I promised to tell something about my ill-fated and never-ending presidential campaign, so I will. I created a platform consisting of ten parts, and my plan is to roll these parts out one by one over the next week or so. But first, a little about the campaign itself. Oddly enough (or maybe not so oddly), its rationale rather mirrors that of this blog. Here goes:
Every four years, usually in the early spring before an election, I decide to run for President. Here is how it always seems to happen: I survey all those threatening to occupy the White House, looking for anyone with actual good ideas about how to make our great nation even greater. If I find someone, I support that candidate—but he or she rarely lasts long in the race. The reason, I have come to understand, is that the combined influence of television and professional consultants makes it almost impossible for candidates for national office to articulate anything beyond the first paragraph of any idea, if they happen to have one. They’re too busy raising huge sums of money for TV advertising to think about public policy, and the last thing they want to do is alienate well-heeled donors with prospects of significant change that might affect their fortunes. That’s how a man like Barack Obama, campaigning on a platform of “Change”, can vote for the 2008 Farm Bill, the mother of all corporate welfare abominations in U.S. politics.
When this scene replays itself every four years, I remember a slightly screwy but charming and mostly harmless character named U. Utah Phillips. A songwriter and folk club entertainer of a Wobblies persuasion, Phillips used tell audiences he was running for president on the Sloth and Indolence ticket. As an anarchist, he'd say that if elected he promised to hang around the White House and shoot pool because, if you wanted to change something, you needed to go out and do it yourself. He also used to tell audiences that if elections could really change anything they’d be illegal, and so not to vote—“It only encourages them”, he’d say.
It has never been quite fair for me to appropriate Phillips’ Sloth and Indolence label, even though it has well described the tempo of my campaign if not its content, because for all I knew Phillips himself was running again on that ticket. That may change next time I run, since Phillips passed away back in May, I think it was. But unlike Phillips, I would never tell people not to vote. I only tell them not to vote for people who have no good ideas. But I have good ideas, so I ask people to vote for me, heading up what I called last time the Common Sense ticket. I have ten such ideas for starters to make America a better place, ideas far-reaching enough to make a meaningful difference were they to be implemented, but not so far-fetched as to be beyond discussion. These ten ideas are thus “torque points” in American politics, places where positive change would resonate throughout our political culture. Here is a summary of the first one.
No. 1: Re-Create a Culture of National Service
There is a crisis of civic participation in America; we’ve become increasingly a nation of cynical spectators, not participants, in our own governance. No democracy can be healthy with the levels of apathy and alienation that exist today in America. We need to recreate a culture of national service that will have long-lasting benefits for civic participation. Here’s how to do it (and note that this not just my idea).When an American citizen is born, the U.S. government should create, along with a social security number, a savings account for that child into which somewhere around $5,000 and $7,500 is placed—called a Baby Bond (or, as some prefer to call it, a “Service Bond”). That child’s parents, family and friends may contribute to that fund until the child becomes 18 years of age, and those contributions are treated for tax purposes like charitable deductions: money put aside that can be subtracted from taxable income. Through the miracle of compound interest, every child will have a considerable nest egg upon reaching the age of consent—upwards of $18-30,000.
Even if the Baby Bond idea, which has been operating in Great Britain on a modest scale since 2003, stopped there, it would be useful as a way to get equity spread around to more young people who can put it to productive use. In my plan, it mustn’t stop there: To get that money, every citizen would have to sign up for and do national service in one of eight categories: military; Peace Corps; Educore (like Teach for America); forestry and environmental remediation; urban “broken windows” brigades; hospice and elderly care; hospital ship duty ; and a “habitat for humanity” program. (Military service, by the way, should be made to attract only a small percentage of Baby Bonders, because the last thing our generals want or need is a huge number of untrained short-timers to put up with.This idea, therefore, is definitely not a smokescreen for a new military draft.)
One 12- or 18-month stint of service, complete with training, would have to be done between ages 18 and 25, and that first stint would entitle a person to three-fourths of his or her Bond. Another 9-12 month stint at any time, even after age 65, entitles the person to the rest (it stays in the same account earning interest until its owner chooses to collect it). Our 18-25 year olds can use that money to pay for college or vocational training, to buy a home or to start a business. And we’d be crazy (we are crazy) not to encourage our older citizens to share their experience with others. This is the way to create a real shareholder mass democracy.
