Supporting the Troops
Jul 26th, 2006 at 8:16 pm by Susie
WASHINGTON — Young veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are having a harder time finding a job than their peers who didn’t serve in the military.
Last year, about one in six veterans between 20 and 24 was jobless, nearly double the rate for nonveterans their age. It was brighter in the second quarter of this year, when young vets had an 11.2 percent jobless rate, but that was still higher than the 8 percent for nonvets their age and more than twice the overall unemployment rate.
Not to be uncharitable, but recruiters have had their best pickin’s–since Bush came into office at least–with people who didn’t have a lot of prospects in civilian life.
I don’t doubt that their military careers makes virtually all vets considerably employable than when they entered (other things being equal, vets tend to have more on the ball than their never-served counterparts).
But if one of them started out as, e.g., a none-too-literate high-school drop-out with the sort of emotional/cultural problems you get when your folks don’t much care about you (if my kid implied he might enlist, his dad, stepmother and I would take turns sitting on him until the lunacy passed–and we don’t even like each other. I’ve read of other parents threatening recruiters with firearms), the enhanced self-discipline, sense of responsibiity, etc. that most people come out of the service with just might not be enough.
And this could be another long-term problem with Bush’s lowered recruiting standards: As a nation, we eventually inherit the responsibility for a less-capable, costlier veteran population.