30-Something Working Group

30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP -- (House of Representatives - June 22, 2004)

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Gerlach). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.

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Ms. LINDA T. SÁNCHEZ of California. Mr. Speaker, I would join my colleagues a little more often if they were not up here so late at night. I know that the gentleman has already talked about a number of issues that particularly impact young people in this country. I know that I was here when we talked about the tuition increases and the rising costs of student loans, the increasingly bleak job market for recent graduates. I know that the gentleman talked about the voter suppression issue, and tonight I want to talk a little bit about the men and women who are putting their lives on the line in Iraq and in many places around the globe to protect our country.

Mr. Speaker, we are rapidly coming up to the 4th of July, our Independence Day; and I think it is timely to thank the men and women who sacrifice themselves on behalf of our country.

An interesting statistic that I ran across is that 70 percent of the people serving in Iraq are ages 18 to 30, and that is obviously a big group of young Americans. Unfortunately, while people talk a lot about patriotism and about supporting our troops, unfortunately, what we are seeing under the current Bush administration is that many of the support mechanisms for these men and women, once they come home, are being dismantled. So instead of talking and giving just lip service to how we should be supporting our troops, we should be passing legislation that stops the cuts that the President has proposed, especially cuts to VA health care.

It was not too long ago that I visited, and I have been there on several occasions, Walter Reed Medical Center, which is where the wounded soldiers come after they are stabilized from the theater in Iraq; and I had an opportunity to talk with many young men in the amputee ward, some as young as 19, 20, 21, 22, who are going to need ongoing health care for their injuries. They are going to need job retraining because the jobs that they are going back to they cannot hold anymore. And, unfortunately, what we have seen this government do is cut benefits to VA programs, especially the health care programs, at a time when out of the other side of their mouth, they are saying we need to support our troops.

So I find that there is a level of hypocrisy in what the Bush administration says and actually what they are doing. I tell people all the time, the measure of our patriotism is not just about rah, rah, and cheering the troops while they are in war, in theater; but it is how do we treat those same men and women once they come home and they need us.

Unfortunately, we are seeing that this administration is bent on cuts to VA services. Veterans who have fought some of their toughest battles for this country on foreign soil then come back to fight the bureaucracy of the VA health care system and face ever-increasing delays to be seen by doctors, closing of facilities and consolidation, which means that they have to travel many, many more miles just to go and get the basic services that they are entitled to.

I just want to note, before I engage my two other colleagues here this evening in discussion, that even VA Secretary Anthony Principi publicly acknowledged that he tried in vain to secure more funding from this administration. So what kind of priorities does this administration have if they cannot meet the funding request of the VA Secretary who was hand-picked by President Bush? Mr. Principi is someone the President picked, but he is also a veteran. So he could not keep quiet about how egregiously low the funding level is for the VA administration.

So I think it is timely that young people know that we are asking them to make a great sacrifice in risking their health and their lives overseas; they are being divided from their families and, again, they are coming back to an administration that is saying they support the troops when, in fact, the services and the follow-up care that they are going to need is being cut while they are away.

I do not know what my colleagues think about that, but I yield.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I think it is important that we talk about and put ourselves in the shoes of these veterans who are going to be coming back, and one of the issues that they are going to be dealing with is their veterans benefits, which the gentlewoman has talked about.

Secretary Principi is saying they need another $1.5 billion. The House budget, both Democrats and Republicans, for the most part, on the committee have agreed that we need another 2.5 or $3 billion more for the veterans to meet their needs. And I think it is important to understand that what we hear from the administration is that we have increased funding for veterans, the Veterans Administration by ex-fold or whatever the percentage points they want to cite, and that is great; but the problem is we have thousands and thousands more veterans accessing the system, so although we are putting more money into it, it is not addressing the demand of the people going into the system.

I know in northeast Ohio we have a large concentration of veterans. I think I have 73,000 veterans in my district out of a 700,000-person district; that is almost a sixth of who we represent, and the reason is, the steel mills close down, you lose your pension, you lose your health care, you do not have anywhere to turn, you never utilized the VA system, but because of the drastic downturn in the economy and the weeding out of manufacturing, you are having a lot of these people enter the system.

So the gentlewoman's point is very well taken, and I think it is something that needs to be addressed and it is an issue that, again, it is easy for us to say here, but these veterans save this capitalistic system. These veterans save the democratic system. And there would be no one generating wealth, there would not be CEOs making however many times, 300 times as much as the average worker if the system was not saved by these heroic veterans.

So I think it is important for us to know that this system that we have that is generating all this wealth would not exist if it were not for the veterans. So I think we have some obligation some responsibility to make sure that we provide them with the health care, the benefits, and everything else that they need.

I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

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Mr. MEEK of Florida. And I must say that the President is from Texas, right?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I think so.

Ms. LINDA T. SÁNCHEZ of California. Allegedly.

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Ms. LINDA T. SÁNCHEZ of California. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to mention one thing in the hearing, you talk about the
testimony in the Committee on Armed Services. It just further illustrates how unfair of a burden we really are delegating to, again, these young men and women who are going overseas with the best of intentions. They want to serve their country well. They want to do the right thing. They are doing their job under very difficult circumstances and to the best of their abilities. But their leadership at the top is failing them.

It is making the situation such that they are going to have to stay for longer and longer periods of time. They will have to endure worsening conditions and continuing instability. And these are folks that are proud Americans that want to serve this country. And, again, their leadership from our President is failing them.

I just think it is such a tragedy because we are asking these young people to take the brunt of the risk. And when they come back stateside and, hopefully, they come back safely, the way that this administration is thanking them for taking that risk is unbelievable.

I want to talk about one brief issue before I have to run, and that is called concurrent receipt. We like to call it the veterans tax or the disabled veterans tax. And what that is is people who have served in the military who have earned a military pension and they are injured in combat and they are receiving disability pay, they have their pension payment deducted by whatever amount they are receiving in disability.

So they are not receiving their disability payment and their pension payment as they should. Because they are meant to do two different things: Disability payments are meant to compensate and help people who have been injured and suffered disabilities from fighting.

A pension was meant to give them a cushion for retirement. They are actually deducting the disability payment from the pension payment so the person gets one amount of money when they should actually be getting both concurrently; and I know that there are Democrats in this body who have been fighting like hell, and pardon my French, to try to eliminate this disabled veterans tax, and we have met full on resistance from the other side of the aisle and the Bush administration.

I think that doing that to veterans who, again, have sacrificed much, have been honored for their work on the battlefield, is just a hypocrisy, and it is like slamming the door in their face after they have taken the brunt of the risk; and, again, it is a failure of leadership, things like the GI bill that were intended to help veterans come back and reestablish their lives by helping them fund a college education.

Today is actually the 60th anniversary of the GI bill. We have seen the GI bill pretty much gutted to what it initially was so that even with the GI bill help, many kids coming back from theater having served overseas in combat just do not have the kind of benefits they do to pick up their lives and move on with a college education and try to move into other fields.

Again, I just think it is shameful that this administration is failing our young people in such a way.

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Ms. LINDA T. SÁNCHEZ of California. Mr. Speaker, excellent point, and I am going to have to leave you gentlemen now, but I just wanted to commend both of you for your excellent work in trying to bring issues to light that impact young adults in America, and I think this topic is so very timely, and I urge you to continue your great work on the issue.