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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (127163)	3/23/2004 12:54:43 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

apparently there was no cut. I'm not going to do a lot of research on that, but I imagine there are different ways of parsing any budget. I also keep in mind that there have been and will be hundreds of thousands of new vets added to the pool served by that budget, from Gulf War II and the war in Iraq. Note that the Veterans of Foreign Wars issued a statement after receiving the White House's budget, calling it "disgraceful" and saying it was a "disgrace and a sham." ------- According to Mary Ellen McCarthy, a staffer for ranking House Veteran' Affairs Committee member Lane Evans, D-Ill., a GOP-controlled Congress is readying to slice $14.6 billion from veterans benefits over the next 10 years. McCarthy said that Congress is mulling over a budget that takes $449 million of vets medical benefits from next year's budget alone. The cuts will cover projected revenue shortfalls caused by Bush's tax cut proposal. The money will come from funding for treatment of service-connected injuries and pensions for low income vets. Vincent DeStefano, a disabled veteran of WWII, said he is a staunch Bush supporter despite being a Democrat, but that these cuts are a "sad, bad mistake." "I'm sorry to hear that our efforts in WWII are now being negated by this decrease in our pensions and disabilities," said DeStefano. "These youngsters don't know what's going to happen to them. I didn't know what was going to happen to me. Unfortunately, I was wounded." Congress is also crunching numbers for the overall vet benefit budget that are only a slight increase over last year's budget, despite the addition of more than 250,000 Gulf War II vets to the pool of those eligible for benefits. "If they are trying to cut us now, you can just imagine what's going to happen to all these kids over there in Iraq," said Tom Daley of the state office of Disabled American Veterans.... townonline.com