Military Music Programs cut $125 Million

Gandalfe

Gandalfe

Striving to play the changes in a melodic way.
Staff member
Administrator
In May, Representative Betty McCullom introduced an amendment to the House version of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that would significantly and immediately reduce spending on military music programs from $320 million to $200 million.

This went back and forth in the House and was eventually passed in early July. The Senate is currently working on their version of the NDAA. When it is passed by the Senate, the two bills will go into conference with input from the office of the Secretary of Defense to be reconciled. If this amendment makes it through, it will have an negative impact on all music in the military.

Since the numbers provided to Rep. McCullom were possibly not the most accurate and her amendment is vague, it is feared that the cuts in reality could well exceed 37.5%. They will take effect almost immediately - Oct. 1 of this year.

The DOD budget projection for FY2012 is $553 billion. Cutting a mere $120 million is a "savings" of...what exactly?

The American Bandmasters Association (ABA), the College Band Directors National Association (CBDNA), and MENC are advocating that this
amendment not become part of the 2012 NDAA. The MENC link provides further information: http://advocacy.menc.org/profiles/blogs/news-itemaction-alert-us

If you are interested in contacting your Representative and Senator:

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml

As few as seven letters and phone calls can make a difference in the passage of legislation.

Source: C-M Community Music Group
 
As a former member of a military band...

...I go against the grain here. There are far too many military bands for the limited demand for such organizations.

It would be better that the military spend that $120,000,000 on increased readiness provisions like more ammunition for training or more spare sprocket plate for the tanks than to support groups that mostly fill a "need" for ceremonial music.

(I discount all of the attempts that the military makes to provide live "pop" music. Pushed under the heading of "moral building", the same function could be better served by a DJ with a comprehensive selection of recorded music, all at one tenth the price.)

I joined the 4th Infantry Division band for about 36 hours after my first putative unit, the 1/69th Armor was redeployed (broken up and ceremonially sent home) , and went so far as to have a horn sent over against just that possibility. However, I saw what duty was with the band (mostly tedium, some boredom), and transferred out to an armored cavalry unit toute suite. Sure, you got shot up now and then, but you didn't have officers harassing you night and day. And, there were other advantages that the band, under close tack almost all of the time, could not avail themselves of.
 
...I go against the grain here. There are far too many military bands for the limited demand for such organizations.
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No disrespect to Gandalfe but his article chafes me. it seems with budget cuts swirling in the political winds, it's the surperfluous departments like this one and subsidized entities like NPR and PBS that stir up the most righteous indignation and calls to action to convince everyone how important they are (albiet vainly).

Of course, they do this because everyone knows they're either useless or don't really need the money. "You telling me that cutting funding for public broadcasting will kill Big Bird? Don't you sell like a billion dollars of Big-Birds a year?"

It's the like buggy-whippers rising up to take back what is theirs....
 
That would have been what happened to me...

...if I had stayed in the band with the 4th. I had an infantry MOS the whole time I was in, but only briefly served as one, doing the rest of my time with an armored unit and an armored cavalry unit on tanks and ACAVs.

I moved to the band in May, did my brief time there, and then got into the cavalry unit immediately thereafter. (It didn't hurt that I had a family friend in charge in the 4th Administration Company, the unit that processed all personnel actions for the division.) Shortly thereafter, they stripped out all of the combat MOSs in non-combat positions to fill out the division's line battalions and squadrons, just in time for the Cambodian excursion.

I sat atop my tank alongside of the highway, watching the infantry battalions being hauled west towards the Cambodian border. Sometimes, what seem like dumb decisions turn out to be smart ones - something SGT Gregorsak admitted to me after going from trumpet player to squad leader.

Checking grease fittings and track tension, and making sure the gunner kept the main gun boresighted, wasn't as much fun as playing the clarinet, but having fifty-two tons of steel plate between me and rifle calibre bullets was a lot more secured that how Gregorsak spent the rest of his time in country.

The guy who does my horn work (Marvin Krantz, at Saint Louis Woodwind and Brasswind) was in the 4th Division Band just after I moved out. However, he had some sort of instrument repair specialist MOS, and thus was not deemed fit for the field.
 
JfW said:
it seems with budget cuts swirling in the political winds, it's the surperfluous departments like this one and subsidized entities like NPR and PBS that stir up the most righteous indignation and calls to action to convince everyone how important they are (albiet vainly).
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I feel the same way about most of the United States Air Force...
 
I don't mean or want to be offensive, cos we're in the same boat.

From across the pond, I'm not surprised. It's not a lot out of total military spending more of a painful token cut.

