From an article in the The New Yorker regarding free plastic surgery to members of the armed forces:

“Anyone wearing a uniform is eligible,” Dr. Bob Lyons, the chief of plastic surgery at Brooke Army Medical Center, said recently, in his office in San Antonio. It is true: personnel in all four branches of the military and members of their immediate families can get face-lifts, nose jobs, breast enlargements, liposuction, or any other kind of elective cosmetic alteration, at taxpayer expense.

[…]

A Defense Department spokeswoman confirmed the existence of the plastic-surgery benefit. According to the Army, between 2000 and 2003 its doctors performed four hundred and ninety-six breast enlargements and a thousand three hundred and sixty-one liposuction surgeries on soldiers and their dependents.

[…]

Mario Moncada […] said that he knows several female soldiers who have received free breast enlargements: “We’re out there risking our lives. We deserve benefits like that.”

[…]

The Army’s rationale is that, as a spokeswoman said, “the surgeons have to have someone to practice on.” “The benefit of offering elective cosmetic surgery to soldiers is more for the surgeon than for the patient,” Lyons said.

[…]

There has been talk lately among soldiers that this benefit is indeed being used as a recruiting tool, but there is no mention of it in any of the recruiting literature. “The Army does not offer elective cosmetic surgery to entice anyone,” Dr. Lyons said. “I would be disappointed with the maturity of the young women in this country if they’re joining the service with the thought of getting breast augmentations.”

I’m okay with it as a learning tool, but it seems a little excessive to me.

Via Scot Hacker, an excerpted transcription of Bill Clinton on NPR, speaking on Bush’s 2003 tax cuts:

“And to make matters worse, we gave half of the money to the top 1 percent and an extraordinary amount of the money to the other 200,000 americans like me who paid income taxes on over a million dollars last year and I just think it’s wrong. I think it is so wrong. We’ve got national guardsman fighting over in iraq and the administration doesn’t even want to make them eligible for military health care benefits if they’re not covered by their own plans. We’ve increased the cost of veterans benefits at health centers by 500%. We’ve cut 300,000 kids out of health care programs and I’ve still got my tax cut? That’s my sacrifice in the war on terror? I think it’s bad ethics and terrible economics and it’s something we’re going to have to pay for a long time to come.”

[…]

What I tried to do was to leave my generation, the baby boom generation, with the security of knowing that their children would not have to support them instead of their grandchildren. It was a huge economic gift to the next generation of Americans. Now we’ve thrown all of that away on what I consider to be highly self indulgent tax cuts for upper income people. I think it’s selfish and I think it’s wrong. […] We should have targetted these tax cuts to middle class people and small business. They could have even been bigger. […] I would liked to seen an expansion in earned income tax credit for lower income working people. They could have been permanent. Most of this stuff is just wrong. It’s bad economics. It’s personally selfish for really wealthy people to have this kind of money. I know no pertinent millionaire in New York, and I know a lot of them, Republican and Democrat, who thinks this is right. I don’t know anybody who thinks this is right.