Veterans fight changes to disability payments
In this March 24, 2013 photo, former Marine Corps Cpl. Marshall Archer, left, a veterans' liaison for the city of Portland, Maine, speaks to a man on a street in Portland. Veterans groups are rallying to fight any proposal to change disability payments as the federal government attempts to address its long-term debt problem. They say they've sacrificed already. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
In this March 24, 2013 photo, former Marine Corps Cpl. Marshall Archer, left, a veterans' liaison for the city of Portland, Maine, speaks to a man on a street in Portland. Veterans groups are rallying to fight any proposal to change disability payments as the federal government attempts to address its long-term debt problem. They say they've sacrificed already. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
In this March 24, 2013 photo, veterans' liaison Marshall Archer, a former Marine Corps corporal, poses for a photo in Portland, Maine. Veterans groups are rallying to fight any proposal to change disability payments as the federal government attempts to address its long-term debt problem. They say they've sacrificed already. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Veterans groups are rallying to fight any proposal to change disability payments as the federal government attempts to address its long-term debt problem. They say they've sacrificed already.
Government benefits are adjusted according to inflation, and President Barack Obama has endorsed using a slightly different measure of inflation to calculate Social Security benefits. Benefits would still grow but at a slower rate.
Advocates for the nation's 22 million veterans fear that the alternative inflation measure would also apply to disability payments to nearly 4 million veterans as well as pension payments for an additional 500,000 low-income veterans and surviving families.
"I think veterans have already paid their fair share to support this nation," said the American Legion's Louis Celli. "They've paid it in lower wages while serving, they've paid it through their wounds and sacrifices on the battlefield and they're paying it now as they try to recover from those wounds."
Economists generally agree that projected long-term debt increases stemming largely from the growth in federal health care programs pose a threat to the country's economic competitiveness. Addressing the threat means difficult decisions for lawmakers and pain for many constituents in the decades ahead.
But the veterans groups point out that their members bore the burden of a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the past month, they've held news conferences on Capitol Hill and raised the issue in meetings with lawmakers and their staffs. They'll be closely watching the unveiling of the president's budget next month to see whether he continues to recommend the change.
Obama and others support changing the benefit calculations to a variation of the Consumer Price Index, a measure called "chained CPI." The conventional CPI measures changes in retail prices of a constant marketbasket of goods and services. Chained CPI considers changes in the quantity of goods purchased as well as the prices of those goods. If the price of steak goes up, for example, many consumers will buy more chicken, a cheaper alternative to steak, rather than buying less steak or going without meat.
Supporters argue that chained CPI is a truer indication of inflation because it measures changes in consumer behavior. It also tends to be less than the conventional CPI, which would impact how cost-of-living raises are computed.
Under the current inflation update, monthly disability and pension payments increased 1.7 percent this year. Under chained CPI, those payments would have increased 1.4 percent.
The Congressional Budget Office projects that moving to chained CPI would trim the deficit by nearly $340 billion over the next decade. About two-thirds of the deficit closing would come from less spending and the other third would come from additional revenue because of adjustments that tax brackets would undergo.
Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow in economic studies at The Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, said she understands why veterans, senior citizens and others have come out against the change, but she believes it's necessary.
"We are in an era where benefits are going to be reduced and revenues are going to rise. There's just no way around that. We're on an unsustainable fiscal course," Sawhill said. "Dealing with it is going to be painful, and the American public has not yet accepted that. As long as every group keeps saying, 'I need a carve-out, I need an exception,' this is not going to work."
Sawhill argued that making changes now will actually make it easier for veterans in the long run.
"The longer we wait to make these changes, the worse the hole we'll be in and the more draconian the cuts will have to be," she said.
That's not the way Sen. Bernie Sanders sees it. The chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs said he recently warned Obama that every veterans group he knows of has come out strongly against changing the benefit calculations for disability benefits and pensions by using chained CPI.
"I don't believe the American people want to see our budget balanced on the backs of disabled veterans. It's especially absurd for the White House, which has been quite generous in terms of funding for the VA," said Sanders, I-Vt. "Why they now want to do this, I just don't understand."
Sanders succeeded in getting the Senate to approve an amendment last week against changing how the cost-of-living increases are calculated, but the vote was largely symbolic. Lawmakers would still have a decision to make if moving to chained CPI were to be included as part of a bargain on taxes and spending.
Sanders' counterpart on the House side, Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, appears at least open to the idea of going to chained CPI.
"My first priority is ensuring that America's more than 20 million veterans receive the care and benefits they have earned, but with a national debt fast approaching $17 trillion, Washington's fiscal irresponsibility may threaten the very provision of veterans' benefits," Miller said. "Achieving a balanced budget and reducing our national debt will help us keep the promises America has made to those who have worn the uniform, and I am committed to working with Democrats and Republicans to do just that."
Marshall Archer, 30, a former Marine Corps corporal who served two stints in Iraq, has a unique perspective about the impact of slowing the growth of veterans' benefits. He collects disability payments to compensate him for damaged knees and shoulders as well as post-traumatic stress disorder. He also works as a veterans' liaison for the city of Portland, Maine, helping some 200 low-income veterans find housing.
Archer notes that on a personal level, the reduction in future disability payments would also be accompanied down the road by a smaller Social Security check when he retires. That means he would take a double hit to his income.
