At 11:30 this morning, President Obama will unveil his jobs plan for military veterans, and it's quite robust. Veterans unemployment has hovering near or above 13% since the Great Recession started. With Iraq wound down, and Afghanistan winding down, it's going to become even more important for a concerted effort at reintegrating those veterans into the workforce.
The Obama administration has more actively dealt with veteran's issues than any administration that I can recall in recent memory. In contrast, the remaining GOP contenders don't even discuss military or veteran's issues - except to the extent that it benefits their buddies in the military industrial complex (such as bitching about the withdrawl timetable for Afghanistan, base closures, and Pentagon budget reductions).
The Veteran's Job Corps initiative has several components:
- New incentives to hire veterans as first responders: The President will announce $166 million in 2012 Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Hiring Grant funding and $320 million in 2012 Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response (SAFER) grants.
- Hiring veterans to protect Americans as first responders and law enforcement officers: Today, the President announced he will include in his FY13 Budget the $4 billion in COPS funding first proposed in the American Jobs Act to spur police officer hiring in 2012.
- Putting veterans to work preserving and restoring America’s land and resources: The President will propose $1 billion to develop a Veterans Job Corps conservation program that will put up to 20,000 veterans back to work over the next five years protecting and rebuilding America.
- Supporting veteran entrepreneurship by building our next generation of small business leaders: The President will propose an expansion of entrepreneurship training opportunities for separating service members and veterans.
It's not clear yet how the GOP controlled House will respond to the Veterans Job Corps plan, but with a $5 billion price tag, expect them to hoot and holler about costs and offsets. We're all quite aware that the GOP has historically "supported the troops" in a yellow-ribbon kind of way, but not much more. They have zero problem sending the military into harms way, but have been pushing for reduction in funding of veteran's programs and the Veterans Administration.
I'm anxiously awaiting Rmoney, Gingrich, Santorum and Paul's reaction to this jobs plan for veterans.