According to Mike Linnington, CEO of the Wounded Warrior Project, 80% of veterinarians are in financial trouble.
As noted in the United States “National Veteran Investment Week”, the results show that veterans have difficulty coping with financial hardship.
Worse, most injured veterans said they were barely making ends meet in the economy, highlighting the disproportionate financial strain between disabled veterans and ordinary civilians.
A a recent survey conducted by the Wounded Warrior Project — a non-profit organization dedicated to providing assistance, programs and services to veterans and their families — found that almost 82% of disabled veterans cited inflation and rising commodity prices as the main culprits for their current woes.
“This is an important issue that has been raised, especially in the last couple of years,” Wounded Warrior Project CEO Mike Linnington said Friday on FOX Business’ The Big Money Show.
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According to the Pew Research Center, the US inflation rate almost four times over the past two years, many Americans, especially veterans, have felt the brunt of a weakened economy.
“64% say they had a hard time making ends meet last year… Those are astounding numbers.”
“For 20 years, we have always focused on [on] helps wounded veterans heal their minds, bodies, and spirits. And we’re doing that with a lot of free programs and services… across the country, for any post-9/11 veteran or any veteran in need of help,” Linnington told co-hosts Brian Brenberg and Taylor Riggs. “But recently in the 13th iteration of our annual surveyfinancial security, financial need, really rose to the top.”
“More than 80% are experiencing financial difficulties. 64% say they had a hard time making ends meet last year. And one in six is food insecure,” the CEO added. “These are amazing numbers..”
On the other hand, as Linnington noted, unemployment in the Wounded Warrior project fell to 6.8% in 2022 from 13.4% a year earlier. [2021]. However, the unemployment rate among veterans associated with the Wound Warrior Project is still higher than among the general civilian population. According to the Department of Labor, the US unemployment rate is 3.4%. The unemployment rate among disabled or injured veterans is almost twice that of the average American citizen.
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Nearly half of the veterans [48%] who answered the annual Wounded Warrior Project poll indicated that their main barriers to employment are mental health and psychological disorders, especially in connection with their military service, while more than a third of respondents [37%] cited the difficulty of transferring his military skills to the civilian workforce as the biggest hurdle.
On Friday, Linnington touched on those barriers, telling FOX Business’s Lydia Hu that the main goal of The Wounded Warrior Project is to eliminate them completely.
“The first thing we do is remove all barriers to employment and that could be barriers to physical injury or emotional stress due to the trauma you face while you were deployed during combat. So we are treating all of these areas first so you can focus on your work,” he said.
“We also need to make sure you have a home; you have to have a stable experience, you have to have a regular income – and we do this by issuing disability benefits.”
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After all, Linnington said, the Wounded Warrior Project is supposed to “empower” wounded veterans, “and that only comes at the expense of jobs.”
“Finding ways to help wounded veterans stay financially stable… increases their overall resilience and preparedness,” Linnington said. “So that’s the area we’re focused on. We have tripled our budget and what we are doing to help meet their needs with financial assistance… We are trying to help them find a decent job countrywide.”
Credit: www.foxbusiness.com /