Simpson to disabled vets
Daily Kos: Simpson to disabled vets: You cost too much Joan McCarter: Fresh off of being forgiven by the White House, Simpson has a new target.
:RALEIGH, N.C.—The system that automatically awards disability benefits to some veterans because of concerns about Agent Orange seems contrary to efforts to control federal spending, the Republican co-chairman of President Barack Obama’s deficit commission said Tuesday.
Former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson’s comments came a day after The Associated Press reported that diabetes has become the most frequently compensated ailment among Vietnam veterans, even though decades of research has failed to find more than a possible link between the defoliant Agent Orange and diabetes.
“The irony (is) that the veterans who saved this country are now, in a way, not helping us to save the country in this fiscal mess,” said Simpson, an Army veteran who was once chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee….
“It’s the kind of thing that’s just driving us to this $1 trillion, $400 billion deficit this year,” Simpson said. “It’s not that I’m an uncaring person, but common sense is the most uncommon thing in Washington.”
Dan (Rdan) here: We could do the numbers for the whole VA cost, but putting the deficit on the shoulders of diabetic veterans is simply out of it…when someone becomes old, their real thinking is blurted out without the normal screening public figures often take…what a tool.
Dan here: Lifted from comments, this wry thought comes to mind regarding Mr. Simpson’s inner world of lesser people:
How would you feel if after forty years of faithful service at five hundred a month and alternate Tuesdays off, your butler or cleaning lady said, “I’ve saved up enough to retire, so screw you.” ?
If the deficit chicken hawks don’t watch out the Dept of Veteran Affairs will spend more money than the entire military budget of China. Worse DVA may take money away from the $300B in cost overruns for a fraction of the trillions DoD spends on new largely faulty equipment. DVA might get in the way of profit for war machines that are not so well made.
When does Simpson get to the DVA disability retirements for all those senior officers who were world wide deployable until the day after they left their ratings?
And when does he check the exposures of all us retired military, which is several times what is in that trust fund?
Deficit chicken hawk smoke, diverting headlines from the 40% of the US G budget which is for the few.
There are an excessive number of veterans who are homeless and the DVA must take care of indigant veterans, there is nothing to cut there.
I certainly don’t understand how “O” can say with a straight face that Simpson stays? I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that “O” is really an Android, but more importantly, Simpson is gone out of his tree, needs his meds, should be in a care home for old vets. The insanity that is parading around Washington today is just plain nuts. I’m a Vet, but I sure don’t take kindly to this sort of B.S. and don’t really care who Simpson is/was, his time is past, to even consider him or the others on the board as being sane of mind, just boggles mine.
In reviewing Simpson’s recent contributions to the discourse last night with a friend we asked: “What does it take to get fired by Obama?”
Maybe if Andrew Breitbart and Glenn Beck took an interest he could be forced out
Good God, you don’t want to FIRE him. You want to put him on national television so the people can see and hear what the enemy looks like.
I have always thought that if someone signs up for the army, one of the perks should be lifetime medical care, without regard to “service related.” Maybe managing the costs of that would show us somthing about running a national health care.
ILSM, care to explain this statement? “Deficit chicken hawk smoke, diverting headlines from the 40% of the US G budget which is for the few. ”
How do you get to thee 40%?
OMG!!! :o! Looks like the deficit commission is actualy looking at all budget line items. Even liberal’s oxen are being gored.
You are cute corev. We are after your pension next of course, to make that new aircraft carrier affordable. Maybe five of them.
CoRev–First, get your punctuation right. Second, what’s your point? It’s ok to starve old people and vets if they’re liberals? And, budget line items are all “liberal spending?” Tain’t funny, Mcgee and you know what Mcgee I’m talking about. Nancy Ortiz
“…when someone becomes old, their real thinking is blurted out without the normal screening public figures often take…”
Um, when taking somebody to task for saying egregious stuff about a class of people, do you really want to finish up by saying egregious stuff about another class of people? Old people blurt stuff out? Really?
I have been playing with the notion that the commission was created to embarass itself. I can’t see how Obama wins from putting together a commission that is packed with people eager to see if the third rail is actually hot, but it’s hard to believe that this bunch is really meant to come up with fiscal policy that’s good for the country.
