While an admirable election-year plan to hire unemployed vets, President Obama’s new $6 billion idea could end up costing $50,000 or far more per job while helping slightly over 2 percent of the nation’s out-of-work veterans.
At the heart of the new Obama plan being unveiled today, the president wants to spend $1 billion putting 20,000 vets to work in a conservation plan being overseen by the Department of Interior. That conservation corps would work to restore habitat and do other activities at a price of about $50,000 per job.
Asked about the costs, a Veterans Affairs Department spokesman said, “This is a resonable and conservative estimate in light of the average salary of these types of jobs, the range of different conservation projects, and the ability to leverage private matching funds. The potential exists to exceed that goal and increase the number of jobs available.”
But the president is also looking to spend an additional $5 billion to fund the hiring of veterans as firefighters and community cops, as well as on veteran job training and small business initiatives. Obama will unveil the program at a Northern Virginia firehouse today.
The price tag is huge and officials say required to encourage employers to hire vets. But some in the GOP are quietly questioning the costs, most of which will be in the president’s fiscal 2013 budget. None have gone public yet with their gripes because the programs involve veterans, group the GOP counts on to support them in elections.
House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor, however, today said that the GOP favors a 20 percent tax cut for small businesses as a way to create jobs. “They need a signal from Washington that there’s not an adversary here, that we believe in the aspirational sense of America, that we believe in small business entrepreneurs.”
According to one report, unemployment among veterans is slightly higher than for the nation, with about 11 percent out of work. Many have joined National Guard units, binding them to local communities and making it difficult to join the proposed conservation corp in national parks and other federal lands.
The president in November said that there are 850,000 out of work veterans. If the initial $1 billion conservation plan is fulfilled, just 2.3 percent of the unemployed vets would get a job. That figure would rise if the other $5 billion is OK’d by Congress.
His effort comes just months after the president signed into law another veterans jobs. That plan cost $95 million for credits worth about $9,500 for companies that hire disabled veterans.
