Posted on 05/31/2008 10:25:54 AM PDT by The_Republican
You can measure the continuing power shift in Washington by looking at the costly package of veterans’ benefits sponsored by James Webb, the Virginia senator elected on an anti-Iraq war platform in 2006. President George W. Bush has promised to veto the measure. The scene is set for a showdown and Mr Bush is set to lose it. Over Memorial day, the editorial pages of US dailies backed Mr Webb’s bill as the least the country could do for soldiers who have sacrificed so much. A majority of Republican senators joined Mr Webb’s Democrats to render the bill veto-proof.
John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, has proposed a more modest alternative, but the defection of his party spells its doom. Now that Mr Webb’s measure has been dubbed a “21st-century GI bill”, it is above criticism.
The original GI bill of 1944 is a landmark piece of US welfare legislation. It was passed in the panicked anticipation that releasing 15.2m veterans (30 per cent of the country’s grown men) into the labour market at once would sow economic chaos and political radicalism. Outlandish benefits were paid to place demobilised soldiers in universities – full tuition at any undergraduate or graduate institution, plus a comfortable living stipend for the soldier and his family. Because 7.8m men – the ruling class of the next generation – benefited from the GI bill, its drawbacks have been ignored or denied. It had no impact on the bottom of the US income pyramid. It drove female students out of universities. It was the channel through which the hierarchical, macho culture of the military spread into boardrooms and town halls. Its cultural legacy includes the three-martini lunch, Playboy and a lot of soulless public architecture.
This pragmatic intervention in the labour market was confused with a moral principle – a military “right” to a free college education and (therefore) a place in the ruling elite. General Wesley Clark recently co-wrote an article insisting that “education assistance is not a handout, it is a sacred promise that we have made for generations in return for service”.
The old GI bill still exists, much amended, and it still offers a ton of money – up to $40,000 (£20,000, €26,000) towards education costs. That represents a third of tuition fees for a private university, two thirds at a public university and far more than it costs to go to a community college. The military offers a range of other benefits to draw recruits. Enlistment bonuses can reach $20,000 and for specialists the Army College Fund will pay up to $70,000 worth of tuition. Loan repayment programmes are also available, not to mention state military scholarship programmes and billions in federal funding, which soldiers can apply for.
Events in Iraq and Afghanistan have made these benefits hard to realise in practice. Television recruitment ads show Marines learning about computers, or lined up in their dress blues in front of the Golden Gate bridge, but many have spent the war hunkered down on some mine-strewn highway in the Hindu Kush. Volunteers who expected to study at war’s end are discovering that violent insurgencies can go on and on. Reservists, some of whom have spent half a decade in combat, are not eligible for the best educational benefits at all. The Webb proposals are tailored to address the worst of these problems. They treat reservists (and National Guardsmen) like the regular military and the benefits can be tapped long after the soldier’s tour of duty.
While the military can be used as a means of delivering welfare benefits, it is not only that. It is also a fighting force. Mr Webb’s plan would raise the value of potential education benefits high enough ($90,000 at the first re-enlistment point) to provide enough incentives to leave the military altogether – a big problem in a force built on technical knowhow. (These incentives would spur recruiting, too, a Congressional Budget Office report found, but not so much as they would spur retirements.) Mr McCain’s alternative gives more consideration to keeping the fighting force at full strength, partly by making the soldier’s educational benefit transferable to other family members.
As with any call for restitution, there should come a moment when whatever debt we have towards those we have wronged or undervalued has been discharged. Apparently that point is never reached when the “sacred” claims of the military are concerned. The 21st-century GI bill is based on a 20th-century idea of welfare attainments – that they are to be measured in absolute terms, without reference to economic limitations or social balance. If a 40-hour working week is good, a 35-hour week is better and a zero-hour week is ideal.
If you look at things this way, the case for making college free for soldiers is not much stronger than the case for making it free for everyone. The CBO estimates that the Webb benefits will cost $52bn over a decade. A few years ago, Adolph Reed Jr, the political scientist, drew up a plan to eliminate tuition fees for every public university student in the country for $27bn a year. Democrats in the House have suggested funding the Webb bill with a ½-per cent tax on higher income earners called the “patriots’ premium”. That could yet be expanded.
There are good reasons to defend this new GI bill. But the near-unanimous support for it is due to something more than a need to adjust the incentives in a volunteer military. It signals that much of the country yearns for a lurch back in the direction of welfare-state paternalism. One gets the uneasy feeling that the fiscal profligacy of the Bush administration will be followed not by fiscal prudence but by another round of deficit spending, to compensate those who feel they missed out when the pie was being carved up the first time around.
Nothing is above criticism.
Sounds good to me. Beats the wussified corporations of today.
The GI bill was the best investment that the US ever made. In my case, they gave me $3,600 to attend college for 4 year ( I had to pay all expenses.) Since then, I have averaged over $8,000 per year in personal income tax, and I continue to do so..
Guess what....George Washington had the same problem...and spoke out quite strongly about it.
It revolved around State Militias giving out higher pay for short time service in the National Army. GW said...If it continues...Everyone will simply wait around for a short term assignment.
Obama hit on McCain who basically holds the same view as Washington. Effectively, Obama disagrees with GWashington!!
Obama might be book smart but he's in left field in his view.
As to the Bill in general, Non-veteran students get grants for some FUTURE benefit to the country, researchers get money to POTENTIALLY develop something, farmers get benefits for NOT growing crops, workers get money for being unemployed.
IMHO the difference between these GI Bill benefits and all the other benefits and entitlements from government is that these people actually do something to EARN the benefit, and they do it BEFORE they earn the benefit, and they give up control of their lives to do it. [And they engage in a pursuit that most other's specifically reject doing
“Obama might be book smart . . .”
that’s debattable
Not too good with history
http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/149gqohu.asp
• Marking the anniversary of the March 1965 “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Ala., Obama, speaking at a church, said his parents got together “because of what happened in Selma.” Obama was born in 1961.
“57 states”
Not re: technology
• Obama told Larry King on CNN — asked about that anti-Hillary Rodham Clinton YouTube ad, a doctored version of a spot created for Apple computers — “We don’t have the technical capacity to create something like that.”
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/ken-shepherd/2008/05/27/obamas-gaffes-start-pile-lynn-sweet-march-2007
My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton’s army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka.
http://www.transterrestrial.com/archives/2008/05/its_nothing_new.html
Foreign policy?
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2008/05/another-major-foreign-policy-gaffe-by.html
*Earlier this month in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Obama showed off his knowledge of the war in Afghanistan by honing in on a lack of translators: “We only have a certain number of them and if they are all in Iraq, then it’s harder for us to use them in Afghanistan.” The real reason it’s “harder for us to use them” in Afghanistan: Iraqis speak Arabic or Kurdish. The Afghanis speak Pashto, Farsi, or other non-Arabic languages.
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/05/21/barack-obama-gaffe-machine/
geography?
*Last week, in front of a roaring Sioux Falls, South Dakota audience, Obama exulted: “Thank you Sioux City
*Explaining last week why he was trailing Hillary Clinton in Kentucky, Obama again botched basic geography: “Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it’s not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle.” On what map is Arkansas closer to Kentucky than Illinois?
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/05/21/barack-obama-gaffe-machine/
btt
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.