newswire: 7/18/2020
- Calls for mandatory national service in the U.S. are coming back as a way to improve social cohesion. While mandatory national service isn’t likely to happen tomorrow, support for expanding service opportunities for young people is certainly growing among lawmakers. (Christian Science Monitor)
- NH: Over the years, there have been numerous calls for America to implement national service programs. In the Great Depression, there was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and in the 1960s, LBJ created AmeriCorps. As recently as last summer, Pete Buttigieg was calling for a service program of 1 million high school students.
- Back in 2016, Congress created a commission to research and recommend policy regarding American public service. They issued their final report last March, and while they recommended reinvigorating existing programs like AmeriCorps, they warned it would be costly.
- Currently, AmeriCorps is on a tight budget and can only accept a fraction of applicants. (After 9-11, they received 150,000 applications but had only 7,000 open spots.) And while expanding AmeriCorps’ budget has been talked about for years, it never seems to happen. In 2017, Trump called to cut AmeriCorps entirely out of the federal budget.
- The Commission also recommended that service programs should not be mandatory, fearing forced work would cause youth to be hostile to the whole idea of civil service. But polls suggest a majority of Americans actually support a compulsory service. In 2017, Gallup asked Americans if they supported a mandatory year of either military or volunteer service for young adults. 49% of Americans said they supported the plan, while only 43% said they opposed it. Yet only 39% of 18-29 year-olds, who would be the most affected by the program, supported its implementation.
- IMO, youth acceptance of a mandatory national service depends upon the framing, structure, and circumstances of the call to action. Experience shows that youth respond more favorably when the call to action is framed as a two way deal. For example, in return for serving, they benefit from education or career help.
- Circumstance also matters. The young are more likely to accept a mandatory service in a time of high unemployment with little else to do. Take it from the military. Their recruitment levels have always gone up in bad economies and down in good economies. Similarly, times of national crisis would make a mandatory service acceptable. As I pointed out, after 9-11, AmeriCorps applications soared with youth wanting to make a difference. With the pandemic leaving swaths of Millennials unemployed, evidence suggests the youth would jump at the opportunity to serve. See "California Is Betting on Millennial Volunteers."
DID YOU KNOW?
- Fewer Choices, Choices. In recent weeks, shoppers have breathed sighs of relief upon seeing household staples like toilet paper and flour back on supermarket shelves. But there’s a catch. According to The New York Times, this doesn’t mean that grocery stores are back to normal. With supply chains squeezed and eating habits changing, many companies have slimmed down their product lines and are focusing on their bestselling products—a reversal of the longtime trend toward seemingly endless choices. (See “When Less is More.”) Gone are varieties like Jif’s reduced-fat peanut butter and lightly salted Lay’s potato chips. The grocery chain IGA has cut the number of toilet paper varieties it offers from 40 to 4. The same strategy is at work in restaurants, which are drastically reducing menu items to accommodate fewer customers. Darden Restaurants has already announced that it will keep the truncated menus, which have cut prep work and costs, after the pandemic is over.
