Today President Obama will be officially announcing the Veteran Job Corps, as discussed in the State of the Union in January. The corps will be allotted $1 billion to employ 20,000 veterans over the next 5 years to upkeep and restore public spaces, such as national parks.
Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric K. Shinseki on Thursday described the program as “a bold new effort” to lower the high unemployment rate for post-Sept. 11 military veterans, which stood at 13.1 percent in December. The government estimates that 250,000 post-Sept. 11 veterans are unemployed.
In addition, as a part of the American Jobs Act, the president is expected to announce at $5 billion budget to help employ police and firemen in 2012. Programs that plan to hire veterans will have priority in the funding. Entrepreneurial training will also be available to veterans who wish to receive it.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that the Civilian Conservation Corps, established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression to put hundreds of thousands of the unemployed to work on projects in government parks and lands, serves as a “very good indicator” of what the administration hopes to accomplish with the Veterans Job Corps.
Do you think the efforts of the Veteran Job Corps will be successful?
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Awesome. Many veterans with good reason feel like they’ve been thrown aside by the government after serving it. Living in DC, I see far too many veterans living on the street, and the facts are “About 16% of homeless adults in a one-night survey in January 2009 were veterans, though vets make up only 10% of the adult population.” – USA Today. These, in my opinion, are baby steps in the right direction, but at least they’re steps.