http://change.gov/agenda/education/ says: "Create the American Opportunity Tax Credit: Obama and Biden will make college affordable for all Americans by creating a new American Opportunity Tax Credit. This universal and fully refundable credit will ensure that the first $4,000 of a college education is completely free for most Americans, and will cover two-thirds the cost of tuition at the average public college or university and make community college tuition completely free for most students. Recipients of the credit will be required to conduct 100 hours of community service."
So is actually required, or do you just miss out on $4k if you don't do it? If the latter, that actually doesn't sound completely unreasonable. If the former, I don't see this passing muster with Congress let alone the Supreme Court.
There's nothing about a tax credit for the high school version, but plenty of high schools already require service hours to graduate and I haven't heard of the legality of that being challenged. I do disagree with the idea of the federal government micromanaging public schools in general, but that's a trend that doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon, given that even Republicans favor it.
It sounds to me like an offer of $40 an hour for 100 hours of work. If I was a student, I'd probably consider this a good deal. If I was an American taxpayer, less so.
Taxpayers already seem reasonably happy with giving tax breaks to college students. If they get some work out of the bargain too, so much the better.
Personally I suspect that the government showering money onto the higher education industry is a major factor in causing tuition to rise, but this doesn't seem to be a widely discussed issue in the public sphere so the chances of getting it fixed soon seem slim.
Students do have to work for aid. It's called work-study. This just means that instead of useful jobs at the college where the student may gain experience, they'll be doing stupid Community Service type stuff (like the courts force criminals to do instead of jail time).
There is aid separate from work-study. Specifically (and this is just the federal stuff; states have education aid programs too): Pell grants, Stafford loans (some are subsidized, and even the unsubsidized ones charge below-market interest), PLUS loans, Hope credit, Lifelong Learning credit, tuition and fees deduction, Education Savings Bond program, the ability for parents to claim full time students age 19-24 as dependents...
Essentially they are planning to pay college students who choose to participate $40/hour to do community service work. That seems like a great deal for students, and a bad deal for taxpayers. How many college students are actually worth $40, or even $20?
It would be better if they required something like 300 hours of work to get the $4000. That would be closer to the market rate for unskilled labor. And it would only be 6 hours per week for 50 weeks per year, which any full-time student could manage.
Meanwhile the federal budget deficit continues to grow unchecked...
This idea comes from Rahm Emanuel. Few years ago I picked up his book, "The Plan: Big Ideas for America", at an airport and read it on a flight back home. In it, him and his coauthor Bruce Reed, discuss all kinds of interesting ideas. The idea of 'mandatory youth service' has a whole chapter devoted to it. Rahm, who used to be a dual-Israeli citizen and spent some time in Israel, was clearly influenced by the ideas behind 'kibbutzim' which Wikipedia defines as "... a collective community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. The kibbutz is a form of communal living that combines socialism and Zionism." Kibbutzim has been largely a failure and the number of people actually participating in them has been declining for a long time.
I doubt this idea will get much traction since it will have hard time passing the Constitutionality smell test. They'll need to heavily incentivize students into signing to something like this (forgiving some student loans?!) if it has any chance of getting any traction.
Spare us the innuendo. Mandatory service is not an Israeli innovation and it doesn't come from "kibbutzim". The Finns, the Danish, the Germans, and the Brazilians all have mandatory military service too. So do the Swiss, not exactly the hub of Western European socialism.
Require? What are they going to do to people who don't do it?
What paperwork are you going to have to fill out to get your open source project certified as community service, so you don't have to spend the time picking up trash along the road instead?
"The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year."
They're changing this page as we're commenting on it. The stuff about tax credits wasn't there the last time I looked. They've also changed the wording about "requiring" certain numbers of hours.
They seem to be making this stuff up on the fly...
If "making this stuff up on the fly" means "revising the policy proposals based on complaints from the public solicited via the Internet", then: bravo!
Iteration can work for policy, too. Regardless, I think the take-away here is that people shouldn't write articles like this based off of vague intentions. What someone wants to do, what they think is a good idea now and what actually happens can all be very different things.
I'd sure like to see a statement about who's writing this stuff and how final it is. Still, it's a lot better than secreting the process away behind locked doors, the way our current energy policy was made.
I would think something is wrong with the system if all my comments were up voted. most other places my pro-capitalism anti-progressive votes get down voted a lot more than they do here.
And if your comments were better thought out then they might even get upmodded. Generalizations of the form "Ohhh yeah, progressives always do X" aren't useful.
generalizations are extremely useful and everyone uses them all the time. people just get a warm fuzzy feeling out of denying the few they are conscious of.
The credit is fully refundable, so it amounts to getting paid $40/hr for a make-work project.
