Replies to post #44951 on Discover GOP Opprobrium

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McCain Adviser Misleadingly Cites CBO Report, Says Webb’s GI Bill ‘Does Nothing To Address Reenlistment’....

On Fox News’s America’s Election HQ yesterday, Nancy Pfotenhauer, a senior policy adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), disingenuously attacked Sen. Jim Webb’s “21st Century GI Bill,” in order to justify her boss’s opposition to the bill. Webb’s bill “does nothing to address reenlistment and retention,” charged Pfotenhauer.

Pfotenhauer cited a recent Congressional Budget Office report to support her specious claims:

Senator McCain has his own legislation, and by the way, he’s largely supportive of the goals of the Webb bill. The problem is, it doesn’t do enough — it doesn’t it quickly enough and it does nothing to address reenlistment and retention. In fact, CBO, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that if the Webb bill went through, we’d see a reduction in reenlistment rates of 16 percent.

But, as ThinkProgress has noted, the CBO report cited by Pfotenhauer actually shows that Webb’s bill would increase enlistment to such an extent that it would completely offset the loss in retention:

Literature on the effects of educational benefits on retention suggest that every $10,000 increase in educational benefits yields a reduction in retention of slightly more than 1 percentage point. CBO estimates that S. 22 (as modified) would more than double the present value of educational benefits for servicemembers at the first reenlistment point — from about $40,000 to over $90,000 — implying a 16 percent decline in the reenlistment rate, from about 42 percent to about 36 percent. […]

Educational benefits have been shown to raise the number of military recruits. Based on an analysis of the existing literature, CBO estimates that a 10 percent increase in educational benefits would result in an increase of about 1 percent in high-quality recruits. On that basis, CBO calculates that raising the educational benefits as proposed in S. 22 would result in a 16 percent increase in recruits.

Sen. John Warner (R-AZ), a co-sponsor of Webb’s bill who is also a veteran of World War II and Korea, has said that the flip side of the impact on retention is that “putting a big piece of cheese out there will induce more qualified people to join just to get this.”

The Army is need of new incentives like Webb’s bill in order to attract higher quality recruits. Thus far, in 2008, 13 percent of the Army’s recruits have been granted “conduct” waivers for misdemeanor or felony charges, which is up from 11 percent in 2007 and 4.6 percent in 2004.