Your overall compensation, too include 100 % full family medical coverage, an extraordinary retirement plan, tax exempt BHA and other allowances, etc are competitive to civilian jobs for people with equivalent skill sets. Your deployments result in additional pay and allowances, often tax exempt. You can receive house hunting leave, leave and proceed time, travel allowance, moving allowances, separation allowances, base housing, house finding assistance, and any number of government funded programs to help your family be, well and fare. Your gov civ comrades have just as many complaints as you. DoS FSOs just had their oversees housing COLA slashed to next to nothing, as an example, and their matched TSA doesn't come close to military retirement advantages.
But to address your larger point, big gov programs are exactly what you have done and been supported by your entire career.
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Quote Originally Posted by Marlin View Post
Not sure how that relates, I perform a service for my benefits. The average person rarely spends more than 50 hours at work, certainly not away from home for months at a time at a fraction of their civilian counterpart's pay. Furthermore, my government cohorts, IRS, FBI, Federal Civilian and so on get FAR more benefits than I get. I am moving to washington state from Charleston, 3200 miles, I have to pay for my own house hunting costs, flight, hotel and whatnot and I don't have a choice in my move, they order me where to go. If I was a fed civ, they would pay my leave, my flight, reimburse my travel, even help me sell my house! They get matched TSP (our 401K) contributions and so on.

Back to the scheduled conspiracy discussion! Sheeple Unite!!!!