It’s strange to me that Conservatives find public service creepy. His call to public service is one of the main reasons I like him.
The state demands kids to be in school. Why not just include public service as a part of their curriculum? I mean that used to be normal. The only thing that’s creepy is that serving your community isn’t normal anymore.
I think you misunderstand the nature of most of this boards ‘Conservatives’.
-XT
Why? Everyone keeps throwing around the word “voluntary” in this thread, but I’m reading this as “mandatory” It may not be spelled out so boldly, but it would seem to work the same way that highway funding did - either a state adopted a lower speed limit, or they cut Federal highway funding to that state.
Are you okay with the idea that the government has a right to your time, and can demand that you spend some of it working as forced labor?
Volunteerism is fantastic, and I’ve done some of it myself. But this would not be volunteerism.
No.
When he was running for President, John Edwards was quite upfront about how the programs that needed to be implemented were going to take priority over balancing the budget. Otherwise, in a world where Dems don’t occupy the White House for 16+ years in a row, we’d spend all our time cleaning up after the elephants, and never get around to dealing with anything else.
So first we’ll deal with global warming and universal health care, and then if the GOP is still sufficiently outraged about the deficit, we can deal with that then.
So I presume you are saying that Obama is not going to pay for it. He will just jack up the deficit.
So Bush is a horrible President because he increased the deficit. Obama, on the other hand, is going to be a great President because he is going to do the same thing.
Okay, let’s pretend I have had a major revelation. Bush’s increase in spending is a major failure of his administration (actually, I have mentioned this several times on the boards, but pretend I haven’t.)
Now how are we going to pay for all this?
Does the board as a whole really have no response to anything besides “Bush SUX!”
Regards,
Shodan
Ah…I see. So, all these last years when the Dems were wringing their hands over the deficit and how bad it is they didn’t really mean it? So, we can have not only the 'Pubs deficit but all these new Dem programs too, but it’s cool because we actually can afford them until the Dems get around to fixing them all?
Let me think on that for a bit…
Um…no. I’m not buying it. YMMV of course.
-XT
There’s a major difference; the reason that Bush has used to increase the deficit has resulted in millions of dead people and more millions of refugees. Which is rather different than a national service initiative.
I have to agree with this. It seems like America is home to a lot of patriots that don’t care to get off their butts. It would be great if we could start learning, as a nation, how to be more involved as citizens. And how do you do that? One way is to teach kids how to do it. Then maybe one day public service will be a point of pride and not a “but it’s so creepy!” kind of thing. Hell, maybe even voting will become more important to people… 
It’s mandatory that kids attend school. I fail to see the difference. Massive public works projects that will enrich all of our lives and increase the amount of money in kid’s pockets, giving them an incentive to go work because their tax burden will be reduced thus increasing their amount of money. All they have to do is put in one 8 hour day a month. Boo-fucking-hoo cry me a river.
Whoa there Captain Exaggeration… he’s talking about an education grant here and there as a carrot for community service, not withholding the voting franchise (unless I missed something).
On the other hand, this “citizen security force” troubles me. What exactly is this going to be? Something to replace the TSA? Something to formalize the Texas border watching vigilantes?
If it isn’t something at least semi-paramilitary, it’s going to look something like this:
Watch commander: I need you to pull an overnight watch
Citizen security guard: Fuck you, my kids are in town this weekend.
Watch commander: Alrighty then.
In other words, useless. And no, I wouldn’t want to see it “improved” by militarizing it.
I really want to throw the Republican regime out on its arse, but how am I supposed to vote for Obama when he comes up with halfbaked bongwater civic activism ideas like this?
If you go to public school, and public schools essentially make it impossible to graduate with good grades unless you perform 300 hours of ‘service’, then by the time people are of voting age the vast majority will essentially have been forced to do service. Granted, it’s not as extreme as Heinlein’s (fictional) vision, but on the other hand in his universe the state was actually very limited, and ‘citizenship’ was little more than the ability to vote. You could be a normal, successful, productive member of society without it.
Still, the tone is the same. Obama is saying that a citizen really ‘owes’ the state some of his or her time.
Obama is clearly talking about refundable tax credits, paid whether you earn an income or not. Because the vast majority of college student pay little to no tax in the first place. If this were merely a tax deduction, then it would only be useful to students who earn so much money that they pay more than $4,000 per year in tax. That implies a big damned income for a student, given all the tax breaks they currently get. So it’s clearly a $4,000 cheque paid out for doing the 100 hours of work.
Eva Luna: Sorry, but I don’t see working for a non-profit that the state has chosen to be a recipient of ‘service’ to be much, if any, different than working for the state itself. The key here is that the state is directing the labor of citizens, and making claims that such labor is somehow better than just working at another job with a private company.
I was with him up until it started sounding like a lot of the service he was talking about would be mandatory. I’m not really outraged because never in a million years will this happen, but, fuck that. I would homeschool my kids if the only other option was goverment-mandated slave labor.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on this then, because I find one of the beautiful things about the concept of “America” is that, not only can I sit on my butt all day, I can put a baseball bat in it while I do so.
I only have a problem when some people (cough…Dems…cough) seek to erase the consequences of being a lazy asshole, through massive public assistance programs. Please note, I include corporate assistance programs in this as well. Except they do not have massive butts…
Unless you count Ken Lay and the like
As I said in the OP, if Obama had limited himself to non-specific calls for people to take an active role in society, and even increasing funding to Americorps and the Peace Corps, I wouldn’t have had much to complain about other than that it would be ineffective.
My complaints are with the specific programs that cross the line from, “Hey, you should help out”, to “Help out - or else.”
That’s a long series of “ifs,” for which I haven’t yet seen any evidence. Do you have a specific cite, from the YouTube clip or elsewhere, that there would be any effect whatsoever on students’ grades if they do not choose to participate? Or that it would even be a graduation requirement?
Has there been anything at all stated about how recipients of service projects would be chosen? Why would it have to be anything more complex than just being an IRS-certified nonprofit org that requests assistance? And what makes you think the state would be at all involved in directing the labor of the volunteers?
So how is Obama going to pay for it?
Or is it really the case that no hard questions can ever be asked (of a Democrat) because Bush was the worst President evah!!!
Regards,
Shodan
The only part of this that seems to be parallel to your analogy is that the district systems have to have the programs on the books to get funding. But it doesn’t say whether this is all federal funding, or only some portion. I think it could be read either way.
Anyway, I have no problem with this plan. But then, I don’t subscribe to the notion that service to private industry is somehow better than service to the state or the community. Quite the opposite.
Yeah, who’s going to pay all these volunteers?
So your complaint is that when most politicians call for volunteer community service it’s okay because it’s just the usual bullshit politicians are supposed to say and then forget about. But when Obama says it, watch out because he might actually do something.
I don’t know - I haven’t even watched the video clip yet, and I haven’t made any final decisions about my opinion of this initiative, because I haven’t seen the details. But this is also why I am not jumping to conclusions that it’s fascism.
Ask away, as far as the budgetary issues go. But even if it would increase the deficit, I have much less of a problem with increasing the deficit to implement something that I believe will pay long-term dividends than with increasing the deficit to do something that has killed millions of people, displaced millions of people, and fucked up another country for decades, if not longer. And that’s without counting the damage to U.S. foreign policy and standing in the international community. Value: priceless.
Are you saying this will all be free? If so…what do you base that on?
I think he assumes that it won’t in fact all be free…and that unspecific calls for service are a bit different than this directed appeal from Obama. Do you not see the difference?
-XT