An American Lion

Is that unfair of me? Too bad.

As I told you in September, Veterans who expected to receive their 21st Century GI Bill benefits went waiting for them. Emergency funds had to be disbursed and the system, much of it set up during the Bush Administration but overseen from January to September by the Obama Administration, failed to meet the standard.

Today, we find out how acute the problem really is:

Universities and colleges are still waiting for tuition payments for thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who attended school last fall under the new GI Bill, leaving the veterans panicked that they’ll be unable to return to class in January.

Veterans Affairs Department officials promise to get them back into the classroom. The VA says the number of veterans with claims unprocessed is now fewer than 5,000 — down from tens of thousands — and the goal is to have them all processed by the end of the year.

“We continue to work on a daily basis with schools to make sure that no student is denied attending class as a result of delayed tuition payments,” Katie Roberts, a VA spokeswoman, said Tuesday. “It’s a top priority for VA to make sure that students can focus on their studies rather than their bank accounts.”

But after being besieged by delays and financial hardship last semester that left them struggling to make rent payments and pay for textbooks, many veterans are frantically contacting veterans service organizations such as the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America for guidance.

Clay Hunt, a former Marine corporal who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, attends Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He said he and his wife have racked up about $4,000 in credit card debt because his university won’t release student loans he needs for living expenses until tuition is fully paid. Hunt, 27, said under the GI Bill the school is still owed about $6,000 and he personally is owed about $1,700 for housing and books.

“I am disappointed about it,” Hunt said. “I’m very disappointed about the way it was implemented. I feel like the VA had ample time to figure out how they were going to disperse these payments and make sure this transition to the new GI Bill went smoothly, and they definitely failed to do that.”

The Veterans Administration has thrown mandatory overtime and 1,200 employees at the problem. My question is, if you had built a better system, you wouldn’t have the problem of processing the claims. You’d have a viable working system in place. Who’s responsible for building a bureaucratically inefficient system of handling the claims? If it was a Bush-era appointee, then so be it. We then should place the blame on those incompetent officials and give the Obama appointees some leeway to solve the problem and correct these issues.

Blaming President Bush will only get you so far. I would think that, at some point, the statute of limitations on blaming the former President would run out. I do note that it is always okay to blame Reagan for the deficit and Clinton for everything else.

I would really enjoy having my bullshit refuted, however. I want to be proven wrong, and I want to see the Democrat party take care of Veterans. You can be rest assured that if they do, I will acknowledge it and show that I was wrong.