This is what Bush means by ‘supporting the troops’

February 13, 2007

Maybe conservatives can remind us again about which side of the political divide really supports the troops.

The Bush administration plans to cut funding for veterans’ health care two years from now — even as badly wounded troops returning from Iraq could overwhelm the system.

Bush is using the cuts, critics say, to help fulfill his pledge to balance the budget by 2012.

After an increase sought for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head. Even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing rapidly — by more than 10 percent in many years — White House budget documents assume consecutive cutbacks in 2009 and 2010 and a freeze thereafter.

The VA’s medical care budget has gone up every year for two decades. Under Bush, it’s risen 83% in six years. And now that the war in Iraq is spiraling out of control, and U.S. casualties continue to climb, the White House believes that it’s time to start cutting the VA health care budget.

It speaks volumes about how Bush perceives the notion of sacrifice. In his drive to eliminate the deficits he caused, the president has decided that tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires are sacrosanct, but medical care for U.S. troops is not. That’s not spin — that’s Bush’s own budget.

In other words, those who’ve sacrificed the least are protected, while those who’ve sacrificed the most are asked to sacrifice some more.

The good news is congressional Dems — you remember, the ones Republicans insist aren’t supportive of the troops — won’t accept the Bush White House’s proposed cuts.

“Either the administration is willingly proposing massive cuts in VA health care,” said Rep. Chet Edwards of Texas, chairman of the panel overseeing the VA’s budget. “Or its promise of a balanced budget by 2012 is based on completely unrealistic assumptions.”

Edwards said that a more realistic estimate of veterans costs is $16 billion higher than the Bush estimate for 2012. […]

The number of veterans coming into the VA health care system has been rising by about 5 percent a year as the number of people returning from Iraq with illnesses or injuries keep rising. Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans represent almost 5 percent of the VA’s patient caseload, and many are returning from battle with grievous injuries requiring costly care, such as traumatic brain injuries.

All told, the VA expects to treat about 5.8 million patients next year, including 263,000 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The White House budget office, however, assumes that the veterans’ medical services budget — up 83 percent since Bush took office and winning a big increase in Bush’s proposed 2008 budget — can absorb a 2 percent cut the following year and remain essentially frozen for three years in a row after that.

“It’s implausible,” Sen. Patty Murray (news, bio, voting record), D-Wash., said of the budget projections.

Now, to be fair, the administration’s number crunchers tacitly admit that they’re not serious about this. White House budget office spokesman Sean Kevelighan said the cuts for veterans’ health care “don’t reflect any policy decisions. We’ll revisit them when we do the (future) budgets.”

In other words, they’re just pulling a short-term con, right out in the open. They’re admitting that the White House budget is a sham, and all the talk about balancing the budget is based on promises that they have no intention of keeping.

The result is the worst of all possible circumstances: a White House with vacuous priorities (tax cuts for the rich over health care for the troops), a smoke-and-mirrors budget (leaving the tough decisions for the next president), and a patently dishonest sales pitch (they won’t even make the cuts they promise to make).

I can’t wait until there are grown-ups in the White House again.

David Broder, (R-Dementia Land), must think this is how one supports the troops.

What a f**king, dimwitted, moron douchebag Broder is.

  • This should be very easy for the media to report

    There are two things at play here

    either

    A. The ENTIRE budget is a complete sham and every item in should be scrutinized (ie the lack of war costs in the budget for starters)

    or

    B. GWB does not want to support the troops when they return home

    That’s it, no ambiguity, no need for “balance”…this story is as black and white as it gets…..

    I will not hold my breath for this analysis to make its way into the MSM..

  • And the Repubs don’t want class warfare? This is pretty much a declaration of war here.

    Gee, rich guy tax cuts over helping veterans recover from the wars that made the rich guys richer.

    I guess most rich people do live in a different world than the rest of us.

  • Well, as one veteran who is among the 45 million who lack medical insurance, I was very glad this month to find that those 18 months in Vietnam and 2 other years overseas finally had some value beyond teaching me there was a difference between loving my country and supporting the government, when I entered the VA health system. For those who wonder what government-run healthcare is like, let me say that I am sure the other 49,999,999 of my fellow uninsured would think they were in heaven to be there. Anyone who has dealt with civilian health care where you manage to be treated as an afterthought would find it quite nice to be in a system where people are not only glad to see you but want to “be of service.” At least I’m unlikely to die of prostate cancer now.

