The Allen Almanac

There was a very good article on TomPaine.com on Tuesday that illustrates the problems with Republican bias against social programs.

The simple fact is that Pelosi’s legislative record on supporting veterans’ health care, education and other benefits is among the best in the House, while Buyer’s ranges from mediocre to atrocious, depending on who’s doing the rating. This is not a subjective judgment, but is based on two separate analyses of voting records by distinctly different veterans organizations—the venerable Disabled Veterans of America, and the upstart Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. (Check the ratings yourself from VAWatchdog.org and IAVA.)

It’s the current Republican leadership in Congress and the White House that own the worst record for supporting veterans legislation—a surprising reality utterly at odds with their support-the-troops rhetoric. Some of the loudest proponents of the war—embattled Sen. Mike DeWine of Ohio comes to mind—have some of the poorest records for supporting veterans (overall, Senate Republicans had a “D” average from the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans’ group), while the most prominent war critics and political liberals—Ted Kennedy, for one– have been the strongest supporters of vets’ legislation (the Senate Democrats had a B+ average).

These votes touch almost every aspect of veterans’ lives: The will of the majority has been to cut funds for brain injury research (more than 3,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered severe brain trauma); to use phony prewar statistics to calculate an unrealistically low but politically palatable cost estimate for veterans health care (causing a $3 billion budget shortfall now coming due); and to rebuff Democratic attempts to correct inequities in the G.I. Bill that cheat National Guard and reserve troops (who have contributed half the fighting force in Iraq and Afghanistan) out of college aid.

So much for supporting the troops. One party talks about it. The other one does it. It is one of the Republicans favorite tactics to assign their opponents with the faults of the Republicans so their opponent appears weak if they try to point out who is really at fault. Unfortunately, it works.

• After World War II, millions of veterans lined up for hours for a remarkable purpose: To register for free college educations, to buy homes with no money down and mortgages cheaper than rent, to sign up for vocational training and job counseling, and to apply for business and farm loans—all courtesy of Uncle Sam and the original G.I. Bill.

• In the wake of the Iraq war and occupation, a different sort of line came be found at military bases nationwide: bread lines. Thousands of military families have been left so impoverished they must queue up for donations of surplus cheese, day-old bread and damaged boxes of frozen food . This is especially true for bases in areas with high costs of living, such as the Marine Corps’ Camp Pendleton near San Diego, where food lines have become a weekly fixture.

When our warriors come home from Iraq, all too many find empty bank accounts, maxed-out credit cards and the realization that the college benefits used to entice enlistees often don’t cover the costs of a 4-year degree, nor support their families while they’re in class. And they actually have to have a payroll deduction in order to even qualify for those benefits. Still others, wounded in a war costing the country $10 million an hour, learn that their president and Congress have cut programs to heal their injuries, post-combat stress, and economic distress. Some vets wait six months for medical care. There are an estimated 200,000 homeless veterans from all eras on the streets at the moment; at least six hundred of them are known to have served in the current war in Iraq.

It’s hard to comprehend that we could have been a more progressive nation 40 years ago than we are today. Did we just decide we are the greatest nation of all time and quit striving for the American Dream?

Unfortunately, this is not merely a story of shortchanged veterans and hypocritical congressmen who support war but not warriors. That’s just an awful symptom of a bigger problem: a wholesale failure to invest in America’s future. Just imagine how a politician today would be mocked if he proposed offering an entire generation free college (with stipends), subsidized mortgages, job training and medical care. Yet today’s unthinkable was yesterday’s matter of course. There was no hesitation, no griping about government being the problem, not the solution. This bit of modern conventional wisdom—the animating principal of the government haters now in charge of our government—would have seemed like crazy talk back then to most Americans. And when FDR signed the G.I. Bill on behalf of 16 million veterans—1 out of 8 Americans at the time—he ended up powering far more than a return to the status quo. The G.I. Bill transformed the nation and the American Dream, opening up the colleges (formerly elite bastions), raising suburbs out of bean fields (a nation of renters became a nation of homeowners), growing the middle class (from 1 in 10 before the war to 1 in 3 a decade after), and providing the medical, engineering and scientific prowess to conquer dread diseases, usher in the information age and win the Cold War. It was what every social welfare program must aspire to be if it is to succeed: a hand up, not a hand-out.

Such luminaries as Bob Dole, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, William Rehnquist, Warren Christopher, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush and George McGovern, among many others, got their starts through the G.I. Bill, as did 14 Nobel Prize winners, two dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 450,000 engineers and a million assorted lawyers, nurses, businessmen, artists, actors, writers and pilots. This was a wise investment in every sense: A 1988 congressional study found that every dollar spent on education under the bill returned $7 through increased productivity, consumer spending and tax revenue. Unlike the $505 billion and counting being flushed down the Iraq drain, the G.I. Bill left us safer, stronger, more united and more prosperous. That’s called investing in the future—not for the next quarter, but the next quarter century.

We need that sort of an investment today, a new G.I. Bill for all Americans—not only for those in the military, but those young men and women who might choose other forms of service. Had FDR lived to serve out a last term in peacetime, America would have had such a program of national service. What heights could we have lifted our young people with the half trillion dollars flushed so far down the Iraq drain—and the even larger sum that staying the course will undoubtedly cost in the future. Instead, the American Dream so generously nurtured through the G.I. Bill after World War II is now under siege, from the cost of college to the cost of homeownership to the shrinking middle class to the declining numbers of advanced engineering and science degrees our young people earn.

Now we have the unbearable sight of breadlines for the families of our brave military men and women, inadequate budgets to care for wounded veterans, G.I. Bill college benefits that disappear in a haze of Pentagon fine print—and of congressmen and a president who point fingers everywhere but the mirror.

I was going to say something about how America’s priorities are mixed up when we spend so much more money on destruction that we do on creation, but I don’t think America has priorities anymore. Unless you can count making as much money as possible as a priority. The massive class divide in this country is pushing us back towards the feudal age.