But overall you have to face up to much more severe cuts in all areas. Space, all armed forces, general consumption.

Somehow (don't ask me how), you need to get US manufacturing to compete with the rest of the world, (same for us!). Only then will the tax revenues will rise enough to sort out national debt and fund more music. Until then, there's little money for necessities, let alone luxuries. Sooner you get on with it, the less it'll hurt in the long run. Like most of europe, you've been overspending for far too long. And US national debt hurts the whole world.

Pete. sorry if this goes against forum rules.
 
Factory jobs have been leaving here since the 1950's, starting with textiles and shoes and moving on to "real industry" in the 1960's. Since that time, the steel industry has been gutted, much of the consumer electrical products have gone, and light fabrication is almost history. Automobiles have been kept here only by inertia, although even a good half of that has gone.

We are accumulating huge piles of freight containers, as it is cheaper to build them new than to ship them back as freight. As groups of Mexican immigrants come across the border to find work, work from here has been shipped to border factories that do sub-assemblies, which are then sent here for final assembly, thus qualifying as "Made in the USA".

There's no way out as long as Americans continue to covet the wages paid during the fat times, back when we were the world leader in so many categories. Who wants to play $500.00 for an appliance made here when you can get the same for $300.00 shipped to you from Mexico?

I sincerely hope that "new" industry, like computers, software design and the like will step up to supply the equivalent jobs and wages. I am just as sincere when I say that there is little chance of that happening.

We're still going to need construction workers (although down here, virtually every non-supervisor on a jobsite is Mexican, either native to the US or from across the border - in a right to work state they get paid the minimum wage plus whatever premium is needed to keep them on, but far less than union scale), but all of the rest is going away, slowly but surely.

The solution is to convince people that they need to live like they did in the 1950's, get paid the equivalent, and drop back to one car and smaller homes, etc. It ain't gonna happen.
 
Economics 101: if you import more than you export, you're dependent upon the countries you import from. However, EVENTUALLY, those exporters will start charging more and there'll be a shift back to cheaper domestic goods. That might take a long while, though.

In the article that's mentioned, you're cutting an entire program out of a budget. The "unfair" claim is because it's obvious that there isn't a 10% "across the board" cut: the cuts are being made in specific areas, while other areas have 100% funding. I can see why people are calling "unfair," but I can also accept the argument that you'd rather have the folks repairing tanks being 100% funded, rather than having a "non-essential" group funded at 100%.

Personally, I somewhat doubt that the military needs half a trillion $ to shift to what the President explained would be a "maintenance" mode -- i.e., not actively fighting in a war, but being ready for one. (I base this on past statements about $553 hammers and simular.) Hey, I'd also like the entire government to be audited by an outside, non-partisan entity -- but that's a different topic.

Regarding public radio/TV, I always felt a little weird about having a program funded by the government that reports about the government. Sounds like a conflict of interest. That being said, I do think that the government should fund cultural programs, technology programs, medical research, etc. An example of why this is necessary: you're reading my post. The Internet is an evolution of a US Defense Department initiative.

Vote Pete in 2012: Hey, the Mayans Said the World's Gonna End, Anyway!
 
SOTSDO said:
I sincerely hope that "new" industry, like computers, software design and the like will step up to supply the equivalent jobs and wages. I am just as sincere when I say that there is little chance of that happening.
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Oh. Wanted to comment on this, too.

I'm in the only "stable" IT job: I'm on-site desktop support. I can't be outsourced. Software designers? There's no reason that they can't be anywhere that has an Internet connection. But they can't replace a power supply through the Internet.

Let's talk wages, tho.

I've been doing this type of thing for over 25 years. The most I ever got paid per year was ... about 12 years ago. There were a lot of things that diluted the market for tech jobs, the #1 of which being that certifications (i.e. "a certificate that says that you've passed an exam") became fairly useless, very quickly: you want a cert? Study this book. After a week (or, more common, 48 hours) take the exam and billions and billions of $ will be yours. People will love you and your touch will cure cancer!

Erm. No.

A lot of people are good at taking exams. It really isn't that hard if it's multiple guess (most of the exams are). If the test was about troubleshooting, though, they'd fail. Badly. Hey, I've hired techs. I ask them a troubleshooting question -- a fairly easy one: "User can't connect to the network. What do you do?" If the person can't give me the correct steps to fix the problem, I don't want the person working with me.
 
pete said:
I'm in the only "stable" IT job: I'm on-site desktop support. I can't be outsourced. Software designers? There's no reason that they can't be anywhere that has an Internet connection. But they can't replace a power supply through the Internet.
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Wanna bet? Most of ours was outsourced to Poland. So now I have to call them with a problem. Get them to accept there's a real problem and eventually it gets passed on to someone onsite. At that point the call to the outsiders is marked resolved. Keeps their service stats looking good, cos the monkey's on someone else's shoulder.

