VETERANS: Tailoring the Dole

Rare is the able-bodied man among 22.6 million U.S. veterans who really believes that the public owes him a living for his war service, but the Government assures him one anyway.

If not already among the 2,100,000 drawing "disability compensation" for an in-service injury (75% noncombat), any man who wore the uniform 90 days can at 65 get a full federal pension ($78.75 to $135.45 a month) simply by showing 10% disability (virtually automatic at 65), and proving that his own annual income is less than $1,400 ($2,700 if he has dependents). A wife's income does not disqualify him, nor does any amount of property.

One result, found by a recent General Accounting Office survey: of the 1,200,000 vets and dependents now on pensions (1959 cost: $1.1 billion), 17% own $10,000 or more in stocks and other family property, 3.4% of the married pensioners have $5,000 family incomes or better.

The worst is yet to come. Present laws will triple pension costs by 1985 as the veterans age.

After working on this politically fused problem for five years, the Eisenhower Administration last week sent Congress a well-turned bill to trim the abuses, keep pension totals from orbiting clear into outer space.

The bill rejects the automatic-dole principle, tailors pension payments to fit the needs of individual veterans in an age of higher social security and private pensions. Key new principle: a "graduated scale" that turns the pension into a supplemental payment, brings each pensioner's annual income (including social security) from all sources to the $1,400 minimum, higher if he has dependents. A single veteran with an annual income of $1,300 would get only $10 a month in pension; a married veteran with two children and only $1,200 income would get $90 a month more.

As a sweetener to veteran-conscious Congress,* the bill would boost some 55% of the present, inflation-shrunken pension checks at a cost of an added $100 million the first year. But it offers the first promising check on the automatic boosters built into pension laws.