Pensions Again

Veterans' pension bills can be killed but, like old soldiers, they never die. Last week the mammoth of all pension schemes, killed by the Senate Finance Committee last year, was back again, as healthy and hungry as ever.

The new scheme is so big that it takes two bills to hold it. One bill would give pensions ($12-$56 a month) to widows and children of all World War I veterans --not just those who died from wounds, but those who died in bed ten or 20 years afterward. For good measure, the bill would pension dead veterans' parents.

The other bill sets up a $40-a-month pension for all veterans over 65, unless they are making too much money to need it. The New York Times's description: "A universal Townsend plan for veterans and their relatives."

Trying to figure what the scheme would cost U.S. taxpayers was a statistician's nightmare: estimates ranged from $5,000,000,000 to $20,000,000,000. The annual cost would start at a modest $7,000,000, jump quickly into nine figures, continue as long as the last widow of the last veteran drew her pensionable breath. Since many a veteran has a healthy young wife, that happy day would be around the year 2000.

The bills have already passed the House--one on the Monday after the Independence Day weekend, with only some 30 members present. At the Senate hearing they got the blessings of the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Disabled American Veterans, other organizations of World War I soldiers and their families.

Only the maverick American Veterans' Association--tax-conscious veterans who want pensions confined to soldiers who really got hurt--refused to jump into the trough. Stormed its National Commander Robert B. Luchars: "[The scheme comes from] big-pension lobbyists . . . whose tears flow ... at the suffering of training-camp heroes who never smelled gunpowder."

In a nonelection year, with the U.S. worried about inflation and high taxes, the bills have slight chance of getting past the Senate committee. But they will be back.

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