Conservatives often claim to respect veterans for their service, yet they don’t respect the welfare state and the lengths to which the government safeguards its citizens. So they have a problem with the system of veterans’ benefits, which are more expansive than what you see in other parts of American society. These benefits, including integrated health care and disability coverage, are too generous for conservative tastes. But how can they deny them to veterans, when one of the main incentives for signing up to the all-volunteer military is the promise of these benefits?
Their solution is to engage in smear campaigns, to claim that veterans are cheating the system or that the government doesn’t administer benefits in a useful way. And those attacks are then used to justify cutbacks in coverage or privatization of the system. That’s what’s gearing up now at the VA, according to coverage from Prospect contributors Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early. This week on our live show, executive editor David Dayen talks to them about a new front in this attack: claiming that fraudsters are unjustly receiving veterans’ disability benefits, as a pretext for cuts. The discussion goes over a Washington Post series that laundered these claims, and what a good Veterans Benefits Administration would look like.
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