This is like hiring Kissinger to run a Southeast Asia policy panel, and then packing it with Vietnam-era hawks. Nobody accuses you of being wishy-washy, but no level-headed person would think you’d done anything to advance US interest, either.
What is Obama doing?
Y’all–I suspect that Simpson fancies himself a sayer of sooth. “See, people? This is what we mean when we say “hard choices.” But, we’re tough! We can hack it! We will fearlessly face the ill-informed criticism we recieve when all we’re doing is what Truman did! He told them the truth and they just thought it was Hell.
So, if the cuts are less than they propose, we are supposed to be grateful. That’s right, grateful that the bene cut was only 6.5% instead of 13% and that the vets now “own their own health care choices.” Simpson puts old Charles Montgomery Burns in the shade for mean. And, he’s proud of it. Obama has allied himself with a bad bunch. Well, good luck, Mr. President. That sort of thing usually doesn’t work out very well, but it’s only the US economy!
Simpson does not for a minute think that whacking SS benes will do any good for the deficit since all the next administration has to do is go on a spending binge (as Ilsm says on a new weapons system or a new colonial adventure) and there goes the surplus. Bush spent the Clinton surplus by half way through his first term. The object is to cut entitlements, period. It really doesn’t matter that it won’t really change anything. The entitlements make Peterson and the boys itch, so they gotta go. Interesting times. Nancy Ortiz
Me thinks that kharris is correct on the point. Age has little to do with it unless dementia can be accurately diagnosed.
Isn’t it interesting that the only expenses that Simpson and his “cronies” (that may be you CoRev) can only find svings from the hides of the disabled and the elderly? Has Simpson offered to cut his pension money? Is he not collecting Social Security benefits? Might his associates in their cozies be able to absorb Clinton era tax rates and categories? So many souorces of revenue yet only the elderly and the disabled are getting the attention.
Boy, the elderly are really under attack by the “O” administrations. First the health care bill cut coverage for theelderly, and now, if Jack is correct, (nobody’s seen the actual report) the commission will focus even another attack on them.
Yup! Sucks to be old in the US, under a Dem administration. I wonder if I can find that in Mike’s book?
Jack, Boy, the elderly are really under attack by the “O” administration. First the health care bill cut coverage for the elderly, and now, if Jack is correct, (nobody’s seen the actual report) the commission will focus even another attack on them.
Yup! Sucks to be old in the US, under a Dem administration. I wonder if I can find that in Mike’s book? 🙂
It is closer to 42% of outlays on discretionary spending dedicated for the corporate dividend and coupon clippers from firms selling to the 42% and also who buy T-Bills with their tax uts.
Rdan,
The Fed Civil Service (not unique to DoD) pension problem is a mix of inflated pay scales and inflated job descriptions to have far too many high grades to manage contracts to do the work.
What used to require a GS 5 1102 (CoRev knows this series), now requires a GS-15 1101 program manager, a GS 13 1102 Contracting Office and a few GS 12 subject matter experts. And they don’t know whatthe contracts deliver.
There are far too many high grades: GS 14 and 15.
But the work is contracted out.
I benefitted too, by the way.
The good thing is congress will do away with the flawed commission and go the way it will.
Of course…its called ‘disinhibition’ and is organic. Or it is feelers to guage reactions and testing the waters??
Dan, with ILSM’s, and my retirements and 2slugs salary, we should be able to build those carriers and build the aircraft needed for them.
Of course taking just two of those Sr. Contractor Mgrs’ salaries (not three Fed salaries) we could still build the same lot. 🙂
ILSM, is correct. What has happened is we have contracted out most of the basic work and turned the remaining Fed work force into various levels of managers. Of course, when we see those private/public (especially Fed) jobs comparisons, we can not match most categories.
There are a LOT of ploys…I saw one article on comparisons that was out right propaganda in the guise of number. Can you send me one such?
Ilsm–Rest easy. In SSA, a GS-15 is a rare and wonderful thing, and they know it. You can labor your whole career in the fields of the Lord in SSA and never get even close to the GS-13 ceiling, let alone a GS-14. Our job series of choice is 105, a generalist position for which practically any level of education and experience will get you an extremely hard job for as long as you can stand it. I only lasted 32 years. People I know still working in SSA will cash out with close to 50 years of service. And, they look like it too. Soon as they retire they look a hell of a lot better. Surprise! Nancy O.
