Tag: steve rogers

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I don’t get how some people in the MCU Fandom claim that Steve must have a crap ton of money

I think the logic is “military back pay + 70 years interes + licensing his image for film/television/merch, as arranged by Howard Stark and Margaret Carter, way back when they founded S.H.I.E.L.D.”?

But I don’t get it because I’m pretty sure that Cap was officially declared dead?
I don’t think that dead people still get backpay? Unless they decided to give him backpay when he turned out to be alive, although I don’t see the US government being that generous.

People writing Steve having a lot of money, I presume, are working on the assumption that he was declared MIA, and then treated like a returned MIA/POW when he was found alive. Returned POWs – regardless of whether they were declared dead while missing – are entitled to all their back pay, including extra hazardous duty pay and living allowances.

It’s possible Cap wouldn’t even have been declared dead; the military is very hesitant to declare MIAs – which is pretty much any active duty soldier whose body was never recovered – dead without proof, unless there’s pressure from the family, and Cap doesn’t have any family left. So whether he was declared dead or still officially MIA is a probably a balancing act between political forces who wanted closure for mythmaking purposes, and Howard Stark who’s still searching for him.

(This is mildly iffy, given that the US military doesn’t have procedures in place for “MIA, later found in suspended animation in the Arctic ice”, but given that it’s Captain America, I don’t think they would fight too hard over treating him as a returned POW. And Bucky had *better* count as a POW, so he’d get his accumulated back pay too, although it would be somewhat less, since he was a noncom rather than a captain.)

I went through historical military pay tables, and using this list of POW/MIA entitlements calculated that he would have something around $2,000,000 in back pay waiting for him (probably more – I assumed he hadn’t been promoted beyond Captain, which is fairly unlikely since MIAs are eligible for promotion and it’s Captain America, and whenever I was unsure how to calculate something, I went for the lesser value. Also it’s entirely likely the Commandos were getting some kind of extra special duty pay, which I didn’t factor in beyond standard hazardous duty/hostile fire pay.)

I didn’t look up Bucky’s in any detail, but as a Sergeant he’d be making about half what a Captain made, so he probably has at least $1,000,000. (He would likely have been MIA as well, since no body was recovered, unless his surviving family pushed for him to be declared dead – the US Military is *really passionate* about recovering all the bodies, and leaving people MIA until they find them.)

That’s assuming they were given just base pay, without interest. I am not sure how the interest is handled for returned POWs who were declared dead, but a POW-not-declared-dead has his pay either go to his dependents/power-of-attorney, or put in an interest-bearing account handled by the Secretary of the Treasury. Steve has no dependents, so it would likely either have been handled by the Secretary of the Treasury or Howard Stark would have managed to get it put in a privately-managed trust (because let’s face it, Howard Stark can do anything he wants.)

Interest could be tricky, but since it was relatively simple to calculate and it’s probably what he would have done if he was alive, I assumed it was all invested in $1,000 US savings bonds (and then not reinvested after maturity.) Which, again, is pretty much a minimum – any actively-managed investment account would probably have made substantially more than that, and Howard Stark would facepalm forever at the idea of investing solely in US Savings Bonds – if it was all put in, say, Stark Industries stock it could be arbitrarily higher.

But assuming U.S. Savings Bonds interest rates, his $2,000,000 *minimum* back pay would have increased to about $7,500,000 by 2011. (Bucky’s, again, would probably be something like half that – say $4,000,000.) I wouldn’t be surprised if a less conservative and more accurate accounting put him well into eight digits.

So he’s not going to be competing with Tony Stark in the big bucks competition, but he can easily do stuff like buy people new SUVs or take a couple years off to travel the world searching for Bucky just on his MIA back pay, without having to look at other income sources.

This is accurate, yes.  And even if Steve WAS declared dead, well, once he was present and accounted for, they’d have to change his status from KIA to MIA, at which point the whole back pay thing would come into play again.

A commenter on one of my works pointed out that with automatic promotions and such, Steve is at minimum a full Colonel and probably more like a Major General.  This would mean that he would have been owed several millions of dollars in back pay, and is drawing a current salary of minimum $17,182.50 per month (including allowances).

Based on that, it’s very likely that Bucky would have been promoted by now to Command Sergeant Major.  This would also leave him owed several millions of dollars in back pay, as well as a current active duty salary of – if I am calculating this properly – $9,359 per month (including allowances). 

So yes, based on real-world How The Military Works facts and the canon provided in the movies, Steve and Bucky both are never going to have to worry about money again.

There is also canonical support for this, actually!

In the early eighties, in the comics, Steve receives a letter from the US government. He thinks it’s just some random official form so he ignores it; Bernie has to bother him into opening it, at which point he discovers they’ve sent him a seven-figure check for back pay and hazard pay.

He uses the money to set up, my hand to god, the Captain America Hotline. 

God bless the 80s.