Nationwide, the unemployment rate for veterans 20 to 24 years old was 16%

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.dailysouthtown.com/southtown/dsindex/26-ds1.htm

State of Shame

<snip>Three years into the war in Iraq, Americans who leave the military, like Summerfield, are coming home to face a problem most never expected: Veterans are having a hard time getting hired. snip

Nationwide, the unemployment rate for veterans 20 to 24 years old was 16 percent last year — compared with a 9 percent unemployment rate for non-vets in that same age range. Overall, the nation's unemployment rate last year was 5.1 percent.

"In a strong economy, these numbers don't fit," says U.S. Sen. Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican who chairs the Senate's Veterans Affairs Committee.

Recruitment ads boast that those who enlist will learn job skills in the military.

"It's a very shrewd, sophisticated marketing strategy," says Robert Bruno, a professor in the University of Illinois at Chicago's Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, adding, "It doesn't bear any real significance to the marketability of someone coming back into civilian life."

Those skills learned in the military often don't translate to civilian jobs, vets and labor experts say — unless they also have college degrees and work experience.

[blue neen]

1. First of all Sen. Larry Craig is hallucinating when he says that this is

a strong economy. Republicans love to pretend that the economy is going great guns, but tell that to the average American worker.

Now these Iraq war vets can't get jobs. Unfortunately, there are no jobs to get.