    So of course the Republican wreckers would want to throw a spanner in the works of a program that actually works and provides service to those who gave service.

    “The only ‘good Republicans’ are pushing up daisies.” Fucking scumbags.

  • Goes to show how little has changed. I grew up within the social group which bred and raised George Bush and there was a deeply held belief — not a superficial, cynical, off-the-cuff belief — that people who didn’t have didn’t deserve to have. They could trot out a dozen examples of the harm done to society by “fairness.” They got kudos for giving modest help to the “right ones”; they were idiots if they condoned any government help to the needy. The needy were inferior, not to be encouraged except in very small ways which wouldn’t change their perception of themselves as inferior. The belief in privilege vs. inferior is so ingrained that a) the privileged were genuinely surprised and aggrieved if you disputed it, and b) only grudgingly might they concede that a vet wounded in the course of fighting for their interests should be given the best medical care… well, okay, perhaps if he was an officer.

    A couple of decades later I lived in a country where most people believed animals didn’t feel pain. They were skeptical when told animals do indeed feel pain. It struck me how alike the two groups were in the convenience of their belief systems. In both cases the believers were often perfectly decent, kind, lovable human beings in other ways. Just blind and/or inexperienced and/or limited and defensive.

  • I meant to add to the above that Molly Ivins is one of very few (Dickens was another!) who understood the “privilege” phenomenon very well and dealt with it humorously and succinctly.

  • Bush considers soldiers to be props for his pep rallies. Why should they need health care (or body armor)?

    Regarding taxes, most Americans focus on income tax. I was looking at my phone bill the other day, and was amazed once again how many “little” taxes it includes. Same way with cable TV. An automobile, for example, sucks up plenty of taxes from ad valorem to fuel to licensing and more. Then there’s any plane flight. Plain folks pay a hell of a lot of taxes.

    I’m sure it will never happen, but I’d like to see a justification for all these “little” bites. Traditional conservatives have a legitimate gripe about taxes and government waste, although it’s usually selfish. We should too.

    No one has ever blown taxpayers money like Bush, and the Iraq debacle has created deficits almost impossible to overcome. Still, I think there’s a hell of lot of money that never gets to the right places, such as military health care and benefits. We can’t fix everything, but I’d like to see the Democrats dive into fiscal accountability. Among other things, it would do wonders for the popularity of the party.

  • Soldiers returning from war, wounded or not, have ALWAYS been forgotten in short order by the nation. North and South, they were treated with disdain, if not hostility, after the Civil War. The same is true of World Wars I & II, Korea and Vietnam. They get a brief nod on Veterans Day, but that day has come to represent department store sales. I fear that Iraq vets will be treated like Korean War vets, who I think are the least appreciated of all.

  • Like everything else, Bush is leaving the hard stuff for future presidents. It’s easy to cut a future president’s budget.

  • This is an issue which progressives should take up right quick for both moral and political reasons. The long habit of forgetting what we owe the victims of our political choices can be broken by a strong group of Democrats and progressives — including both supporters of the war and antiwar activists — who stand up for returning vets and don’t sit down again until resources are built into any resolution to use military force. Agree with Alibubba.

  • If one Democratic legislator suggested anything like this they’d all be hanging from the trees around the Capitol with rope supplied by Haliburton. But I forgot, the GOPers think Purple Heart Band-aids are a riot.

    I swear, if I had an airplane I’d round up a bunch of DeBasers and drop them over Iraq. I might even give them parachutes. Instead I must be content with hoping Jim Soltz tears Bush yet another new one.

  • “there was a deeply held belief… that people who didn’t have didn’t deserve to have” PW @ 5

    “either… The ENTIRE budget is a complete sham and every item in should be scrutinized (ie the lack of war costs in the budget for starters) or… GWB does not want to support the troops when they return home” lib4 @ 2

    Well said. The more desperate the situation becomes the more transparent modern conservative thinking becomes. This is the best opporunity in years for rational Americans to expose the inherent contradictions and utter bankrupcy of republican ideology.