The on-site person then wastes more of my time asking the same questions. And eventually agrees with my diagnosis. Then we order the parts... And so it goes. No stats for this point, cos they'd be embarassing...

This is progress and efficiency. But it saved us a couple of headcounts (read people).

Net result is that we're paying money for other people to waste our time, so that managers can fool themselves that the changes improved things.
 
years ago before the auto demise around here GM outsourced most of their desktop support. Then I think they outsourced the remaining on-site support, thus they ended up contractors. They opted to fix most problems remotely, from if i recall correctly, India.

but they had the same problems. First call India. Talk to people that simply don't understand for it to come back to local support.
 
... But, in both examples, there are problems where you have to have on-site support. In other words, me. I've worked as a contractor before. I've worked as a private consultant, too.
 
I was approached to work as a contractor by my former employer...

...I told them where they could put their "generous" offer.

Retirement is wonderful, as long as you plan ahead...
 
I believe there is a mandatory retirement age where I work, but I know that a few of our retired employees do work on occasion as contractors. I wouldn't necessarily knock the idea if I was nearing retirement age and needed more funds. Hey, my grandparents-in-law retired in their 60s and they're now 90. You do need a lot of cash if you're planning on living to 100-ish.

Again, another odd thing about me: I have a 401K and a money manager. The money manager was impressed when my wife and I wanted to do retirement stuff. We've started at a very young age.

Well, I also charge $75 an hour for "private consulting," 1 hour minimum. If I like you. If not, it's $7500 an hour :D.
 
The solution is to convince people that they need to live like they did in the 1950's, get paid the equivalent, and drop back to one car and smaller homes, etc. It ain't gonna happen.
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This is what protectionism would lead to. It always makes me scratch my head when people want to go after foreign manufacturing, as if if making the US the generator of 30% of world output again would be a good thing [it was never sustainable in the first place since we were the only first-world left standing after WWII] It would impoverish emerging nations, cause widespread economic disaster, and possibly lead to wars against the United States. America would then be driven back to a standard of living where we had to count on someone who makes just as much as the average citizen to make everyhing for us instead of leveraging what the world can offer us in exchange for the more in-demand and valuable things we have been shifting to [engineering, technology, biotech, finance, information, etc].

Also, never mind that we are yet still the world leader in manufacturing. It's just that we do it with robots now.
 
"Ripped from the pages of this month's International Musician"

There is an article in this month's IM that talks about how rosy the orchestral outlook is these days, despite Louisville and San Diego and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and New Mexico, et al. Reading it, you would get the impression that things are now looking up for professional musicians, that the corner has been turned, and that the light at the end of the tunnel is not the headlight of the 4-8-8-4 Big Boy locomotive hauling a mile long drag of loaded coal cars.

(There is still one of these mighty compound locomotives in working condition. It is "home ported" at a yard up in Wyoming on the interstate to San Francisco, and I had the enormous pleasure to stop near it one fine, cold winter morning back in 1988. I picked up my breakfast at the local McDonalds, and then parked on the shoulder of the highway just to watch the thing being prepared for a road trip. Wreathed in "steam", it looked like some prehistoric monster, crouching and ready to pounce.)

What the article really is is major league whistling in the dark, and for the proof all one has to do is to look at the audition information ads in the back.

If someone wanted me to live in the Washington DC area, they would have to pay me a hell of a lot more than $62,000 plus benefits. Yet, that's what they are offering for a principal chair player to perform in a local professional orchestra.

They would probably look down on anyone without a masters, and the promotion path can't be too extensive for someone who would not qualify as a concertmaster/mistress. Good luck with the housing in the DC area, too.

(Come to think of it, why can't someone other than the top dog violinist become a concertmaster/mistress. Sure, bowing in unison is important if you don't want your group to look like a bunch of pikers. But, give that to the first desk violinist if needed.)

In the government, we got paid (and our retirement amount computed) based upon how much it would take to hire our equivalent in the local market. Since I lived in Houston TX, one of the most economical places to put down roots in the country, that presented me with the paradoxical situation where it cost me next to nothing to live (at least compared to Illinois), while at the same time I got paid more than my equivalents in 97% of the area of the United States by a very comfortable margin.

