A New Deal for Youth
Paul Starr, writing in the American Prospect, is thinking big. He wants to create a “New Deal for the young.” This is a bold idea – and one that could do a lot for the next generation of Americans.
We need a New Deal for the young -- a Young America program -- that can help young people cope with those challenges. At least part of that program ought to draw on the lesson of the GI Bill. Americans will be ready to be more generous to the young if the beneficiaries have demonstrated responsibility and contributed something through their own efforts. The United States no longer needs to draft or recruit most of its youth into military service. But we could make national service, whether civilian or military, a routine experience, for some in their late teens and for others after college. And, in return, we could help them to deal with the responsibilities of paying for their education, first homes, health coverage, and the rising costs of raising children.
A Young America program would not provide something for nothing. Like the GI Bill and Social Security, its benefits would be earned. And because of its focus on youth, it would be a way of helping Americans, individually and collectively, become more productive as well as more secure.
The premise of a Young America program would be the inclusive conception of freedom and power that are at the core of modern liberalism. An increasingly unequal America that exposes so many of its young to poverty and insecurity cannot be the strong and prosperous nation all Americans want it to be. Government can be the means for expanding the horizon of freedom, creating opportunity, and making a society both more powerful and more just. The world used to think of America as a country where the young had possibilities unmatched anywhere else. The United States could be that country again.
There are likely many ways to achieve Starr’s goals, but I want to (self-servingly) point out Service Pays, an idea Elizabeth Warren, Sandy Baum, and I have proposed. Service Pays would provide loan forgiveness for college to kids who work in public service. We think this is a great way to engage young people in service to the country, to get more kids going to college without taking on crushing debt, and to increase opportunities for the next generation.
As the proudly progressive post-Boomer father of a four-year old, I plan to teach my son a response for condescending and paternalistic statements like this:
"Americans will be ready to be more generous to the young if the beneficiaries have demonstrated responsibility and contributed something through their own efforts."
That response will be: "F.U., pal!"
Americans--that is, the Boomer generation and those with a Boomer mentality who now run the nation--should "invest" in (not be "generous" with) its youth for reasons that make sense for all of us and would be the right thing to do with or without national service. College debt should not be "crushing" for anyone under any circumstances. The public service you cite is merely extortion. It's merely Democrats and other so-called "progressives" using an unjust society to extract direct service to the state.
Now that Americans--that is, the Boomer generation and those with a Boomer mentality who now run the nation--who came before my son have squandered America's wealth and prestige, Mr. Starr and others wants to put a "national service" test in place as a procedural barrier to limit future public "generosity."
This is why I increasingly believe that the current generation of Democratic/progressive leadership is almost unredeemable. What you describe is not a new deal, it's a raw deal.
April 27, 2007 10:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't think it is such a bad deal. Many European countries do the same thing. Of the ones that I am familiar with, a young person can choose to do either 1 year of military service or 2 years of non-military service.
Furthermore, it is not like they are required to work for free. They are paid on top of other benefits that they receive.
Satellite Sky Blog
Find the Truth. Do Justice.
April 27, 2007 2:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
it's a perfectly nice idea. If college kids are going to have to work for peanuts to get by anyhow, may as well do it in a senior citizen's center rather than a Burger King. Still, it doesn't seem all that relevant to a new New Deal, including a serious change in America's class structure and serious commitment to a government representing all of us. It seems too much geared to keeping, well, Warren's students off the street so that they can afford to blog here.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
April 28, 2007 7:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
How new a deal is this, really? I think it a good idea, but perhaps if one saw it as an amalgam of ideas which have been around since at least the 1930s, one would have an easier time convincing the American public that programs which combine public service with aspects of training and skill development can serve the country well, because they indeed have served the public well. Some examples:
I'm not suggesting that the ideas put forward by Mr. Sitaraman and his generation are precisely the same as these older programs. Rather, I'm suggesting that these new proposals echo a longstanding American practice of investing in social capital by providing opportunities for the next generation coming along. Thank the generation of the roaring twenties for investing in the depression era generation. Thank the depression and World War II era generation for investing in the Boomers. And us boomers need to remember we didn't make it on our own, either. I expect Mr. Sitaraman's generation will be ready to give back (which really means give ahead) when its turn comes around.