CoRev–Right you are that is McGee. As in Fibber McGee and Molly. (If you never heard of old Fibber, it’s just proof you’re a lot younger than I am. Good for you!) And, if I want to criticize your punctuation, I oughta spell correctly, I think. Sorry. But, yeah, Simpson is selling us wolf tickets. Which I will kindly explain if it seems important to anyone, but it’s essentially just a scary confidence game. As CoRev says. Nancy O.
Ilsm–Congress will not do any such thing. That would be too sensible. They’re all staggered by the huge, shiny numbers in the deficit and scared to death of losing their jobs.
However, CoRev, if you think it sucks to be an elderly person in the Obama administration you should have been around during the Bush years. Remember, nobody cares particularly about the huge unworked claims and appeals backlogs in SSA except the mainly older disabled workers who have been waiting years for benefits.
Yet another good work of the Bush administration. Wouldn’t want to pay them, would we? They’ll only get used to benefits and never work again! Come down to it, no one likes federal employees except the people who depend on them. And, I will allow as how DOD does serve a purpose beneficial to the public. But, as Ilsm says, it should be managed correctly. Nancy O.
Maybe we shouldn’t retrieve our wounded in battle and save some money?
I too have been wondering that maybe this whole “deficit commission” is a clever political ploy. Give these people the spotlight and give their thinking an airing in the public limelight?
Before now they could just make Glen Beck quips, without the teeth of suggesting policy and budget priorities we may have to take seriously.
After all, wiki’s Peterson bio describes him as a philanthropist!!!!!
Of course he is.
His foundation is a tax emempt non profit charitable organization dedicated to educating the public about the evils of the federal debt.
you see, he is just “giving back.”
ILSM, now you’re changing the percentages and the total. First you used the US G budget (that’s the whole budget) now you are claiming it’s 42% of the discretionary budget.
Which is it? Why are we supposed to care? You are making a case for being hyperbolic and wrong in your analysis.
NanO, let’s not get into that ole is mine older than yours argument. Anyway, from some of your previous comments I think I have you by a few years. Now that you have explained the McGee comment, yes I do remember him/them.
It’s tempting to think “Obama has a plan” or “there’s a (good) hidden reason for this” but I’ve been there, done that, with the health care debate. As one memorable character put it, “Fool me once…”
Having said that, I can see Coberly’s point about not firing him. Heck, I could go for CSpan running live coverage of the Commission’s meetings! Most people would still consider it boring, and opt out of watching, but there could be nightly roundups of the day’s “quips.” If the dominant media didn’t want to do it, I’m sure Jon Stewart would.
If there were any truth to it, you probably could. Spin, spin, let me count the ways. Sucks to be old under Democrats? Believe FDR was a Democrat, and the government insurance plans for the elderly being discussed here were his creation. The 1983 deal to make workers cough up money to FICA so that the Treasury could borrow it and cut taxes for the rich happened – lessee – in 1983.
Nobody has seen “the report” because there isn’t one. C’mon, if you are going to go around pretending to know stuff, you need to keep up. The commission’s recommendations, whatever they turn out to be, are not Obama’s until he adopts them as his own. They aren’t binding.
So, once again all we get from CoRev is dishonesty and sneering attacks. Such a clever boy.
I’ll take Bill&Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet anyday.
I applaud Simpons strategery.
Attack the entitlements and benefits early in the debate to throw you haters back on your heels. Next step is to attack a key piece of euipment actually being used on the battle field…for example…..Drones.
After that comes the public compromise. X amount of military cuts for X amount of government human resource spending 🙂
I agree, the more people see of him, the more they will see through him.
Coberly,
maybe a little holier than you.
Everytime someone criticizes an entitlement, even, in this case, one which the people are apparently not entitled to. The big spenders can count on people like you and rdan to jump up and say how cruel and inhuman the person that says “no” is.
It is a very easy and cheap way to feel good about yourself. You don’t even have to do anything, and someone else pays. So I get that. However, this type of government profligacy has a negative effect on economic growth and JOBS. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Need shipyards in Virginia and Mississippi.
Navy ships are among the few ships built in US because there is no limit to the cost, and profit. South Korea seems to be growing though.
sammy,
Don’t you care about your sick, aging vets? Or do you only honor those wonderful soldiers when they are killing and destroying to sell the war machine and some sick definition of miliarism in the guise of patriotism? What do you think when you pass a 60 something panhandler, with a Vietnam Servcie ribbon on his rags? Must be lazy? Not service connect PTSD or drug issues picked up in Vietnam where our puppets ran the drugs business then too.