"We all volunteered to serve, so we all volunteered to sacrifice," he said. "I don't believe that you should ever ask those who have already volunteered to sacrifice to then sacrifice again."
That said, Archer indicated he would be willing to "chip in" if he believes that everyone is required to give as well.
He said he's more worried about the veterans he's trying to help find a place to sleep. About a third of his clients rely on VA pension payments averaging just over $1,000 a month. He said their VA pension allows them to pay rent, heat their home and buy groceries, but that's about it.
"This policy, if it ever went into effect, would actually place those already in poverty in even more poverty," Archer said.
The changes that would occur by using the slower inflation calculation seem modest at first. For a veteran with no dependents who has a 60 percent disability rating, the use of chained CPI this year would have lowered the veteran's monthly payments by $3 a month. Instead of getting $1,026 a month, the veteran would have received $1,023.
Raymond Kelly, legislative director for Veterans of Foreign Wars, acknowledged that veterans would see little change in their income during the first few years of the change. But even a $36 hit over the course of a year is "huge" for many of the disabled veterans living on the edge, he said.
The amount lost over time becomes more substantial as the years go by. Sanders said that a veteran with a 100 percent disability rating who begins getting payments at age 30 would see their annual payments trimmed by more than $2,300 a year when they turn 55.
.
Associated PressSkyfall Chicago Marathon 2012 texas rangers steve jobs meningitis bobby valentine bobby valentine
prissilawikarson পোস্ট করেছে @ ৪:১৯ PM
0টি মন্তব্য
It's not going to win any beauty pageants, but Eventful's 2.0 could make sure you never get bored. It's racked up 20 million registered users and shows of 4 million events at a time, but with today's big relaunch Eventful gets personalized thanks to your Facebook, iTunes, Spotify, and Last.fm data. That lets it show you concerts you'll love, along with movie times, conferences, festivals and more.
Fresh from putting smiles on the faces of tabletop gaming geeks everywhere, with yesterday's news that it would be helping to bring Dungeons & Dragons to iOS devices later this year, mobile game publisher Playdek has closed a $3.8 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Qualcomm Ventures, with IDG Ventures and ff Venture Capital also participating.![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](http://www.eurekalert.org/images/back2e.gif){kind=small}
Public release date: 27-Mar-2013
Share ] 
Priority Inbox is one of Gmail's best unsung features. It's amazing at curing email overload, but if you don't give it a chance to learn, all it'll do is muck up your inbox. Here's how to get it working properly. 
Filters are an amazing tool, and they help Priority Inbox learn really fast. Say you want to mark emails from your coworkers as important. Just create a Gmail filter that matches 
Before it has time to watch your behavior, Gmail does a lot of guesswork when marking messages as important. Just like with its Spam button, it only takes a click to change a message's importance. If Gmail gets it wrong, just click the little yellow tag to toggle that message's importance. You can also use the + and - keys on your keyboard if you're a keyboard shortcut fanatic!
Lastly, if you're ever confused as to why Gmail's marked a message as important, just hover your mouse over that little yellow tag and it'll tell you! Usually it's because of "the people in the conversation," because you "often read messages with this label," or something like that. Still, it can give you a little insight into what's going on inside Gmail's head, and what things you might need to do to correct it (for example, if you read emails with the "newsletter" tag but don't want to mark them as important, you'll need to create a filter that never marks newsletters as important).
Bookboard, a subscription service for children’s books, has launched its?iPad app, which gives parents and children streaming access to its library of books. Like many kids apps startups,?three former Adobe employees, Mike Fitzpatrick, Nigel Pegg, and Fang Chang, founded the company out of personal needs as parents. They came together to develop a service that encourages and develops a child?s love of reading. Bookboard?s library includes more than 300 books targeted at children ages 2-7. Parents can set up individual profiles for each child, track progress, and adjust the reading difficulty of books. According to Pegg, who is the CTO, the overarching goal for the company is ?What can Bookboard do to motivate kids to spend more time reading?? That ends up driving many of its design decisions, particularly incorporating game dynamics into the app. As kids get older and the system detects changing interests, the app adapts to the growing child. Bookboard?s secret sauce comes from its librarian Cen Campbell, who defines and applies library organization guidelines to the collection, including classifications, metadata, and reading level assessment. With metadata on hand, the system can tackle two big data problems: 1) unlock relevant “next books to read” and 2) apply collaborative filtering?techniques to recommend books. Unlocking Books – Incorporating Game Dynamics To Motivate A prevailing psychological theory, ?the tyranny of choice,? argues that when provided with too many choices, people feel overwhelmed and overloaded and are, as a result, unlikely to pursue any of the options available. In building out the product, the Bookboard team encountered their big aha moment when they discovered that progressive unlocking was the key to driving engagement of the service. In the beginning, the app presented the entire library to kids. The team noted that the ratio of time spent browsing titles to time spent reading was too high. Then the team introduced artificial scarcity into the initial set of books that kids could choose from. Kids are motivated to make it through books to see what will come next. The unlocking of more choices over time serves as a reward mechanism. As a result, the time spent reading, as opposed to browsing titles, is now the bulk of time spent within the app. When a book is earned via unlocking, it is read over 75 percent of the time. As kids progress in the app, they are presented with more book choices. Half of
