Stewart vs. O'Reilly

[Andalusian girls]

the government should not have the power to take two years of your life from you simply because you exist in the spacetime continuum

[Athas]

the government should not have the power to take two years of your life from you simply because you exist in the spacetime continuum

But they can take 13 for mandatory schooling?

[Andalusian girls]

yes

[noblemountain]

I am at odds with the idea in my own head honestly. I think it would be really helpful for a lot of kids growing up in the ghetto or backwoods country to get out of those shitholes and see what life is about in a mandatory civil service...however the "true freedom" argument is hard to refute. I just think that if there's an option to not do it...people won't do it. Americas real problem is laziness and apathy. Having the civil service (note...I mean that as in any sort, not just military) mandatory would force people out of their comfort zones...which is really what helps shift paradigms. Realistically it may just be treating a symptom and not the real problem though. I think our welfare system needs a HUGE overhaul and our education system needs a complete reboot to fix the real problem.

[Jeryhn]

the government should not have the power to take two years of your life from you simply because you exist in the spacetime continuum

Since you said yes in response to schooling, what do you think of the following?

Personally, I'd like to see more options on the table:
- Military service
- Accredited trade training
- Educational background. (This would include getting an associate's degree and performing work for your educational institution, like federal work study.)
- Civil service (this could be defined as a number of things, from working for your local or state government in some capacity.)

Completing any of the above undoubtedly leads to some kind of useful training that can be applied to a trade.

Things you should not be eligible for if you have not completed one of the above:
- Voting
- Accepting government benefits
- Running for or holding any kind of government office

In short, I'm pretty much all-for the idea of a Starship Troopers idea of government participation. You want something out of it? Put in your time and earn it. You eliminate the stupids and the deadbeats from the voting and entitlement pools, and having a more educated base of citizens moves the workforce from being more service-centric to one more manufacturing and idea-centric. Let the people who are unmotivated or lazy work for Burger King and Starbucks forever. There are, of course, obvious holes in this idea: where the cost should come from, what to do with people who are physically or mentally disabled in some way etc., but its a rough idea.

EDIT: it was Starship Troopers, lol. Such a great movie.

[Acevalefor]

I like that list. I am remembering my days as an 18 year-old teenager trying to get public assistance due to a job loss. I was required to jump through a lot of hoops and provide proof that I was applying at 10 places per day before they would even consider letting me in the door. I understand their goals, but turning someone away at the front desk without even letting them get the process started until they come back with a mountain of proof that they need government assistance is horrible. Add the need to have some sort of training/civil service completed before being allowed benefits and many many people will just walk away and live in poverty and/or on the streets.

I would suggest requiring proof of enrollment into the program be sufficient to allow voting, government benefits, etc. That way it does not preclude people that need it the most.

When I applied for a federal college grant at my local community college, they required that I also apply for state benefits (food stamps, emergency cash, health care) to ensure that I was taken care of while going to college. I see something like this in the program you speak of. Forcing enrollment has to come with some sort of guarantee that you will be able to afford basic needs while in the program.

[quannum]

what's the reason for this mandatory service again?

poverty could be handled the same way brazil is dealing with it.

Rumour has it that when senior civil servants at the Department for International Development (DfID) tried to interest the development secretary Andrew Mitchell in cash transfers, they couldn't get anywhere. One morning he came across a column by my colleague Aditya Chakrabortty and was converted.

Within a short space of time the "must read" book for senior DfID officials was Just Give Money to the Poor, which charted the success of projects all over the world where aid was given straight to the poorest people – without all the consultants on fat salaries to analyse poverty reduction.

Mitchell jumped on the idea as a version of the "Big Society" applied to aid – bypass the institutional structures and empower the people directly. Interestingly, another DfID minister is believed to be less enamoured. Alan Duncan worries about that bogeyman of Conservative party nightmares: dependency. Won't the poor just get hooked on handouts?

Probably the biggest and best known of all the cash transfer schemes in the developing world is the Bolsa Familia in Brazil. Since 2003, 12 million families have joined the scheme and receive small amounts of money (around $12 a month). Inequality has been cut by 17% in just five years, which is perhaps one of the most dramatic achievements in welfare ever recorded. The poverty rate has fallen from 42.7% to 28.8%.