I wonder if there are going to be limitations on that... I could definitely be a student for a few more years if it meant I got paid $40/hr to do what I'd normally volunteer to do anyway.
For the kind of students who party their way through college, it would merely be a big waste of time. (Yes, waste. Forced community service always ends up going into lame make-work projects.) But for more earnest college students it would be a disaster. For the kids working their way through college, it would be a crushing burden to lose 2 1/2 weeks of fulltime work every year to government mandated projects. And for students who already spend their time on genuinely public minded projects, like open source, it would mean either (a) filling out a lot of paperwork to get the project certified, or (b) being yanked away from it for 100 hours a year, which is a large fraction of the time a college student can afford to spare for side projects.
If (as other parts of the website seem to suggest) the policy is actually that you $4k tax credit if you choose to do the service, this isn't such a huge problem. If you have a job that pays more than $40/hr, don't quit it to do the service. If you don't have such a job, then figure out what your options for service are and decide whether $40/hr is sufficient motivation to get you to do them.
The stuff about the tax credit wasn't there till a couple minutes ago. That changes everything, of course. Then it becomes just one of those make-work projects like e.g. Boston organizes during the summer to keep unemployable teenagers busy till school starts again.
Tax credit info has been on a different page (http://change.gov/agenda/education/) for longer than that. It contradicted the info on the linked page and that contradiction was apparently resolved a few minutes ago.
* 100 hours! Shocking! Tell it to the Israelis who, last I checked, didn't seem to have much of a problem building up a technology industry.
* The nerd exceptionalism is wearing a bit thin. Open source is the best you can come up with? How about: (a) teaching, (b) improving technological infrastructure (testing and improving muni and state web applications, helping administer muni wifi), (c) collecting, refurbing, and recycling computing equipment?
* Or for that matter: a large fraction of Obama's margin of victory came from mobilization of youth and first-time voters, and his overperformance of polls in Indiana are also attributable to the field operation: people wandering around towns in Indiana knocking on doors. Can't get more low-tech make-work than that. But that effort was disproportionately staffed with clueful, Internet-savvy college students. Lots of valuable work isn't sexy, but still benefits from smart people figuring out where when and how to do it right.
When I graduated from high school, I would not have been able to go to college if not for lots of help from the gov't in the form of grants and loans. After graduating, I personally felt that I should spend a year "giving back" to the country by participating in AmeriCorps. Ironically, I ended up learning way more from the experienced than I actually contributed during my year of service. Ask anyone who participated in either AmeriCorps or Peace Corps and they'll likely tell you the same thing.
So, as someone who voluntarily went through basically this exact program, it absolutely worked for me in terms of getting both a formal and non-formal educational experiences.
With the $4,000 tax credit this is really a massive subsidy for college tuition in return for a bit of make work.
The trouble is that the iron law of college subsidies is that the subsidy gets capitalized into the tuition. The net result of the tens of billions in existing aid is that tuition rates have risen higher than inflation for the past four decades.
If the government was serious about making college more affordable, they could simply mandate that in return for the non-profit tax status a college must keep tuition hikes lower than inflation. This wouldn't cost taxpayers a dime. It would simply force colleges to cut a lot of the bloat they've added over the years.
> If the government was serious about making college more affordable, they could simply mandate that in return for the non-profit tax status a college must keep tuition hikes lower than inflation.
The effect of this might just be to encourage colleges to drop their non-profit tax status. Or it might force the best faculty to all work for for-profit colleges, which makes a for-profit degree nearly required, which makes college less affordable. Beware unintended consequences.
IMHO, if the government was serious about college more affordable, they teach basic financial literacy in high school, and then give graduating high school students accurate, detailed information about the real degree requirements of different jobs and the salaries attached to them.
The effect of this might just be to encourage colleges to drop their non-profit tax status. Or it might force the best faculty to all work for for-profit colleges, which makes a for-profit degree nearly required, which makes college less affordable.
No way. For one, most top professors get paid from government grant money. Second, you way underestimate the benefits of the non-profit status. Most colleges have accumulated vast land holdings because they do not have to pay property tax. They then lease this land out to retail stores and restaurants and make mad cash. The tax free status also gives them a big advantage in equity trading: "Its endowment managers can trade rapidly in hedge funds without paying the short-term capital gains rates that we peons pay. This gives them a big advantage over most investors. If it were taken away, I wonder what the endowment's return on investments would be in stock or commodities trading." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/business/yourmoney/23every...
Also, you make the assumption that for-profit means more expensive. Personally, I'd expect the opposite.
