What share of veteran benefits is cash? about c-tam HOT 2 CLOSED

@MaxGhenis Thanks for the question. We haven't explicitly target cash/in-kind benefits because for many programs it's hard to separate the two in administrative data. Specifically for Veteran's benefits, we got our targets from the expenditure table on this page: https://www.va.gov/vetdata/Expenditures.asp

Using 2016 as an example, you can find 7 categories of expenditure: compensation and pension, construction, education and vocational rehabilitation, loan guaranty, Insurance and indemnities, medical care, operation expenses. I think safely speaking, compensation and pension should be cash. There might be a bit cash involved in education and vocation but I don't see any source supporting that. So maybe we can say roughly 84/173 = 48.5% is cash, but we didn't target that part in particular.

from c-tam.

Thanks @Amy-Xu. For posterity, here's a % breakdown from the 2016 expenditure table:

from c-tam.