An editorial from the Wall Street Journal discusses the implications of Obama’s plan for public service:

Both John McCain and Barack Obama exhorted Americans to dedicate themselves to public service in an appearance at Columbia University on Thursday, to mark the seventh anniversary of 9/11. But Americans need no lectures from politicians to participate in their nation’s civic life. They need them to stay out of the way. Between the two, Sen. Obama is far less likely to do so.

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Mr. Obama has laid out a 10-page vision statement that includes virtually every program proposed by the left and the right in recent memory and then some. President Bush’s controversial faith-based initiative? He’ll keep it. President Kennedy’s Peace Corps? He’ll double it. Even Mr. McCain’s seven-year-old plan to raise a domestic civilian force to fight terrorism and triple enrollment in AmeriCorps gets a plug.

In addition, Mr. Obama would create several new corps of his own: a Classroom Corps to help teachers and students in underperforming schools; a Health Corps for underserved areas; a Clean Energy Corps to weatherize homes and promote energy independence. The last is separate from his Global Energy Corps, to promote low-carbon energy solutions in developing countries.

Mr. Obama calls all this his “Plan for Universal and Voluntary Citizen Service.” It might live up to its “universal” billing, given that it would prod Americans of all age groups—from preteens to retirees—to sign up. But as to its voluntariness, the plan will make generous use of Uncle Sam’s money—and muscle.

Read the rest of the editorial. You can also read the actual plan (9 page PDF file).

It’s all well and good to inspire people to public service. It’s even OK to use some public moneys for it, assuming it’s properly offset by other spending cuts. Seed money and tax credits are examples of good ideas (and there are a few of those in the Obama plan). Bigger bureaucracies to manage service programs, however, are not a good idea. Most of the Obama plan falls into this bucket.

But at its core - universal service that’s theoretically voluntary? How does that work. Sure, there’s no draft involved. But the amount of money being thrown around as part of these programs essentially makes them mandatory. $4000 tax credit for college for 100hr/yr of service. That is a wonderful idea, if the loss in tax revenue is offset by spending cuts. Enhanced benefits for seniors for public service? Isn’t that what most people would call “a job”? Not a fan of that one. Read through the plan. There is literally something for everyone.

Returning to the editorial:

The real issue is why Mr. Obama thinks it is necessary to take such extraordinary steps to push all Americans into service. Americans every year contribute close to $300 billion out of their own pockets to charities at home and abroad. This is the highest of any nation—seven times more than Germans and 14 times more than Italians per capita. Americans are equally generous with their time. According to the Corporation for National and Community Service—a federal agency—last year Americans volunteered 8.1 billion hours of service valued at $150 billion to community organizations.

Mr. Obama doesn’t think this kind of voluntary effort is sufficient, because it can’t deliver social justice. In his memoirs and elsewhere, he distinguishes between community service and organization. Community service, he believes, can offer short-term relief to those temporarily down-and-out, through things like church food pantries or homeless shelters. It can also address concrete problems such as vandalism or crime through neighborhood watches.

However, Mr. Obama believes—as he wrote in a 1990 anthology, “After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois”—that this kind of service plays into the “individualistic bootstrap myth.” It doesn’t by itself help the disenfranchised trapped in inner cities.

For that, Mr. Obama wants collective political action, i.e., bottom-up mobilization, to help the disaffected extract resources from the powers-that-be to remake their communities. This is what Mr. Obama attempted to do during his years as a community organizer. And that’s what he hopes all his cadres of social workers would also do.

At a certain level, what he’s saying here is exactly what Federalism is all about - local resources taking care of local problems locally. That makes a lot of sense. But he’s proposing to address it a vigorously anti-Federalist fashion - nationalize the local problem to solve the local problem. How does that help?

How about you leave the money in the communities, so that they can solve problems at the local money, and use Federal money for national issues?

There’s a major chunk of the Obama document not covered by this editorial - military service. Give that a read, too. Obama/Biden will solve all the problems of the size of the military as part of this “culture of service”, too:

Before the 2000 election, George Bush and Dick Cheney famously told our military “Help is on the way.” Today, the active Army is short 3,000 captains and majors, and 58 percent of recent West Point graduates are choosing to leave the force - double the historic average. We do not have a single combat brigade at home in reserve, ready for an unexpected crisis. Our National Guard and Reserves have only half the equipment levels they need, hampering their ability to respond to crises, foreign and domestic. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will strengthen the military and enable more men and women to serve their country in the armed forces.

Expand to Meet Military Needs on the Ground: A major stress on our troops comes from insufficient ground forces. Barack Obama and Joe Biden support plans to increase the size of the Army by 65,000 troops and the Marines by 27,000 troops. Increasing our end strength will help units retrain and re-equip properly between deployments and decrease the strain on military families.

Solve Recruitment and Retention Problems: A nation of 300 million strong should not be struggling to find enough qualified citizens to serve. Recruiting and retention problems have been swept under the rug by lowering standards and using the “Stop Loss” program to keep our servicemen and women in the force after their enlistment has expired. Even worse, the burdens of fixing these problems have been placed on the shoulders of young recruiting sergeants, instead of leadership in Washington. America needs a leader who can inspire today’s youth to serve our nation the same way President Kennedy once did-reaching out to youth, as well as the parents, teachers, coaches, and community and religious leaders who influence them. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will make it a presidential imperative to restore the ethic of public service to the agenda of today’s youth, whether it be serving their local communities in such roles as teachers or first responders, or serving in the military and reserve forces or diplomatic corps that keep our nation free and safe.

Admirable. Unfortunately, there’s no actual meat behind how they’re going to address all this. There are a whole lot of benefits to service men/women and their families spelled out. Some make sense. Many are way over the top. These, however, are the types of things that should be paid for with Federal dollars. Not local community mandatory volunteerism.

And how are we going to pay for all this?

A COMMITMENT TO FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY
Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s national service plan will cost about $3.5 billion per year when it is fully implemented. They will maintain fiscal responsibility and prevent any increase in the deficit by offsetting cuts and revenue sources in other parts of the government. This plan will be paid for in part by cancelling tax provisions that would otherwise help multinational corporations pay less in U.S. taxes starting in 2008 by reallocating tax deductions for interest expenses between income earned in the U.S. and income earned abroad. The rest of the plan will be funded using a small portion of the savings associated with ending the war in Iraq.

Uh, how many people do they think will take the $4,000/yr tax credit? According to the US Census Bureau, in 2006, there were 17M college undergrads in the US. Let’s take a nice round number - 1M, a bit over 5% of that total. That $4B in tax revenue lost right there. You need a whole lot more than $3.5B in funding offsets for this enormous program.

I love that last sentence, too. There’s no “peace dividend”. The war funding is pure deficit spending. Any savings from military drawdowns (if any, given the need to ramp back up in Afghanistan) are not fodder for funding programs. That money should go “poof” as part of reducing the deficit.

Change we can believe in right here, my friends.