A Lousy Deal

Being a vet, I rarely, if ever, stand against advantages for vets.  Today....I'm probably taking a stand against a deal for vets.

The administration came out yesterday and now calls for a new program.  There are two parts to this deal. First, they want to establish grant money for towns to hire up GI's leaving the service, for police and fireman jobs.  If you were a town of four thousand, and wanted to add two more full-time fireman jobs onto the payroll....you'd ask for this grant.  Naturally, the grant would only cover a certain amount of time. My guess is two years.  Then you as the town....would have to find tax revenue methods to pay for this guy's salary, and eventually his pension with the town.

You can imagine a town council jumping onto this idea, but not asking how exactly they would cover these two new guys in the years to come.  Around 2014, you'd have the finance officer of the town come up and mention that you were $110k short on your payroll estimates over the two new guys.  You eventually decide that one guy has to go, and you will find some revenue new money from the new property tax to cover your extra fireman.

On the cop side?  Well.....you can imagine some town with five full-time cops and feeling great about getting grant money to hire some former US Army cop.  Time passes, and now the pressure is on for more traffic tickets to cover this guy's actual salary which the town never forecasted over.  My guess is that half the military guys hired to be cops.....will be released from their first job within three years over this salary coverage problem.  Some will filter out to smaller towns where they become the one and only cop....instead of the town hiring the mayor's nephew who has no experience.

The second program?  Well....the administration envisions this conservation program that goes back to the 1930s.  They would hire up these GI's, and put them to work rebuilding trails, roads and levees on government property.  Course, this might make sense if you had purely infantry guys.....but what happens when the guy comes up and he's been a cook for ten years?  How about the Army computer technician....who you'd like to be paving roads in some national park?

In the 1930s....you had this vast population in America that had no skills or backgrounds....and turning them into brick-layers, carpenters, or ditch-diggers was not a big issue.  If a guy has a skill and is fairly intelligent....he's not going to stand up and accept some job that he's simply not qualified for.

Then you come to this odd problem.  To accept this conservation job....you'd have to pack up and move to some remote area of Idaho, Mississippi, or other state...far from the urban areas that you might be used to.  You'd likely have to accept living in some old house or cheap trailer.....waiting for the funding to eventually run out....then you get tossed out on the street as a former GI-turned-ditch-digger-turned-unemployed.  Grants never last forever, and in this case.....you have a limited amount of time to dig ditches.

The odds of these programs passing Congress and the Senate?  My guess is that they will find 'some' funds and allow these to float through.  Maybe at the end of this deal....five thousand guys end up as cheap labor guys in some conservation program.  Most will take to drinking after a while because of the conditions and lousy pay (it probably won't even pay what they were making in the Army).  A couple thousand guys will make it as cops.....then most will find that it's just not as good a deal.

I'd prefer not to stand against any deal for vets.....but I suspect that most folks will be disgruntled in the end over this safety-net that the government offered up.  And if you really wanted to toss a better pitch.....why not offer a higher preference to be hired via Homeland Security, and collect real pay?  Start laying off the lousy TSA guys, and find GI's who are dependable and more intelligent.