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Vets' Notes: Cutting Thru Red Tape, Making Sense of Regs

By VVAW

Keeping an Eye on Our Congressmen: A proposed 5.5% hike in GI Bill payments has disappeared from the legislative agenda. For the last two years there have been raises in the GI Bill and some vets had come to expect—even believe—that Congress was tryting to give us a little something so we would fall only a little further behind inflation each year. But not this year.

According to a staff member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, the plan to raise benefits, and another larger scale plan which would have inserted a cost-of-living escalator into the GI Bill have both been dropped because Congress instead wants to work on pension reform for older vets. "The older veterans have the political clout in Congress," the staff member said. As a result pension cost may well increase $10 billion over the next five years.

But don't give up hope—Congress is thinking about us Vietnam vets. The House Veterans Affairs Committee is going to hold hearings on GI Bill overpayments and the poor repayment record of Vietnam-era vets on V.A. education loans.

Vietnam veterans certainly have nothing against an increase in pensions for older veterans—they need to keep up with inflation probably even more than most of us do. But there's no reason why it has to be an either/or proposition. If they need a place to get the money from, one clue might be in a recently published table which gives expected retirement salaries, based on life expectancy figures, for lifers. If you put in 30 years and retire as an O-10 (that's a bunch of stars), you can expect to get $898,805 before you drop dead!

V.A. Education Loans: V.A. educational loans aren't a bad deal if you're in school on the GI Bill. Depending on how bad the V.A. wants to see its loan fund used, even to the paperwork isn't bad. Go to a V.A. rep at your school or write to the V.A. and ask for a loan form. That form will require that you detail your income and projected expenses. Based on your figures, the V.A. will determine how much of a loan you will get.

To qualify you have to be enrolled in school on the GI Bill. You can get up to $2500 (recently raised) for a nine-month period. The loan, with its 7% interest, is due 90 days after the vet finally leaves school. There's no clear way to judge when the V.A. will decide to push the program—if you've got a decent vet rep, he or she can clue you in.