What share of veteran benefits is cash?

[MaxGhenis]

Is there an estimate available? I didn't see it in the new documentation from https://github.com/open-source-economics/C-TAM/pull/52.

Related:

• @martinholmer's questions on medical share of VB in https://github.com/open-source-economics/C-TAM/issues/58, answered by @Amy-Xu
• @kpinkelman's research on cash share of other_ben in https://github.com/open-source-economics/taxdata/issues/148 (reported by @andersonfrailey)

[Amy-Xu]

@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.

[MaxGhenis]

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

Compensation & Pension	Medical Care	Education & Vocational Rehabilitation/ Employment	General Operating Expenses	Construction	Insurance & Indemnities	Loan Guaranty#
48.4%	36.5%	8.0%	4.5%	1.0%	0.9%	0.6%