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Originally Posted by wendybeth
At a time when we are at war and incurring casualites, not to mention that there are numerous vets from other wars that still need care, of course a decrease would be considered a cut- there is a shortfall regardless of what you call it.
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Admittedly, I have not clicked your links. I have mentioned this before, but as a brief reminder, during the Carter years, something called "baseline budgeting" was started. Every year, an automatic 10% increase was required when submitting your budget for whatever. This was for a few reasons, primarily so that spineless politicians could automatically increase their spending.
If the news was presented as "Veteren's affairs gets a 5% budget increase", that's good news. However, with baseline budgeting, the story is "Veteren's affairs cut by 5%", because the amount increasing only went up 5% instead of the automatic 10% is was supposed to get.
VA may very well be underfunded (though I suspect that it is more about waste and top heavy spending with the money not getting where it needs to), but I doubt it has been cut (meaning a real cut of actual dollars).