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American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Creating Jobs & Improving Quality of Life for Our Troops and Veterans
As President Obama has often stated, one of the chief goals of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, signed by the President on February 17, is to create jobs by putting Americans to work doing the work that America needs done. The long-neglected infrastructure needs of both our military and veterans’ facilities, as the Walter Reed scandal highlighted, require swift action.
That is why this legislation identifies and funds some of the most pressing infrastructure needs of the military and VA. Funding these infrastructure projects will create tens of thousands of new jobs, along with taking another step in keeping our promises to our troops and veterans. This legislation also includes other key provisions – including giving businesses tax credits for hiring unemployed veterans and providing disabled veterans a payment of $250.
In addition, it includes other provisions to improve the lives of our troops and veterans, such as funding additional child care centers and warrior transition centers for wounded warriors returning from combat.
Improving the Quality of Life for Our Troops
- Renovating and Making More Energy-Efficient DOD Facilities: Provides $4.2 billion to invest in energy efficient projects and to repair and modernize a variety of Department of Defense facilities.
- Improving the Hospitals for Our Troops: Provides $1.3 billion for rebuild and renovate our aging military hospitals and ambulatory care centers. Many of these facilities are 40 or even 50 years old, and are not suited to current medical standards and practices.
- Providing Assistance to Military Homeowners: Provides $555 million for assistance to military homeowners, including wounded warriors and surviving spouses, who have been impacted by the housing crisis.
- Improving Troop and Family Housing: Provides $335 million to build new barracks and dormitories for our soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen as well as to make further investments in quality family housing for military families.
- Expanding Child Care for Military Families: Provides $240 million for new child development centers on military bases across the country. These facilities will help military spouses hold down jobs and will provide employment opportunities for caregivers.
- Establishing Warrior Transition Complexes: Provides $100 million for warrior transition complexes to provide services to wounded warriors returning from combat and their families.
- Constructing Needed Facilities for the National Guard: Provides $100 million for new construction of operations and training facilities to support National Guard units across the country.
Improving the Quality of Life for Our Veterans
- Providing Businesses A Tax Credit for Hiring Unemployed Veterans: Provides a tax credit to businesses for hiring unemployed veterans. Specifically, veterans would qualify if they were discharged or released from active duty from the Armed Forces during the previous five years and received unemployment benefits for more than 4 weeks before being hired.
- Providing Disabled Veterans A Payment of $250: Provides a payment of $250 to all disabled veterans receiving benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs. (This $250 payment, which also goes to retirees, SSI beneficiaries and Railroad Retirement beneficiaries, is targeted to those who are likely not to benefit from the Making Work Pay tax credit.)
- Improving the Hospitals for Our Veterans: Provides $1 billion for non-recurring maintenance, including energy efficiency projects, to address deficiencies and avoid serious maintenance problems at the 153 VA hospitals across the country.
- Increasing the Number of VA Claims Processors: Provides $150 million for an increase in VA claims processing staff, in order to address the large backlog in processing veterans’ claims. This backlog has been a key complaint of veterans across the country.
- Improving Automation of VA Benefit Processing: Provides $50 million to improve the automation of the processing of veterans’ benefits, to get benefits out sooner and more accurately.
- Constructing Extended Care Facilities for Veterans: Provides $150 million for state grants for the construction of additional extended care facilities for veterans.
For More Info Click Here: http://www.va.gov/recovery
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Short URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/?p=5173
Posted by Veterans Today on Mar 7 2009, With 0 Reads, Filed under Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
COMMENTS
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This legislation, if approved, will go a long way to improve current military members and Veteran’s immensely.
I seem to remember that there is also a clause in the proposed FY 10 budget that will help people like myself, medical retiree’s. For us, we didn’t have the choice to serve at least 20 years through no fault of our own, but were punished monetarilly every month. For us, our retirement $ is deducted dollar for dollar what our VA disability compensation is each month. With this new legislation, we will finally be eligible for concurrent receipt and receive both retired and disability pay with no offset.
This is a great start, but there still needs to be so much more done in areas such as PTSD eligibility, claims processing and time constraints, indicting those responsible for the obstruction and destruction of veteran’s claims at our RO’s, the list goes on. We are a long ways away in righting the wrong’s of the past administrations.
We must wait and see if this program is really the answer to so many problems or if our President will have to adjust things in the future to serve the veteran community better. I think these things will go a long way towards correcting several problems but even more is needed to truely service the veteran community.
Truman did it!! Hoover did it!! Eisenhower did it!!
And
OBAMA CAN DO IT!!!!!
Create Jobs for LEGAL AMERICANS & SOLVE our immigration problem…
Back during The Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover ordered the
Deportation of ALL illegal aliens in order to make jobs available to American citizens that desperately needed work.
Harry Truman deported over two million Illegal’s after WWII to create Jobs for returning Veterans.
And then again in 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower deported 13 million Mexican nationals! The program was called ‘Operation Wetback’ so that American WWII and Korean veterans had a better chance at jobs.
It took 2 years, but they deported them!
Now, if they could deport the illegals back then, they can sure do it today!! Take back our country!
If you have doubts about the veracity of this information, enter Operation Wetback into your favorite search engine and confirm it for yourself.
They abuse and overcrowd our school system & medical facilities, never paying & don’t pay taxes, causing our taxes and insurance to go up… They are like leaches, sucking the blood out of our nation, sending most of the money they earn south of the border. The people that hire them should be fined and put in jail also…
Reminder::: Don’t forget to pay your taxes…
12 million Illegal Aliens are depending on you!
Vietnam Combat Veterans, Ltd.
VET-NET Bulletin
CommoCheck — Over©
2009.03.10:1024Z
I believe these announcements are steps in the right direction.
With retired Army Major General Shinseki as our new VA Secretary, Veterans and their Family Members might see some actual improvement in the VA’s long-standing [though unacknowledged] policy of “Delay, deny – untill you die.”
The General put military knowledge, honor and truth before “political correctness” when he insisted that we should have gone into Iraq with more troops. In so doing, he gave up additional stars and maintained his integrity. We have reason to hope that, like USMC Major General Smedley D. Butler, General Shinseki will tell America’s politicians and populace the truth about the patterns of abysmal abuse that our Veterans and their Family Members receive from the government they served.
Some of our kind have forgotten some of the things we were taught during our military induction. I speak, particularly, of those who are showing disrespect for the Office of the Presidency and our lesson: “You are not required to respect the Officer. You must, however, ‘show respect to’ the Office. And if you do not, there will be serious consequences to face.” The unspoken part was that the “consequences” involving disciplinary action against the offender were the least serious of all.
Like him or not, President Obama is our duly-elected President and Commander in Chief. Some of our kind dislike him so much that they are distributing [and re-distributing] slanted truth, false innuendo and, in some cases, downright lies — apparently in some misguided hope of accomplishing something-or-other. Being Veterans, they are not subject to consequences under the UCMJ — the less serious ones. Our Nation, however, and “We the People” must face the really adverse consequences of their desecrations of The Office of the Presidency.
As indicated, above, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s Military, Veteran and Family Member provisions appear to be a start.
Thanking you for your attention, I remain
Patriotically yours,
-/ s /-
Michael J. Davis; SS, DFC, PH
CWO-2, U.S. Army (Retired)
VCV, Ltd.; VET-NET
Bulletin Editor
On Honor:
To the people of our Nation, particularly our elected officials and VA bureaucrats:
We, your Military Veterans, ask that you honor neither our service nor our sacrifice.
We ask only that you honor your promise to us as we have honored ours to you. ~Mike Davis~