President Obama Commemorates Veterans Day in Weekly Address

By Brittany Muldoon

President Obama thanked veterans for their service and stressed the need to help the veterans smoothly transition back into everyday life.

"Now that more of them are coming home, we need to serve them as well as they served us," said Obama in his weekly address.

Obama acknowledged that this will require more than a simple "thank you." He encouraged citizens and elected officials to take action to ease the transition back into everyday life for the veterans by helping them to find jobs, homes, and quality education.

"If you fight for your country overseas, you should never have to fight for a job when you come home," said Obama. Since Obama has taken office, 300,000 veterans have been hired and he plans to continue to connect highly-skilled veterans to businesses.

Obama also said he plans to encourage businesses to hire more veterans by implementing new, potentially permanent, tax credits for companies that hire veterans and wounded warriors.

Obama said he has also been working to get more veterans hired in the private sector with the help of Michelle Obama and Jill Biden's Joining Forces campaign.

 "They've already hired or trained over 290.000 veterans and military spouses, and they've committed to hiring over 400,000 more," Obama said.

Obama also stressed the need to give veterans the opportunity to obtain the quality education that they deserve and acknowledges the progress made under the Post-9/11 GI Bill.

 "We've worked with thousands of schools across the country to set new standards to protect against dishonest recruiting and predatory lending practices that target our veterans," he said.

Although the country has made significant progress with job and educational benefits for veterans, Obama stressed that as more veterans return home, the nation will have to work much harder to ease their transition back into society.

Obama proceeded to thank the veterans once again, reassuring them that "as long as I'm your President, I will make it my mission to make sure that America has your back, not just on one day or one weekend, but 365 days a year."