Congress trying to CYA fix on Veterans funding

This is a great thing to do because as the article points out, veterans and their families are tired of being used in political games. Those games include everything else veterans care about.

Taking care of the VA is good but what about Social Security? What about Medicare and Medicaid? What about taking care of the roads we all travel on and bridges? How about police and fire departments across the nation? What about the FDA making sure food, water and medications are safe? What about the food stamp programs that put food on the tables of far too many veterans as well as active duty families need?

"An estimated 900,000 U.S. military veterans will lose some or all of their Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits on Friday."

How about fixing everything instead of playing some kind of game to make sure everything veterans fought for and still care about work? As for work, have members of congress done anything to make sure there are jobs for all of us? We kept hearing about jobs from politicians but one second they say "government doesn't create jobs" and the next they want to blame the other politicians for not making any. Which is it folks?

VA opposes shutdown protection only for itself
By Rick Maze
Staff writer
October 30, 2013

A politically popular proposal to protect all veterans programs from harm during future government shutdowns is meeting opposition from an unexpected source: the Veterans Affairs Department.

But VA’s opposition might not matter.

The House Veterans’ Affairs Committee passed bipartisan legislation in August to create a two-year discretionary budget for veterans programs to prevent disruption if Congress does not pass a VA budget by the Oct. 1 start of the fiscal year.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Independent who heads the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said Wednesday that his committee will pass similar but even more expansive legislation in November that would protect not just discretionary spending for things like benefits processing, information technology and cemetery programs but would also provides advance funding for benefits, paid with what is known as mandatory funding.

“Failure to pay mandatory benefits would be a disaster,” Sanders said. “As we saw this month, in the event of a prolonged shutdown, VA would not have been able to issue disability compensation, pension payments or education benefits. The veterans community is not particularly wealthy. Many of them depend on these benefits to feed themselves and their families, to pay their rent and to make ends meet.”
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