benefit claims. the va reported more than 800,000 pending claims as of june of this year, 66% of which have been pending for more than 125 days. is america doing enough for its men and women who have served the country in times of war? i think america can always do more. i think what we need to do now is take the resources we have and employ them better. the va is working to fix the backlog. our men and women coming home face very unique challenges. they bring a lot of great advantages and benefits. joe s story, i ll plug his story as well, in talking about they come home with this sense of greater mission, greater good, wanting to zephyr next to their brothers and sisters and do something more. i was one of those soldiers in the hospital at walter reed. when you asked me what i wanted to do, i said i wanted to go back to my unit. i couldn t go back to my unit. finding a new mission for my life was critical for me, as it is for these other vets. the real hero of the day when i
backlog of nearly 1 million benefit claims at the v.a. many are waiting years for the benefits they were promised. and we can t renege. the department of veteran affairs created a strategic plan to eliminate this backlog. their reason reason for increas and delay, ten years of war with increased survival rates and post conflict downsizing of the military, so we have more soldiers per capita to deal with. the lack of organization is really at the root of this problem because of the case overload. piles of benefit claims fill the v.a. offices. this looks more like an episode of hoarders than a functioning government office. it wasn t supposed to be like this. nobody predicted it, but this is the cost of going into a war on faulty intelligence. it s 2013. the fact that paper claims are still the norm is pretty archaic and laughable.
tough scenario for growth in the united states of america. 1.3 is a paltry number in terms of growth. let s talk a little bit about the unemployment number. every thursday we get the weekly read on that. what is your take on that one? we are down. last week 385,000 jobless claims. by the way that was revised upward as they do these days. always revising last week s number up. this week s number, 359. okay, that is lower but it s still a very high rate of firings, of layoffs. 359,000, three years after a recession ended. that s a far too high a number. it should be much more like 250,000 jobless benefit claims, not 359. shouldn t be that high. martha: new waves of layoffs at bank of america, american airlines, among others. they do keep coming. thank you very much. stuart varney coming up in a little while on fbn. meantime since december of
confident dick durbin of illinois and one of romney s possible vp picks senator kelly ayotte from new hampshire. and mitt romney s company were pioneers in outsourcing jobs. barack obama s record is the worst record since the depression. and we will talk about those ads with our cnn political analyst ron brownstein and time magazine s michael sherer. an incumbent president still in peril, and measuring optimism about the economy has fallen to the lowest level this year, and personal spending cooled as shoppers cut back on items big and small from cars to groceries and the broadest measure of economic health, the gross domestic product grew at an anemic 1.5% in the second quarter. not good news for president obama 100 days away from the election. and joining us this morning is senator dick durbin. i want to put the gdpp fod g figures the gross domestic product figure, because it has been up, but not to the point where it can bring down unemployment. that is a 3
yrlt i m erin burnett. tonight, who let the attack dogs out? mitt romney, rick santorum and newt gingrich, these guys have a fundamentally different economic philosophy than we do. governor romney was more direct. let detroit go bankrupt. it s kind of amazing. gingrich and romney and santorum, they don t let the facts get in their way. that was the first time he mentioned them by name and as you can see, he did so with joy. vice president came out swinging in a trip to the all important swing state of ohio speaking to his party s base, the united autoworkers union. the industry s bailout is clearly a point of pride for the administration. it is a talking point you will hear a lot on the campaign trail for the rest of the year. just take a look at this clip from a 17-minute video the re-election campaign is debuting tonight. his advisers would ask where to begin, which urgent need would he put first. which is one, which is two, which is three, which is four, which is f