  • Beep52
    “This is the best opporunity in years for rational Americans to expose the inherent contradictions and utter bankrupcy of republican ideology.”

    Yup. Con ideology can be summed in five words : “FUCK YOU, I got mine.”

  • This is pure stupidity for the Retardicans, because it’s such a transparently lose-lose situation for them.

    They propose cuts for veterans which they know won’t pass and everyone will hate them even more for proposing. So why do it in the first place? What’s the benefit for them? Absolutely none that I can see.

    One might ask if they really are that stupid. One would be correct.

  • B. GWB does not want to support the troops when they return home — lib4, @2

    You figure that’s why Bush’s sending them in underequipped? So that fewer of them come back to suck up the health care budget? Wouldn’t put it past him (and Cheney).

    And Alibubba (@8) is right; soldiers returning from war had always been put on the scrap heap of memory and gratitude. It goes back to the times when armies were, mostly, mercenary but itdidn’t change when people began to be drafted (or impressed, as the case might be)

  • Where have I heard this blatantly classist, go to hell attitude before? Oh yeah, the last time a Bush tried to relate to people who paid a price at the hands of federal negligence …

    “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this — this [she chuckles slightly] is working very well for them.” – Bush’s Mom

    They can’t help it. The family doesn’t have the genetics to care about a fellow human being, other than their own.

  • Face it, Bush is out of control…OUT OF CONTROL. How can he insist on placing our troops in harm’s way, for good or bad, and reduces their support by this givernment after they have given so much to his service?!!???

    Bush should be impeached. It is sickening.

  • So Boy George II proposes to balance the budget after he leaves office by making cuts in services to the victums of his own folly.

    Isn’t that just priceless?

    Note the cuts come in 2009 and 2010, so it’s not like HE’S hurting the veterens, is it?

    Gah! This guy was the Republican’ts BEST candidate in 2000. That’s what they told us. Imagine what we are going to get out of them in 2008.

  • My uncle died in a VA hospital in Buffalo almost 20 years ago. He was a WW2 vet, and that was hands down, the most sad and depressing place I have ever been. It left me with the conviction that once vets are home and the latest war is over, our govt. really doesn’t give a damn. Unless things have changed, and that was the exception to the rule, the VA is the last place I’d want someone I loved to end up.

    That said, I think that the VA deserves every bit of funding it has been promised and more, so it can provide the level of care and service that these men and women and their families so richly deserve. They should be places where people come to get help and encouragement, and maybe
    a sense of the gratitude our government owes them.

  • This was reported on http://www.va.gov and shows you what a scam this Carpetbaggers report is! I sugest you go there and read everything!

    VA Requests $87 Billion for Veterans in Landmark FY ’08 Budget
    Continuing to honor the nation’s commitment to meet the needs of America’s veterans, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jim Nicholson announced on Feb. 5 that President Bush will seek a landmark budget of nearly $87 billion in fiscal year 2008 for the Department of Veterans Affairs, with health care and disability compensation for veterans receiving the majority of the spending. The budget proposal represents an increase of $37.8 billion, or 77 percent, from the budget in effect when the President took office.

    The proposal calls for $42 billion in discretionary funding – mostly for health care – which is the largest amount ever requested by a president. It also would provide $45 billion in mandatory funding, mostly for compensation, pension, educational assistance, home loan guaranties and other benefit programs.

  • Alan,

    Perhaps you should take a reading comprehension course.

    It was noted in CB’s article that VA funding has gone UP 83.3% since 2001. But in case you don’t get it, the increase is for THIS fiscal YEAR, 2008. So in the short term, it has gone up, but your dear leader has decided to cut the VA budget in 2009 and 2010 which is not NOW but rather next TWO years in the FUTURE. Unfortunately, two years later is when a lot of these Iraqi veterans are going to need lots of help dealing with the emotional and physical issues.

  • Another trick the Shrub learned from his hero Ronald. Ronnie managed to wrap himself in the flag while gutting the V.A. through two terms, all in the name of balancing the budget. During the reign of the Great Communicator, my uncle, who retired from the Air Force after fighting in three wars, was told by his doctor to avoid the V. A. hospital, because the morale had dropped so low that it had become a dangerous place to be treated.

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