we got money from a lot of different places. there is an easy fix for this military retirement issue, beginning january 1 of 2015, military folks who retire after that date will get a full retirement and cost of living increase, but their quota will be reduced to age 62 if they re disabled. it doesn t start until january, 2015. i have introduced a bill to close a kind of a peculiar tax loophole that would raise much more than the $6 billion and replace it and i m on armed services and carl levin ven has said during the next calendar year before it even kicks in, we can look at other ways to deal with it. so we need to vote for this budget, get the nation s first budget in four years and then we can go back in and fix this provision and we ought to fix it. i agree with tim. they will fix it. to be fair, the report which
of all the people we could have picked on to screw, how could we arrive here? how could we have done this? reporter: now, his very good friend, best friend in the senate and very influential veteran, john mccain, disagrees with him. he spent a lot of time on the senate floor making the point that you need to have reforms, wolf. he said, for example, that this costs the together, these benefits, $56 billion last year. it skyrocketed, like 49% over ten years. the point he was trying to make is he believes it s intellectually dishonest to say there shouldn t be cuts here, what he calls minor cuts, because you need to do this in order to reform the system, to reform the budget in general. he also made the point that if this didn t happen, if people stopped there because of the military retirement issue, the whole thing would unravel and there d be another threat of a government shutdown. there will be major efforts
the government through continuing resolutions which is what they ve been doing for several years is wasteful and in efficien efficient. senator johnson says he ll support this bipartisan budget plan as long as the senate does nothing to worsen the bill. new hampshire senator is among those concerns with the veteran cuts. another veteran republican explains why he is a yes on the budget compromise. particularly sensitive about the military. i ve talked to our military leaders. they say theyed aboutly need this relief. i wish this provision was not in there that concerns the military retirement issue. senator levin has assured me and others we ll take up this issue in the next year s authorization
in the meantime, we ve always told you about the growing v.a. scandal and the many problems are veterans are having to get to health care. you might think that we aren t spending enough to get our veterans that help that they need. turns out, that s not the case at all. according to the white house, v.a. funding levels growing faster than any other government agency, tripling since just 2000. keeping pace with the massive jump in the number of vets coming home. stephen dinan is a staff writer for the washington times. he s my guest. we ve put money into it but does money always solve the problem? no, that s exactly the lesson you learn from this. if one group has been protected from budget cuts, it s veterans and the military. the sequester didn t affect the v.a. specifically, that was one category we wanted to keep outside of these cuts. in addition, we had the military