they don't come to congress to beg for money, they are Owed it.

they didn't donate to a $1000 a plate fundraiser, they signed a contract, served their obligation, and now we have to keep our end of the agreement.

health benefits, GI Bill, they earned it, and they should get it.

pay them what they are owed, and leave the politics out of it.

your potholes and pet social programs have Nothing to do with it.

I agree. Sadly, McCain pissed off many veterans that I know and work with by not whole-heartedly supporting the recent GI bill. Seems he was worried that too much college education would affect re-enlistment...That's just wrong on so many levels.

I want to hear more people talking about what we owe the vets returning from the current conflicts. We are seeing more survivors needing long term care than ever before. We're also seeing more vets that need mental health assistance, and fewer people talking about how important this will be to vets and their families. I want to hear both candidates discuss how we are going to be able financially meet our obligations to vets, in light of handing over 700B! to Wall St.

The costs of the Iraq war that this administration itemizes, or bothers to budget for, do not address the full range of services that we have promised and owe to our men and women in uniform.

The vets got their pay when they served. Non-combat injury related health-benefits, GI Bill etc. are just socialism. Socialism is OK, but lets not sacrilize what they did too much. Its prefectly reasonable to put their socialized benefits into the context of what society as a whole needs.

the GI Bill WAS their pay.

as was health care.

if it was in the contract, we owe it, regardless. you don't re-negotiate the deal after it is done.

Actually, from a legal perspective, they have no contractual, and they are dependent on the acts of Congress to continue to pay their benefits, and so they are constantly renegotiating. Time after time the courts have found that veterans do not have contractual rights to retirement benefits and medical care, regardless of what they were promised when they signed up.

I think its appalling that people signed up based on these promises and served and now can't enforce them, so I see your point in principle. But in reality, veterans are very much special interest groups who do have to go and lobby to get those benefits, and those benefits get considered in the same mix with everything else.

that is disgraceful then, isn't it?

who tells the kid that lost a leg he has to pay to replace his prosthesis?

it's not contractual, no. it is determined by law, and laws can be re-written.

If we were honest about what it would cost us in terms of proper medical and psychiatric care for veterans over the course of their lifetimes at the point of entry into a war, then we would have skipped the last 4 wars. When we're clear about the total costs of war, it's rarely worth it.

In the end, even the pacifists among us would prefer to see the soldiers treated as well as they deserve. And if we have to be more prudent about where we insert ourselves (instead of trying to rewrite the definitions of PTSD because it's not in the budget anymore) then so much the better.

And that's the point, it makes it socialism.

And there are folks who lose fingers, hands, legs and lives in private industry as well. The difference is that these people's choices on how to gain personal benefit hasn't been sacrilized. Frankly I have a tough time feeling MORE obligation to kids who sign up because they were too lazy to get a job and are now getting kicked out of their parents house, failed out of Community College because they were too busy partying, wanted to buy a cool new car, liked to blow shit up, were bored with their job at Taco Bell, didn't have many options because they didn't bother to study very hard in HS (this covers all but one of the dozen kids I know that enlisted in the last few years).

It particularly is disturbing because they are signing up primarily for personal benefit and what they are signing up to do is to kill and destroy the livelihoods of poor brown people.

Now I realize that Obama would be as shocked about my attitude as you probably are - but its about time we started to talke about what is really going on here rather than ignoring the very mercenary force that our all volunteer military has become.

In the end, even the pacifists among us would prefer to see the soldiers treated as well as they deserve

I'm not a pacifist - I recognize the need for a military. That said, I consider our current military to be primarily a mercenary force. And that does not make me particularly inclined to kindly views of kids who signed up to kill and destroy brown people's lives primarily because they were too lazy in their pampered teenage years.

Degsme, I agree with you on many things, but I think that you are way off here. The military are mostly honorable folks. Where we get into trouble is the civilian leadership. Those that aren't taking the bullets or suffering multiple tours of duty away from friends and loved ones. Being in the military is an honorable career path that many do because they feel it's an obligation and an honor to support their country. Even if you disagree with the leadership (Rumsfield, Bush, etc), it's terribly myopic and very disrespectful to write off those who work to keep these borders and your right to vote and voice opinion on blogs safe. The fact is, the military is an absolute necessity, but the leadership has been in shambles for 8 years now.

I know very well we (veterans) are not entitled to regard military promises as binding.

I joined the Navy and signed up for a technical specialty based on the promise of a large variable reenlistment bonus (VRB) for agreeing to serve six years instead of the usual four. When it came time to pay up, the Navy decided we were no longer as valuable as when it dangled the bonus in front of us to entice us to sign on for the extra two years. We had to serve the two years, anyway, of course, but no money.

