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Politics : The Donkey's Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (6735)	7/9/2003 12:19:10 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

For benefits, injured vets fight uphill ajc.com It was easy for politicians to praise America's military men and women at Independence Day celebrations -- so how come it's hard to vote for disability payments to injured soldiers when they retire? The proposal, which comes with a hefty price tag, has been bounced around for more than a decade. U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall, a freshman Democrat from Macon who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, is tired of the hypocrisy. He has gotten 201 signatures, 16 short of the number needed to blast his bill out of committee over the objections of Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert. The bill would repeal an 1892 law that denies a military retiree the same disability pay an injured soldier who isn't career military receives for life. Here's the way the complex and unfair system works: Take the retired U.S. Army major from Gwinnett County described by Charlie Knox, the state American Legion's administrative officer. The man, Knox said, is still carrying shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade injury in Vietnam. But he receives less than two-thirds of the roughly $2,400 monthly retirement to which he's entitled; it's reduced by the monthly disability check he gets. In the intricate veteran disability rating system, he is 30 percent disabled. Only 23 at the time, the man chose to stay in the Army since his injuries allowed him to continue serving. If he'd chosen a nonmilitary career, he would have received his disability check for life, instead of having his retirement offset by his disability pay. If he'd gotten out of the Army but gone to work for some other federal agency, he would now be receiving his full government retirement plus his disability check. Only in special cases do career military veterans receive both: if they are Purple Heart recipients who are also 60 percent or more disabled. But if you're 60 percent disabled (lost a limb, for example) you probably can't qualify to stay in the service. According to Brian Lawrence, who works on federal legislation for the Disabled American Veterans, the ratings aren't particularly generous. Here's a more recent and equally outrageous example. Army Pfc. Chris Shipley, among the first U.S. troops to enter Baghdad in April, was hit in the eye during a vicious firefight with Iraqis on the streets of the capital. Under the current rules, Shipley would receive a 40 percent disability rating for the eye he lost, if his vision is good in the other eye. If Shipley chooses to stay in the military for 20 years, and barring other disabilities, he would receive no disability pay for the combat injury that forever changed his life. The cost of extending such benefits ranges from the Congressional Budget Office's estimate of $41 billion over 10 years to the White House estimate of $90 billion. This is clearly a stumbling block. But the big barrier is a cowardly Congress that doesn't want to go on the record opposing any benefits for veterans, especially while American troops are still being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Few of the bill's 340 co-sponsors (more than enough to approve the measure) have signed Marshall's petition to force the bill to the House floor. "Neither party is without shame," says American Legion Assistant Legislative Director Mark Seavey. Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi only became a co-sponsor after Marshall initiated the petition to go around GOP leaders. Knox says he's surprised the six Georgia Republican House co-sponsors aren't supporting Marshall's petition. "They told us they were 100 percent behind us," he said. President Bush, who has been silent on the issue, is tentatively scheduled to speak at the American Legion convention in August. But Seavy and other Legion officials say they intend to make room for Marshall to speak, too -- and it's no secret Marshall has his eye on the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Zell Miller. He may well find a warmer welcome among the Legionnaires than our "war president" will receive. Martha Ezzard's column appears Tuesdays.

To: Mephisto who wrote (6735)	11/16/2003 3:29:53 AM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (8) \| Respond to of 15516

Bush's fiscal policies of bait and switch By Paul Krugman (NYT) Wednesday, November 12, 2003 PRINCETON, New Jersey: Yesterday's absurd conspiracy theory about the Bush administration has a way of turning into today's conventional wisdom. Remember when people were ridiculed for claiming that Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, eager to fight a war, were hyping the threat from Iraq? Anyway, many analysts now acknowledge that the administration never had any intention of pursuing a conventionally responsible fiscal policy. Rather, its tax cuts were always intended as a way of implementing the radical strategy known as "starve the beast," which views budget deficits as a good thing, a way to squeeze government spending. Did I mention that the administration is planning another long-run tax cut next year? Advocates of the starve-the-beast strategy tend to talk abstractly about "big government." But in fact, squeezing government spending almost always means cutting back or eliminating services people actually want (though not necessarily programs worth their cost). And since Tuesday was Veterans Day, let's talk about how the big squeeze on spending may be alienating a surprising group: The nation's soldiers. One of President George W. Bush's major campaign themes in 2000 was his promise to improve the lives of America's soldiers - and military votes were crucial to his success. But these days some of the harshest criticisms of the Bush administration come from publications aimed at a military audience. For example, last week the magazine Army Times ran a story with the headline "An Act of 'Betrayal,'" and the subtitle "In the midst of war, key family benefits face cuts." The article went on to assert that there has been "a string of actions by the Bush administration to cut or hold down growth in pay and benefits, including basic pay, combat pay, health-care benefits and the death gratuity paid to survivors of troops who die on active duty." At one level, this pattern of cuts is standard operating procedure. Just about every apparent promise of financial generosity the Bush administration has made (other than those involving tax cuts for top brackets and corporate contracts) has turned out to be nonoperational. No Child Left Behind got left behind - or at least left without funds. AmeriCorps got praised in the State of the Union address, then left high and dry in the budget that followed. New York's firefighters and police officers got a photo-op with the president, but very little money. For that matter, it's clear that New York will never see the full $20 billion it was promised for rebuilding. Why shouldn't soldiers find themselves subject to the same kind of bait and switch? Yet one might have expected the administration to treat the military differently, if only as a matter of sheer political calculation. After all, the military needs some mollifying: The Iraq war has turned increasingly nightmarish, and deference toward the administration is visibly eroding. Even Private Jessica Lynch has, to her credit, balked at playing her scripted role. So what's going on? One answer is that once you've instilled a Scrooge mentality throughout the government, it's hard to be selective. But I also suspect that a government of, by and for the economic elite is having trouble overcoming its basic lack of empathy with the working-class men and women who make up our armed forces. Some say that Representative George Nethercutt's remark that progress in Iraq is a more important story than deaths of American soldiers was redeemed by his postscript, "which, heaven forbid, is awful." Your call. But it's hard to deny the stunning insensitivity of Bush's remarks back on July 2: "There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring 'em on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation." Those are the words of a man who can't imagine himself or anyone close to him actually being in the line of fire. The question is whether the military will start to feel taken for granted. Publications like Army Times are obviously going off the reservation. Retired military officers, like General Anthony Zinni - formerly Bush's envoy to the Middle East - have started to offer harsh, indeed unprintable, assessments of administration policies. If this disillusionment spreads to the rank and file, the politics of 2004 may be very different from what anyone expects. E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com iht.com