The other thing that the government should do is separate credentialing from schooling. Want to become a teacher? Pass a test and do a year apprenticeship. Want to be a lawyer? Just pass the bar exam. If going to college helps you learn the information you need to pass these exams, then great. But if you are poor and determined, you should be able to teach yourself and enter your chosen career without having to pay the college tax.
Of course, none of this has any chance of happening. The universities are probably the most politically powerful organizations in the country. That's how they got all these advantages in the first place.
The point of this exercise is to show 1) there are plenty of solutions to the problems of this country that don't actually require spending more money and 2) the current political system is not even capable of talking about these solutions, much less actually enacting them.
From the wording, it sounds like the "requirement" will only extend to high school and college students, not citizens of all ages.
I agree that this sounds onerous, but I suspect that the requirement will only extend to students at government-funded institutions. I seriously doubt that a requirement for all private citizens to give their time would stand up under judicial scrutiny.
The rest of this article is just baseless conjecture about what will and will not qualify as community service.
"Government-funded institutions" includes all but a very few universities in the U.S., because research grants and federal student aid are considered government funding.
Are you guys not reading the document? It basically gives $4000 and up to 2/3's of tuition to every college student. the only requirement is 100 hrs of community service. If you dont want the money, you dont have to do it... It is a requirement for funding, not for being a student...gosh
"Corvée is labour, often but not always unpaid, that persons in power have authority to compel their subjects to perform, unless commuted in some way such as by a cash payment; sometimes this was an option of the payer, sometimes of the payee, and sometimes not an option."
"Corvée has existed in modern and ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, China and Japan, France in the 1600s and 1700s, Incan civilization, and Portugal's African colonies until the mid 1960s"
Actually the 13th admendment forbids this most explicitly:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
It's not quite slavery, but it's walking an awfully fine line, especially since the value of the so-called "tax credit", at $40 an hour, by far exceeds the economic value of the work performed.
As a thought experiment, suppose the value of the "tax credit" were increased to $1000 an hour, so that you need to either do your 100 hours of community service or pay $100,000 extra in tax. Since the vast majority of us can't possibly afford to pay a $100,000 fine for not doing our "community service", this would in effect be a government-run slavery system.
At $4000 (forty bucks an hour for college students who otherwise be lucky to earn 25% of that) it's pretty borderline.
This policy was always one of my strongest reasons for opposing an Obama presidency. It's facepalm-worthy to find out that many of his supporters are only just finding out about this policy now.
The smear campaign from the catastrophically failed US far-right is starting. Comparing slavery and the plan on compulsory social work is disgusting.
And no, US far-right conservatives are NOT capitalists in the Adam Smith kind of way. If he were still around they'd smear him as socialist or some other idiocy.
This article could've been written by Ann Coulter.
For the last month of the campaign, McCain's campaign attacked progressive taxation as redistributionist "socialism"... the OP is saying that Adam Smith supported progressive taxation, so that's why conservatives "would" smear Adam Smith.
"The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.[16]"
Thanks, that was insightful. Then again, there is the possibility of a progressive sales tax, which is more in line with the conservative (not necessarily Republican) ethic that, if citizens are taxed, they should be taxed equally, proportional to their income or consumption.
US far-right conservatives are anything but Adam Smith. They are more like the conservative lords Adam Smith was revolting against. US far-right is closer to the Victorian, or even Feudal system (saving the distance of centuries!)
Note by US far-right I mean people like Richard "Dick" Cheney, Bill O'Reilly, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush.
For them talking about moral or equal oportunities means socialist, commie, or something else.
It will take many years to undo this US government's deeds in the world. And as it starts affectig the interests of this powerful groups there will be a dirty smear campaign like we've never seen before.
It seems to me this is more about an effort to expand existing volunteer programs and add new ones while encouraging and rewarding people for community service than it is about slavery.
Of course, but I never said that. One thing I don't like about all of this is the treatment of college students as anything but grown men and women trying to get an education. There is a strong contingent, if not a majority, that wants to treat college-aged adults as if they're still children (note alcohol and gun laws). This and its consequences are the main reasons that I left college.
Immediately following high school, I began work as a web designer/front-end developer. After over a year of that and taking night classes, I transferred to a good university in my state. I'd had enough after a semester, and more than enough after two, so I went back to front-end development.
So is actually required, or do you just miss out on $4k if you don't do it? If the latter, that actually doesn't sound completely unreasonable. If the former, I don't see this passing muster with Congress let alone the Supreme Court.
There's nothing about a tax credit for the high school version, but plenty of high schools already require service hours to graduate and I haven't heard of the legality of that being challenged. I do disagree with the idea of the federal government micromanaging public schools in general, but that's a trend that doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon, given that even Republicans favor it.