How statistically significant are the studies to link agent orange to diabetes or cancer? How significant do they need to be?
It is easy for republicans’ talking heads to criticize the idea that entitlelments for the sick, disabled and elderly need to go away and they all just die, in debtor prisons, when the war profiteers are skimming billions for phony trash.
The war profiteers work surreptitiously in the halls of the senate and house office buildings bringing in bags of money looted from cost overruns for shock and awe anywhere the US wishes to justify the war profiteers’ budget some of the money plundered from vets’ “entitlements”.
As someone said recently, the US has to make sure DVA spends less than the military budget of China.
While we talk statistical significance, what is the correlation of shock and awe with a dozen super carriers each much larger than the nearest French or Brit competitor (each have one or two, and last I saw they were allies). and any threat?
When the war profiteers are criticized like the aging, and sick we can talk.
sammy
i pay taxes too. i am willing to risk giving benefits to veterans without forcing them to prove their medical needs are service related. if it turns out to be too expensive we can reconsider.
difference between you and me is that i try to look at the numbers. you just get scared of ghosts.
Oh dear sammy. There are several approaches to this, but on this one ‘bleeding heart’ had not occurred to me.
Simpson has choices regarding his public statements if he is not blurting out private thoughts. He is in a position of prestige, so his statements are being used to anticipate deficit priorities. It is thought in some circles I have read about that hardware is off table and the ‘reductions’ will be in the human side of the military (Sec. Gates).
Whether a claim is valid or not might be of concern and diagnosis very imprecise, but if you look at the numbers hardly significant for the deficit, so a figure suggesting this as a possible priority suggests where cuts will be sought.
If this is spin, get Simpson to clarify?
Compassionophiies… Ah ha. Where would you reduce costs in the military sammy, instead of the actual increase? Yes I also suggested taking a clearer look to PTSD in this type of warfare, and TBI of course, which could be measurable physically, in posts several years ago.
Sammy–How exactly do you know whether the vets who have diabetes are entitled or not? Why would you think they wouldn’t be when, of course, many vets suffer from a combination of injuries and relating complicating medically diagnosable conditions? I already explained that diabetes can be idiophathic and also acquired from the long-term use of such anti-inflammatory medications as prednisone.
Yep, someone who stays just naturally pumped up on adrenalin as a result of being constantly shot at can burn out his immune system, alright. Also, if somebody makes a serious attempt to blow you up and you survive with some nasty fractures, you better believe you’re going to get a lot of prednisone in the process of rehabbing your shattered knee, femur, and hip. Oh, yeah. So, sammy, I know quite a bit more about this stuff than most people. Helped process the DIB claims for the vets from Nam and have seen people who have survived, if you can call it that, these recent wars. So, this isn’t your area of knowledge. I’m happy to leave it at that. Nancy O.
“Relating” should be “related or associated.” NO
Well
Sammy contents himself with the thought that the rest of us are holier than thou bleeding heart liberals who are glad to spend his money on people too lazy to work.
It’s not true, but it gets him through the day.
But as old Bill Buckley used to say, “The night is coming.”
sammy
your hierachy of possible is somewhere between in your own mind and a mere word game.
the neighbor with the dog and the bill saying “possible” is arguing a kind of possibility that is merely “well it couldda..” and the researches saying “possible” are saying “there’s some reason to think it could be, but we can’t be sure.”
in any case, i take the view, as i have said, that any person who signs up to fight to protect my ass and yours deserves the benefit of a doubt… to the extent that i would offer lifetime medical and disability insurance as a signing bonus.
look at it this way.. you pay a private so many (not many) dollars a month to go off and take a chance of getting killed and certainly working under some pretty unpleasant conditions. adding the cost of lifetime insurance to that compensation package amounts to a raise for him of a few dollars.
it costs you, per person, less money that you could see with a microscope. this strikes me as at least a good investment in incentivizing people to sign up. an incentive a lot easier for me to understand than your theory that giving huge tax breaks to millionaires incentivizes them to go out and make more money and create jawbs for the rest of us too dumb to create out own.
i didn’t say it, but the “sap” in this discussion is your granpa who turned down his pension.