Everyone seems to understand the rationale for Social Security: We hold ourselves as a society morally responsible for providing a basic minimum for our elderly out of respect for their humanity and an abiding sense of basic fairness toward them. If we care about our elderly enough to pool social resources on their behalf, why don’t we take a similar attitude toward our young people—young people who not only deserve a fair start, but whose accomplishments in the constructive lives ahead of them will benefit us all? The Baby Bond idea is not charity or welfare; it is socially selfish, for it benefits everyone.
Because it will benefit everyone, businesses and state and local government will have good reason to offer partial or full matching funds to encourage Baby Bonders to spend their money at colleges or in areas they wish to encourage. So, for example, if the City of Pittsburgh, say, wanted in-state Pennsylvania Baby Bonders to invest in real estate or businesses in certain parts of the city, the municipal government could offer special incentives to attract Baby Bond resources. If General Electric wanted to encourage more students to go into electrical engineering, it could offer to match any Baby Bonder funds used to pay toward an academic major in that field. The possibilities, if not literally endless, are extensive.
In my version of the Baby Bond-National Service concept, the first 12-18 month stint of service, in whichever of the eight categories is chosen, must be done away from a person’s home area. The government will provide enough of a stipend for basic subsistence housing and board (financed in part out of the interest-earning money it is holding in maturing Baby Bond accounts), just as “City Year” and AmeriCorps programs do now.
A key reason for “circulating” our 18-25-year olds is to break the downward spiral of poverty, drug addiction and hopelessness that afflicts a still far too large percentage of inner-city residents, and a significant number of rural “white” poor, as well. The only way to really solve this problem is to literally remove young people away from harmful environments and have them come face to face with people of their own age from different places. Moreover, the only way to generate real understanding for people in such straits from the rest of our population is to have them actually meet and get to know one another in a neutral environment. The military draft used to help fulfill this function in the past; we need that function again, now by dint of another method.
This proposal amounts to integrating the many private volunteer and public service programs already in existence, and perhaps adding a few more. It amounts really to scaling up dramatically and incentivizing in a new way what we already do in a fragmented and inadequate way. Even so, a national service program of this magnitude would not be cheap. Even if we use existing non-profit infrastructures to their maximum, the government would have to put aside (but not initially spend) money for Baby Bonds, pay out money when service is rendered, and pay for the operational costs of the program, as well.
But, then, the GI Bill—which serves as the basic model for this idea—wasn’t cheap either. Neither was the Civilian Conservation Corps, but that worked, too. Just like the GI Bill and the CCC, the benefits of a Baby Bond National Service Program would more than offset its costs over time. Just think of the costs we as a society already pay for prison and drug-related debilities on account of how poisonous environments trample the hopes of so many young people. We do not have to tolerate those costs, which go way beyond the merely monetary. If we look at all the cost factors involved over the long term, a national service Baby Bond program would beyond doubt be an overall economic winner for the nation. As it is, every dollar spent on AmeriCorps volunteers pays back roughly $2 in services rendered.
Besides, costs are relative. We know how many Americans will turn 18 in any given year—a little under four million—and we can estimate program costs within reason. If we do that math, two things become clear: first, that the United States of America, the wealthiest mass society in history, can afford the Baby Bond-National Service Program; and second, that the costs are almost trivial compared, say, to wars like the one in Iraq or the financial bailout of recent months.
Note, too, that service is not compulsory, and there is no penalty for demurral. There would be no costs for the government having to track down truants and dodgers, for by definition there cannot be truants or dodgers. If a person does not wish to do service, his or her bond is merely forfeit and the money goes back into the general pool to earn interest, pay for program operations and help others. But once a culture of service is created, I believe that the opt-out rate would be small.
Obviously, a great deal more can be said about how this program would work and what its main challenges and many benefits would be. Clearly, intervening into the negative social patterns in our inner cities can’t wait until people are 18 years old, so supplementary programs would have to be devised (I have ideas here, too). But note that sending Baby Bonders in to help rescue the just 15% of our high schools nationwide (about 2,000 schools) that produce the majority of high school drop-outs can make a tremendous difference.
And we can’t wait 18 years from the passage of a bill to graduate our first Baby Bond class; we’ll have to devise ways to accelerate the program between now and 2027. But based on the already existing incubus of AmeriCorps, we can find ways to scale up over time to do that.
The patterns of undergraduate university life, too, would be temporarily thrown off pattern, as significant numbers of high school graduates do service instead of becoming college freshmen at age 18 or 19. But does anyone think it would be a tragedy for our young people to go to college a year or two more mature than most do now? Who is anyone kidding? It would be a huge improvement for our kids and our colleges alike.
Of my ten ideas, this one has the greatest potential to change American society for the better. You think it’s too hard? Then your own thinking is part of the problem, so please think again.
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