[FX Yacob Smirnoff voice]: "What a wonderful country!!! [/FX Yacob Smirnoff voice]

With orchestras, it's like they operate in an inverse fashion to this. More living expense, less compensation. How anyone who is highly qualified in the musical field would want to work for approximately double the poverty wage is well beyond my ken. Hell, the poor schlub who would take this position would make less than my lowest level trainee when I did OSHA stuff for Uncle Sam.

Of course, there will be dozens of musicians, most of whom will be very highly qualified, who will apply for that position and the twenty or so others in the same issue of IM. That's because they are offering peanuts for musicians who have to settle for what the market will bear - i.e., not very damn'd much.

If I was at the threshold of going to college these days, I would think long and hard before investing my student loan money into something with such a "low rate of return" as we have with professional music. Even taking the "last resort" for many in the trade (the military, four year enlistment option) is preferable. Sure, you don't make too much (but more than that orchestra in VA is willing to pay its top dog players), but you get room, board (or a housing allowance, should you be stupid enough to enlist as an NCO while married), excellent free health care, college tuition payment, help with student loans AND you get to see something of the world.

Or, you could be a big fish with a third tier orchestra, spend all of your income on housing, and have enough left over not to starve - as long as you're single.
 
Robots and the American factory

I spent a powerful amount of time in American factories, and while there are robots out there, doing what they do very well while mangling the occasional maintenance worker, they are not as thick on the ground as you might think. They are only amiable to certain types of work. However, there are many machines that do their work in a robotic fashion but which we would never consider as same since they have analog control means, only do one thing very well, and look nothing like what you have seen in the movies.

The auto industry is big on them, not only for the body assembly but also for painting. There are also a significant number of them used these days for appliance assembly.

(We had a factory in our area of operations that used them to prep and paint urethane body panels and bumper covers. Chock full of the buggers, all of which had to be kept clean of paint. In the middle of the night, when maintenance was pulled on them while the line was down, there would be periodic maiming and deaths as someone threw the wrong switch. Not a good thing. Our only remedy was to jack up the penalties by geometric levels after each event. That sounded good, but it didn't bring anybody back to life.)

(And, dangerous they are. There is enough force behind the movement of the arms of some of the larger ones so as to (literally) "drive" the person unfortunate enough to be in the way of one, much as Albert Pujols drives a baseball way out of the stadium. Victims of this get thrown across plant aisles, and sustain as much injury from the collision with the floor or some other machinery as they do from contact with the robot.)

Otherwise, most of what's done these days is either with dedicated machines that perform the same functions only in a much more limited fashion, or with the horrors of manual labor.

For dedicated machines, devices like power presses and forging hammers automate the most physical aspect of the task (the hammering and punching strokes for metal, leather or cloth).

But, the very worst jobs to handle (like cutting meat or weaving wire harnesses) are still done with good ol' American muscle and sweat. Meat cutting is hazardous, moreso that almost any other job in the nation, and (with the exception of the conveying means) it is all done with hand-held saws and knives, most held at very uncomfortable angles, and by people working like demons so as to keep up with the speed of the line. Weaving wire harnesses seems like innocuous work at first (with nothing lifted over one pound in weight), until you consider the pace of the assembly line, or watch how the workers have to manipulate rolls of electrical tape at weird angles by bending their wrists.

As some of the worst examples in all of industry, both of these groups destroy their workers' health at a high rate, and there's no robotic help for them in sight. (The wiring systems are too complicated and irregular for machine winding, and the carcasses all differ enough in fine detail to prevent the application of a robot.)

Robots are great, as long as you know how to "program them" (industrial engineers have been doing this kind of work for many a year, even before the advent of the modern robot), how to operate them, and how to maintain them. Unfortunately, most owners don't want to spend the money to do any of this correctly, thus we have deaths. Nothing new under the sun...

I could go into the sizing of shovels and Taylorism, but I've prattled on long enough.
 
pete said:
Economics 101: if you import more than you export, you're dependent upon the countries you import from. However, EVENTUALLY, those exporters will start charging more and there'll be a shift back to cheaper domestic goods. That might take a long while, though.
Click to expand...

Sorry if I sound anal, but I'd like to point out that this type of talk is well beyond any 100-level econ course, where they generally just cover concepts like supply/demand, p-graphs and price shifts, deriving utility, etc.

Trade theory is something I think well above that, and the concepts taught will depend on if the class centers on the teachings of Keynes, or Hayek, or Marx, etc. 101 Macroeconomic theory is something basic to most all economic models.
 
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