Putting Veterans Back to Work
HENDRICKS: Welcome back on this SUNDAY MORNING. With the encouraging news on the overall jobs market, President Obama is unveiling a plan he hopes will help one specific group of unemployed Americans. Veterans, we're talking about.</s>BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Our veterans are some of the most highly trained, highly educated, highly skilled workers that we've got. These are Americans that every business should be competing to attract. So we're going to do everything we can to make sure that when our troops come home, they come home to new jobs and new opportunities, and new ways to serve their country.</s>HENDRICKS: Now, the Veterans Job Core Initiative will help. An estimated cost of at least $5 billion of cost that will help a lot of people. It will offer community grants for hiring former service members. It targets also the first responders and law enforcement fields and proposes $1 billion for the creation of tourism-related jobs. Now, preferences will also be given to the communities that are post-9/11 veterans, which when you think about it, who can be opposed that? Joining me now from Washington is Tom Tarantino, an Iraq - he is an Iraq War veteran. He's in Washington D.C. He's also a Senior Legislative Associate for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization whose mission is to improve the lives of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and their families. Tom, I want to ask you, what do you think of this from President Obama? Is the timing suspect at all to you? Or are you for it altogether?</s>TOM TARANTINO, IRAQ WAR VETERAN: I mean, this isn't suspect at all. This is actually part of something that the administration has been doing for the last several years, which is working out ways to help veterans transition from being in the military to getting a civilian job. You know, the interesting thing about this particular program is that it's actually helping keep the investment that we've made in these men and women. We spend billions and billions of dollars and countless man hours training our military to be the most highly educated, highly proficient military we've ever had. But for some reason we're OK with losing that investment when they go into the work force, and so they've been working on various programs to help veterans translate their jobs skills into something in the civilian world, and this is right in line. You know, veterans work great as first responders. Veterans were our first national park rangers. And so being able to transition those skills into the Department of Interior is great and veterans are also nine percent of the business owners in this country. So helping veterans start small businesses is just a natural fit, and it's a continued investment in these men and women.</s>HENDRICKS: Tom, that is what President Obama said. He said these men and women risk their lives for our country. We should help them out as well. If you're a veteran in your home watching, what should you do to take advantage of this program? Of what President Obama is proposing?</s>TARANTINO: Well, there's a lot of things that you can do where you can go to the Department of Labor's website. It's the DOL Vets website, and there you can find particularly job training, job training information. You can find information on a veterans job bank where you can find jobs. You can go to IAVA.org Combat Career website. And we can, you know, help you find resources and job - you know, job skills there. Veterans basically what we need to do is you need to go - go to school or go get training if we need to. We can use our post-9/11 G.I. Bill and go ahead and retrain for the work force, but, you know, keep at it. It's getting better. Businesses want to hire you. But what we need to do is try to bridge that gap. This is the first generation of business leaders that is largely not served in the military. So while they want to hire vets, we need to make an effort to educate them on what skills men and women who are in the military can bring into their work force.</s>HENDRICKS: All right, another key component is owning our own business, becoming an entrepreneur. President Obama is backing you, that's what you would like do as well. Tom Tarantino, thank you. Appreciate it.</s>TARANTINO: Thank you very much.</s>HENDRICKS: So you think you're throwing a big Super Bowl party. Wait until we show you how big and bright and colorful the celebration is gearing up for this year's Carnivale. We'll tell you where it is as well. That's Rio.