GI Bill and college costs

As a college student and veteran, I know how important education benefits are to our service men and women returning home from overseas. Unfortunately, Sen. McCain is failing to show leadership on this issue. Veterans deserve to be represented by leaders who will recognize their sacrifice to our nation.

The cost of attending college has increased at a much faster rate than what Congress has authorized for annual increases for education benefits in the past. A large coalition of bipartisan legislators has proposed a reasonable increase for the GI Bill to close this gap.

This increase will pay for itself in the long run by creating more educated workers who can support themselves and their families.

Jon Ethington
President, Kansas City Young Democrats
Overland Park

Comments

[solomon]

I can see NEs neighborhood meth lab is having a good noliday weekend.

[NoMoreMrNiceGuy]

Because of my opposition to the draft and the war, I am in great sympathy with those who are not willing to fight, kill, and maybe die for their country, that is, the particular policy of a particular government, right or wrong. Two of my friends at Oxford are conscientious objectors. I wrote a letter of recommendation for one of them to his Mississippi draft board, a letter which I am more proud of than anything else I wrote at Oxford last year. One of my roommates is a draft resister who is possibly under indictment and may never be able to go home again. He is one of the bravest, best men I know. His country needs men like him more than they know. That he is considered a criminal is an obscenity.

The decision not to be a resister and the related subsequent decisions were the most difficult of my life. I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system. For years I have worked to prepare myself for a political life characterized by both practical political ability and concern for rapid social progress. It is a life I still feel compelled to try to lead. I do not think our system of government is by definition corrupt, however dangerous and inadequate it has been in recent years (the society may be corrupt, but that is not the same thing, and if that is true we are all finished anyway).

When the draft came, despite political convictions, I was having a hard time facing the prospect of fighting a war I had been fighting against, and that is why I contacted you. ROTC was the one way left in which I could possibly, but not positively, avoid both Vietnam and resistance. Going on with my education, even coming back to England, played no part in my decision to join ROTC. I am back here, and would have been at Arkansas Law School, because there is nothing else I can do. In fact, I would like to have been able to take a year out perhaps to teach in a small college or work on some community action project and in the process to decide whether to attend law school or graduate school and how to be putting what I have learned to use. But the particulars of my personal life are not nearly as important to me as the principles involved.

After I signed the ROTC letter of intent I began to wonder whether the compromise I had made with myself was not more objectionable than the draft would have been, because I had no interest in the ROTC program in itself and all I seemed to have done was to protect myself from physical harm. Also, I began to think I had deceived you, not by lies - there were none - but by failing to tell you all the things I'm writing now. I doubt that I had the mental coherence to articulate them then. At that time, after we had made our agreement and you had sent my 1 - D deferment to my draft board, the anguish and loss of self-regard and self-confidence really set in. I hardly slept for weeks and kept going by eating compulsively and reading until exhaustion brought sleep. Finally on September 12th, I stayed up all night writing a letter to the chairman of my draft board, saying basically what is in the preceding paragraph, thanking him for trying to help me in a case where he really couldn't, and stating that I couldn't do the ROTC after all and would he please draft me as soon as possible.

I never mailed the letter, but I did carry it on me every day until I got on the plane to return to England. I didn't mail the letter because I didn't see, in the end, how my going in the Army and maybe going to Vietnam would achieve anything except a feeling that I had punished myself and gotten what I deserved. So I came back to England to try to make something of this second year of my Rhodes scholarship.

And that is where I am now, writing to you because you have been good to me and have a right to know what I think and feel. I am writing too in the hope that my telling this one story will help you to understand more clearly how so many fine people have come to find themselves still loving their country but loathing the military, to which you and other good men have devoted years, lifetimes, of the best service you could give. To many of us, it is no longer clear what is service and what is disservice, or if it is clear, the conclusion is likely to be illegal. Forgive the length of this letter. There was much to say. There is still a lot to be said, but it can wait. Please say hello to Colonel Jones for me. Merry Christmas.

Sincerely,

Bill Clinton"

[NoMoreMrNiceGuy]

Have you read the bill? You are spinning the facts. McCain is not against a revised GI Bill. He is correct in NOT voting on something he has not throughly reviewed.
The issue at hand is not so much providing funding for an education to soldiers but levels of funding. It's thing to allow fair and equitable funding, another to have an open checkbook with no limits. There are many soldiers that want military careers. Some want to become officers and some don't. College or no college, we must still retain a fighting force that is combat ready not just a bunch of Phds and lawyers.

[Jim]

McCain couldn't even leave his elitist fundraiser friends out in California to come back and do his job by voting on this bill. If you had an extra $28,000 lying around, you could hand it over and get a picture with the Senator. Meanwhile a huge majority of both houses, a veto-proof majority, passed a real GI Bill that will improve the lives of our GIs in these two wars.

If McCain wants to toss his lot in with Bush, that's fine by me. It's just another reminder how McCain really would give us a third Bush term. Too bad he felt the need to hide with his elitist friends than to have to courage to go on record about it on the Senate floor.

[NoMoreMrNiceGuy]

Well taxation has increased at an even higher rate. How come the Demcrats refuce to reduce taxation as to afford wage earneers more of THEIR EARNED income.
John McCain did not support the bill because it had a load of pork barrel attachments to it. He is for more benefits to veterans. I think it is good he does not endorse an irresponsible bill. Sen. Obama seems to think there are more than a hundred pennies in a dollar.

[Rogue]

The bill should increase benefits I agree, but at the same time increased unemployment compensation hardly belongs in a GI bill Mr. Ethington.