Help Veterans Find Work, Pelosi Says

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said this morning that Congress' efforts to help troops and veterans won't be complete "until every American who has fought for their country abroad can find a job when they come home."

Speaking to the American Legion's national convention in Milwaukee, Pelosi said more progress has been made for veterans and military families over the last four years "than has been made since the passage of the GI Bill in 1944."

But she said more needs to be done to help veterans and troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan to find work, and she took the opportunity to cast the "Make It In America" economic program being advanced by House Democrats as one such initiative.

Billed as a way to increase manufacturing, the effort involves more than a dozen pieces of legislation. Some of those are tax breaks for manufacturers.

Pelosi's remarks today followed a plea last week from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for businesses to hire more veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. In remarks to the Executives' Club of Chicago, Adm. Mike Mullen noted the unemployment rate for veterans is 11 percent, higher than the national average of about 9.5 percent.

He also noted that many veterans from current conflicts remain homeless.

Today, Pelosi said that actions already taken include expansion of tuition benefits for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and tax credits for businesses that hire unemployed veterans. She also said the billions of dollars in stimulus bill investments have helped to provide jobs and other help to troops and veterans "to alleviate the burden of the recession."

But she noted, "Our manufacturing base has been eroding in our country."

"We're saying that one way to correct that is to make it in America -- not only to manufacture it in America, but to enable the American people, and our veterans in particular, to make it in America," said Pelosi.

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