Posted on: Thursday, November 11, 2004

EDITORIAL
Veterans deserve an improved GI Bill

On this Veterans Day, we challenge Congress and the president to ensure that soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan benefit from a GI Bill every bit as good as the one World War II, Korea and Vietnam vets enjoyed.

We owe these men and women no less.

In the 1980s and '90s, an all-volunteer military in peacetime had become more of a job than a sacrifice.

No longer. A "back-door" draft summons tens of thousands of Guard and Reserve troops to active duty, extends combat tours and even recalls people to active duty years after their commitments ended.

And some units in Iraq are being chewed up as badly as in previous wars. The numbers of broken and maimed veterans must sober us.

By April of this year, one in six veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan had filed benefits claims with the Veterans Administration for service-related disabilities. Today, one-third of those claims have yet to be processed.

A grateful nation needs a more generous GI Bill, a measure that, like its 1950s counterpart, would rejuvenate the middle class and boost the economy. By 1956, the GI Bill signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944 had helped produce more than a million college-trained men and women — in an era when few people dreamed of higher education.

Eleven million of the 13 million houses built in the 1950s were financed with GI Bill loans.

That GI Bill helped to create a new American middle class whose consumption patterns fueled the post-war economy.

No need to reinvent the wheel; just do it again.