aMike
April 28, 2007 12:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
You mean the rather cheap ripoff of John Kerry's national service plan written about last month here? The one that tinkered with what was an excellent plan, converting it into something that doesn't help the less fortunate actually achieve higher education.. rather it allows the affluent to buy it's way out of service (this is against our constitution.. try reading it some time)
Kerry's provided funding for education with the commitment to two years service.. it recognized also that community service was necessary to help bridge the divide that our society has had imposed upon it since the '80s.
April 28, 2007 8:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm with you on that. Though the ratio should be 1:1 between military and civilian service. Also a military option that has a non-combat component (we actually can use non combat people stateside in the military to support combat forces).
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
April 29, 2007 11:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
What a great idea, national service. How new... I have only been hearing about it for my entire life....
Look, in the 60s and 70s the states and federal government managed to pay a not insubstantial share of college cost for the poor and much of the middle class. I personally benefited from it.
It has the subsequent stingy agenda, and I won't stick all of it on the publicans, although they get the lion's share, that has shifted this cost onto the middle class students' future earnings, with much of the poor afraid to even try.
The reason we don't have a national service in the US is we don't have anything for the national service to do. Who wants a make-work job? If we needed that big a workforce for low skilled, but not necessarily dangerous, public service not presently delivered one of the bi-annual proposals for a national service over the last 50 years would have gotten legs and taken off.
The reason we don't provide better benefits to the youth is that we are stingy and the youth don't vote.
April 29, 2007 1:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Your point about "make work" projects is really interesting. I was raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico and one of the WPA projects there was the construction of a theatre and roadshow house which is now (and has long been) home to the Albuquerque Little Theatre.
At the time, it was a "make work" project. It was certainly not vital that it be built. It was a neat thing and people needed work and so the government set them to it. Decades later, it's an important part of the city. It's enhanced the cultural life and current residents love it and are glad it's there.
I'm just saying that it's possible and even probably that what's "make work" today can give decades of reward. Some of these projects won't address current needs, but we still get something out of them.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
April 29, 2007 2:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am too young to know (not many things I am too young for anymore), but it is my understanding that the WPA and the CCC were not limited by "not dangerous." Those were desperate times. Nobody is going to send their children out to do high risk jobs they wouldn't do themselves in ordinary times. According to the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, "During the period from 1980 through 1995, at least 17,000 construction workers died from injuries suffered on the job."
If we are going to have a "National Service" it had better be mandatory and had better put Senators' and Presidents' daughters at the same risk as my grandchildren.
April 29, 2007 3:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, by the way, we already have a public workforce. In fact, we already have 4 different public workforces. First, we have the traditional public employment workforce. We have a small volunteer sector. Then, we have the ever growing not-for-profit workforce. And the Reagan-Bush "revolution" has been undercutting public control of it's own policies by selling off public assets and hiring out public jobs to the for-profit private sector. Why do we need a fifth public workforce?
April 29, 2007 5:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
There are also a few more recent examples in the same tradition:
AmeriCorps provides scholastic awards of up to $4750 per full time year, and VISTAs now are eligible for a partial forgiveness of their loans. But the AmeriCorps awards are limited to two years, and the forgiveness is only 15%, so these at best make only a relatively small contribution, given todays higher education costs.
The Service Pays proposal seems much more comprehensive than what is in place now and would cover student costs more effectively, at the same time providing human capital for vital social programs; it sounds like a win-win to me.
Know your enemy well, for in the end that is who you become. ~~Old Chinese Proverb
April 29, 2007 11:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Let's get serious here. It all comes down to money.
It's cheaper to warehouse people at minimum levels in subsistence welfare programs than it is to make a real effort to rehabilitate and upgrade and educate them out of poverty.
A national service program will cost a lot of money.
Well sorry, America's gotta pay for all those tax cuts for billionaires, and that trillion dollar military machine somehow.
So much for national service.
May 1, 2007 5:53 AM | Reply | Permalink