We initiated a class action lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court. They ordered the Navy to pay up. I had moved on to civilian life by that time, and didn't even know about the decision. I just wrote off the money as one of those "never volunteer" lessons one learns in the military.

I got one of those government envelopes with a check in it about six months after I got out. I figured it would be $11.54 or something because they miscalculated my final paycheck. I was a wee bit surprised to see the amount was $4986. There was no explanation or anything, just a check for almost $5K. I felt good about the money, of course, but I felt even better about winning.

Does anyone think the current Supreme Court would make a similar decision?

It depends on what you consider honorable, and what the underlying motivations for joining the military are. If you want to "serve your country" as a noble calling, that's one thing. That has the potential to be honorable (though you know the adabe about patriotism and who its a last refuge for).

But as the advertising for the military, the recruting techniques and the reasons given for enlisting all attest to, if that was the primary makeup of the enlisted force, we would be looking at a military about 90% smaller than what it is today. Instead the majority are signing up for the PERSONAL benefits it gets THEM.

Now there is nothing wrong with personal betterment if you are fully cognizant of your tradeoff. But if either through willful ignorance or simple apathy you choose to benefit regardless of the suffering of others, then the "honor" in that is at best dubious. And what the military is good at - what its SUPPOSED TO DO - is to be the best at killling and destroying. And in the last 60 years, the US Military has been deployed ONLY against brown people, usually poor.

In the last 50 years, the US military has kept our oil prices down, but it has contributed very little to the safety of the borders, our ability to vote (as Carlin pointed out, it isn't really a right), or our ability to voice opinions.

Korea could be argued as a treaty obligation, but pretty much every "intervention" since then has been one of imperial adventurism. You realize that in the time that Hussein attacked 2 of his neighbors - both for very good cause - the USA attacked or invaded more than 9 nations, half of them our neighbors?

I just don't see much honorable about the modern military.

degsme:

I consider our current military to be primarily a mercenary force. And that does not make me particularly inclined to kindly views of kids who signed up to kill and destroy brown people's lives primarily because they were too lazy in their pampered teenage years.

Our military is a mercenary force. Pretty much all of the militarys in the world, other than conscripts are. A mercenary is one who gets paid to fight. What do you expect?

Romanticising fighting into something "honorable", such as fighting for the Constitution, freedom, democracy, or whatever is dangerous. We aren't in Iraq or Vietnam, or Korea, or World War II or World War I, and we certainly didn't fight the Cold War for anything so "honorable" as freedom and democracy. It was all about the capital. Our fearless leaders, who didn't have to get their hands dirty, send the underclasses over to fight the good fight for "freedom and democracy" or so they said, to keep capital freely flowing. Why individual soldiers fight is a different story, but why the corrupt guys at top do it? Don't get starry-eyed. It's all about trade.

I also think you're over-generalizing the make-up of the military. Very few of the people I served with were "lazy in the pampered teenage years." Most I knew joined up because there were few job opportunities that offered the necessary benefits that would get them the education they desired while providing health care and a living wage for their families. Perhaps you should ask yourself why it's overwhelmingly poor people who do the bulk of the fighting and the wealthy don't? Is it laziness? Do poor people just spend their teenaged years pampered?

That's a great point, Soc. That's where I was trying to go regarding over-generalizing, I just didn't do it as well as you.

As for romanticizing the idea that fighting for the constitution etc is noble, etc., I think that it is in fact romanticized and that isn't going to change. Until we are in the exact position of being shot at in a military zone, we aren't going to fully understand it and will continue to romanticize. The greatest violators making this romantic vision (and buying into it) are the military civilian leadership.

Much of that romanticism comes from the whole Greatest Generation mythologies. Well that "Greatest Generation" did some admirable stuff, as well as some less than admirable stuff including standing by as my grandfather and others like him were tortured to death or worked to death by Russians, firebombing cities like Bitburg where there were known displaced person refugee camps (including one with my mother and her mother), strafing children (my father was 12 and his brother 14 when a P51 tried to kill them for the crime of coming back with fish for the family).

So I don't buy this.

As for lazy - yeah I'd still say lazy. Cuz if they had opted to work a bit harder in HS, get better grades and better SAT scores, they could have gotten academic scholarships to college (my son just did, without that great a GPA but excellent test scores). Sure its fun to go to the prom, but if your choice is the prom or a college scholarship, what do you call someone who choses the prom?