Almost immediately critics within the veterans’ community and on Capitol Hill charged that the bill did not go far enough. At first, single veterans who had served more than 180 days and had received an “other than dishonorable discharge” received only $100 a month from which they had to pay for tuition and all of their expenses. Most found this amount to be insufficient. In particular, veterans who had endured the hardships of the Vietnam War recoiled at the government’s failure to provide them with the same generous educational opportunities as their World War II predecessors. Consequently, during the early years of the program, only about 25% of Vietnam veterans used their education benefits. But for the next decade, a battle raged in the government to increase veterans’ benefits. Congress succeeded, often in the face of fierce objections from the fiscally conservative Nixon and Ford Administrations, to raise benefit levels. In 1967, a single veteran’s benefits were raised to $130 a month; in 1970 they rose to $175; under the Readjustment Assistance Act of 1972 the monthly allowance rose to $220; in 1974 it rose to $270, $292 in 1976, and then $311 a month in 1977.

I remember a cousin who used the “flat sum” after Vietnam.

I will say that Shaun is probably above the perverse mentality of other leftists who would believe instinctively that failure to vastly increase any entitlement or benefit from government upon reflection or moment's notice is some kind of crime.

Also, didn't someone put out a list about how GOP legislators have routinely boned the troops on stuff like this while the Dems are the ones sticking up for them. Meanwhile the GOP gets the good PR because they “Support our Troops”. The GOP idea of supporting out troops seems to be more based on a willingness to get them killed for nothing and less about actually taking care of them and using them wisely.

Vietnam.

Officials in charge of Pentagon personnel worry that a more generous and expansive GI Bill would create an incentive for troops to get out of the military and go to college.

O NOES!

Did the troop starved military consider that a more generous GI Bill might entice more people to sign up?

Like neary 10 million other veterans, I finished my college education on the GI Bill, but that was when it provided full tuition, housing, and living costs before being scaled back to a “peacetime” program in the mid 1980s that pays a flat sum.

You're a WW2 or Korea vet? Because the GI Bill has been paid flat-sum since the Veterans’ Adjustment Act of 1952. The only thing close to “full ride” since then was the program Webb used, which wasn't the MGIB at all but a Chapter 31 program for those with service-related disabilities. Or did you use VEAP, which didn't start until 1977 and only ran through '85?

Chapter 31 is still in operation. Today's Chapter 30 MGIB payment of $1100/month is the inflation-adjusted equivalent of the 1977 payment level, and still requires the first-year pay-ins that it has for the last 20-some years. So what am I missing here, Shaun?