with the quintessential victims of US empire fighting for that empire. But there are some hopeful changes. Anecdotal, but none of my family that joined the military encourage that path which isn't the way it used to be. There's also less of the "do anything to get out" mentality. So I remain hopeful we can finally break that stereotype.
I'm trying to find data to support this claim. Only stat i found was one saying 60% of [people enlisting in] the military make under 34-80k, with 20% making less than that. If that bracket is what the term middle class means now then the term is officially useless.
Do you have anything else a bit more granular? My fu must be weak this morning
[Edit: clarified meaning]
It's not that the US Military pays it's troops a "middle-class" wage , it's that troops in general come from middle-class families and communities.
Also a lot of the compensation is housing and healthcare, so them making 34k is maybe more comparable to someone getting paid 50-60k depending on the housing market where they are.
This is what i was saying, though reading my post i can see that was unclear. My scant data shows demographics of enlisted prior to enlisting is 60% 34-80k and 20% below that bracket.
Ahh gotcha - yeah I got my info from a CFR report that basically says the same thing, but the breakdown was by median household income: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military