{"id":32178,"date":"2012-09-28T11:29:28","date_gmt":"2012-09-28T15:29:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=32178"},"modified":"2012-09-28T11:56:48","modified_gmt":"2012-09-28T15:56:48","slug":"that-veterans-job-bill-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=32178","title":{"rendered":"That Veterans’ Job Corps Bill thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Someone mentioned it this morning in the comments, and I thought I’d address the Veterans’ Job Corps Bill of 2012 that failed to make it through the Senate last week. Here’s the text<\/a>, if you want to read it all, since I’m not interested in addressing the bill completely. It’s Senate Bill S.3457. <\/p>\n

If you are a veteran who is unemployed and don’t really care about the work you do, I guess it’s not that bad, but it really doesn’t offer anything that isn’t already available. For example, the bill offers for veterans employment;<\/p>\n

(1) in conservation, resource management, and historic preservation projects on public lands and maintenance and improvement projects for cemeteries under the jurisdiction of the National Cemetery Administration; and<\/p>\n

(2) as firefighters and law enforcement officers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It doesn’t create any jobs, though. It just offers assistance getting jobs that are already available. It does, however offer grants to agencies that employ veterans, but there are no specifics on those grants. They could last a month, a year, a decade, but there’s no real language that addresses those grants except that the Secretary of Veterans Affairs will manage that. <\/p>\n

The bill gives priority to veterans hired as police officers or firefighters, but we all know that usually happens anyway, because veterans are the types of employees those agencies are attempting to recruit because of the demands of those jobs in regards to physical fitness and tolerance for the long hours.<\/p>\n

It also makes the DVA Secretary responsible for reporting on the progress of the Job Corps, and we all know how that turns out – we’re always getting rosy reports from the DVA on how well they’re doing in spite of the available evidence otherwise.<\/p>\n

The bill also tells the DVA to set up “One Stop” centers with internet access to help veterans find the available jobs. Like we don’t have that already in our homes or at the library or a thousand other places. Like the VA.<\/p>\n

(e) Report- Not later than 455 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Labor shall submit to the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and the Committee on Heath, Education, Labor, and Pensions of the Senate and the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and the Committee on Education and the Workforce of the House of Representatives a report on the pilot program that includes the findings of the Secretary with respect to the feasibility and advisability of providing computing facilities as described in subsection (a) with assistance as described in subsection (d) at all one-stop centers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, the DVA has more than a year just to report if setting up those One Stop facilities is even feasible, so there’s no help for veterans in that regard for more than a year from the date the law is passed.<\/p>\n

The bill also provides off-base transition training. We all know how effective the on-base transition training is when we’re leaving the service, I don’t know how anyone thinks that more government training is going to be much of a help, except in employing more DVA bureaucrats punching their time sheet.<\/p>\n

The Veterans’ Job Corps Bill doesn’t really do anything useful. If anyone was thinking that it creates more jobs for veterans, it doesn’t. It creates more jobs for bureaucrats – now if you were hoping to get one of those jobs, you’ve got a reason to be disappointed that it didn’t pass.<\/p>\n

But, honestly, I don’t see anything in the bill that isn’t already being done in another shape or form. I’ll admit that I work for the federal government, but all I needed was an opportunity to work, and when Bill Clinton did away with the Carter-era double-dipping prohibition, that was all I needed. Since I’m a disabled combat veteran, I had a hiring preference anyway. It didn’t hurt that it was almost guaranteed that I’d clear the security clearance hurdle, either.<\/p>\n

Now, I know that the IAVA and Paul Rieckhoff<\/a> are going to make a big deal out of the Senate’s failure to act on the VJC Bill, it’ll probably be the centerpiece of their scorecard this year, but they’re going to have to show me where the bill was more than a bureaucrat employment bill. <\/p>\n

IAVA’s statement linked above said the bill created jobs for police and firefighters and it did nothing of the sort as you can read for yourself, unless you think that giving non-specific grants is creating jobs. Paul and the gang are hoping you don’t read the bill and just take their word for it.<\/p>\n

The Veterans’ Job Corps Bill of 2012 was nothing more than a boondoggle to wave in front of veterans. The truth is that the federal government can’t do anything for veterans that we can’t do ourselves for a lot less money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Someone mentioned it this morning in the comments, and I thought I’d address the Veterans’ Job … That Veterans’ Job Corps Bill thing<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-veterans-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}