Re: Americorps

Topics: Education, Programs
05 Feb 1995

From: "DG Ervan Darnell"


ThomasG1@aol.com wrote:

>The Post today has a bit on "AmeriCorps: is it worth the money?"

Americorpse would be closer to the truth.

>I was glad to learn some of the basics. The program pays minimum wage,
>benefits [not elaborated on in the article], and has child care.

Benefits include full health insurance for everyone in the program and free
room and board for many. In '94, the federal part of the program allocated
$19K per "volunteer" (according to the Post article) and that was before
paying the out-year education benefits. As Thomas noted, the feds are only
paying 75% of the cost (that may be good or bad depending on how you look at
it), but it says the real cost is more like $25K per "volunteer" per year.
This is all for work the value of which is sub-minimum wage (demonstrated by
the fact that the people involved would be making near minimum wage
otherwise and were not previously hired to do these jobs).

The program is supposed to be investment in education. Well, if that's the
case, why not just invest in education instead of forcing people to diddle
around for a year? Furthermore, a lot of people in the program have
enrolled after graduating because it was the best job they could find (for
instance, the person interviewed in the Post, Josh Denk, is a Rice grad who
used to be a gopher for the CS department). Such people are obviously not
earning money for college. They simply cannot do anything better with a
useless degree (a situation caused in large part by government education
loans which subsidize majoring in certain fields disproportinate to their
real value). To the extent that the program snares people who would have
been more productive, it's a dead loser because someone who will contribute
$40K/year to society after graduation has a year of that productivity lost
to instead contribute some work worth <$10K/year for a year before starting
college.

It is supposed to teach young adults something about citizenship. Yeah,
right. Something about government pork barrel politics is all that is being
learned here. It is supposed to do important community service jobs. Well,
if those jobs need to be done, pay the going rate for them. That should be
cheaper than using labor which is ill suited for the task at hand.

> After one
>year, the members get $4,725 to help pay for college or vocational school.
> For those without a calculator handy, the $4K divided by 2080 hours in a
>work year comes to $2.27 an hour, presumably tax free [1].

An interesting point, when the government goes into business, it always
"cheats" by refusing to follow its own rules so as to make its bad ideas
look better.

I reminds me of social security in a strange way. Social security is two
things welded together: a regressive tax (not just a flat tax, but a truly
regressive tax) and a non-means tested benefit. Either of those ideas on
their own would be shot down as terrible, but together they become
politically unassailable. Americorpse combines another college money give
away (when the feds were already giving all they thought prudent) and a
welfare program for the young, single, childless, and able. Either of those
alone would be thought ridiculous, but together each bad half seems to
justify the other. Go figure.



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