Serve Thy Country
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/opinion/national-service-buttigieg-moulton-delaney.html Version 0 of 1. This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday. The 2020 Democratic primary is full of intriguing ideas — on climate change, tax policy, voting rights and more. This morning, I want to focus on an issue that three candidates have begun pushing: national service. The basic idea is to encourage people, especially younger adults, to work on projects that advance the country’s interests. Franklin Roosevelt created the first federally funded service corps in the 1930s. Since then, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton built on the idea. AmeriCorps — today’s umbrella program, which receives both federal and private funds — has about 75,000 civilian corps members annually. They perform education, antipoverty and other work, in exchange for a modest stipendor tuition reimbursement. [Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.] So far, three 2020 candidates have talked about expanding national service. John Delaney, the former Maryland congressman, wants to expand AmeriCorps to address climate change and improve infrastructure, among other things. “We have to restore a sense of common purpose and unity to our country,” he has said. Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., has not been as specific as Delaney, but Buttigieg also talks about national service as a way to bridge social divides. “We really want to talk about the threat to social cohesion that helps characterize this presidency but also just this era,” he said last month. And last week, Seth Moulton, the Massachusetts congressman, announced his proposal, which includes a specific program for climate change. Moulton also went into detail about the benefits that participants would receive, including tuition at public colleges or a job-training benefit of up to $24,000. I think Moulton is right to get specific about these benefits, because Americans under the age of 40 don’t deserve to be lectured about the idea of sacrifice. Many of them have already sacrificed. “American millennials are approaching middle age in worse financial shape than every living generation ahead of them, lagging behind baby boomers and Generation X despite a decade of economic growth and falling unemployment,” as The Wall Street Journal’s Janet Adamy and Paul Overberg recently wrote. “They have less wealth, less property, lower marriage rates and fewer children, according to new data that compare generations at similar ages.” An ambitious service program — more ambitious than anything proposed so far — could have two big benefits. It could help restore a sense of national purpose for many young people, and it could also address the current intergenerational injustices. For more … “Presidential, congressional, state and local officials should endorse the idea of at least a year of national service, not as a legal obligation, but as an increasingly widespread cultural, political and moral expectation for all able, young Americans,” write Stanley McChrystal, the retired Army general, and Michael O’Hanlon in The Hill. In a graduation speech at Ohio State University, Fareed Zakaria of The Washington Post noted that Donald Trump spoke positively about national service during the 2016 campaign — but that his proposed budgets would slash AmeriCorps funding. Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and White House chief of staff, calls national service a necessary complement to new social benefits, like Medicare for All. “The Democratic Party is strongest when we challenge the public to give, not just promise the public more of what they get,” he writes in The Atlantic. If you are not a subscriber to this newsletter, you can subscribe here. You can also join me on Twitter (@DLeonhardt) and Facebook. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. |