Such is the fascination in this "social technology" that Brazil is now being sought for advice on cash transfer programmes by countries across Africa (Ghana, Angola, Mozambique), the Middle East (Egypt, Turkey) and Asia (including India). Even New York City has implemented a version of the programme.

"It's social policy diplomacy," suggested one of the ministers involved in the Brazilian programme, Dr Romulo Paes de Sousa, when I caught up with him in London after speaking at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex earlier this week.

He's delighted by the interest. "Brazil is developing a new model of donor whereby we give expertise as well as aid. Brazil is already one of the largest donors of food aid in the world." He is also struck by the paradox that Brazil is expanding its welfare state just as Europe is cutting back on welfare.

There are some aspects of the programme, he explains, which have attracted particular interest. The first is conditionality. The payments are dependent on the family's children staying in school until 17, and attendance must be at least 85% up to 14 years and 75% for the remainder. Another form of conditionality is that children get the full set of vaccinations in their first five years and that mothers attend pre and post-natal care.

"Bolsa Familia has definitely contributed to the improvement in infant and maternal mortality that we are seeing in Brazil," said Dr Paes.

One of the advantages of the conditionality is that the investment in welfare has a real bang for its buck. For just 1% of GDP, Brazil is simultaneously boosting education levels, improving dire health indices and reducing poverty. This might meet Andrew Mitchell's requirement for "value for money".

What has been controversial is the transparency. All the names of recipients are publicly available on a website. Individual claims can and have been checked. Anyone can report abuse. But it's working. Independent evaluations found that 80% of the money is reaching the poor; pretty good in a country in which welfare has been dogged by corruption.

One clever aspect of the programme was to put all payments through the banking system. Recipients use a debit card to draw out the money from their bank accounts at ATMs. The registering of claims is a more complex process and since the scheme started in 2003, a network of social services centres has increased from 1,000 to 9,000.

Inevitably, the programme has led to criticism that it will generate a dependency culture. Unlike another comparable programme in Mexico, it is not time limited. But Dr Paes points out that the level of support is low so it is designed to supplement income from a job, never replace it. It helps that studies of its impact show how the injection of this cash into particularly poor communities is helping stimulate the local economy. Other studies have shown that the vast bulk of the money is spent on necessities such as food, school supplies, clothing and shoes - that helped squash arguments that if you gave money to the poor, they would simply spend it on alcohol.

Such evaluations (including publications by the World Bank) have helped the programme win legitimacy, but Dr Paes admits it was very hard at the beginning, when the Brazilian economy was weak, to persuade middle class voters of this disproportionate investment in the "bottom of the pyramid". "It's got easier since then as the Brazilian economy has grown," he added. It seems as long as everyone's share of the cake is growing, the middle classes are prepared to tolerate this modest degree of redistribution.

Bolsa Familia is another example of how the emerging economies – such as Brazil and China – are increasingly becoming players in the global debate on aid and development. Dr Paes – who was educated in the UK as an epidemiologist – jokingly referred to the UK as an "old country", and while very admiring of many aspects of the UK's welfare state, he saw Brazil as now being in the driving seat in helping to forge new welfare models for export.

[arus2001]

Still think there's an error in logic assuming that forcing lazy/stupid people to do shit they don't want to will change them in any meaningful way. Just how useless are a lot of college degrees out there? People are pretty much "forced" into those to make anything meaningful out of their life, but not only do those degrees represent a colossal waste of money from the individual, but the system doesn't exactly leave them in a good place for a decade or more after finishing. And for a lot of people, simply being able to afford that education is a problem, even with grants or scholarships. Doubly so in a shitty economy like present.

There's always gonna be chaff. But for the people who do want to be something, we're better off making sure they have the means to get there instead of feeling like everybody should or even wants to be there. And even "there" is speculative since you'll get people who deem things like art useless, even though artistic representation through video games is likely why we're all on this forum, for example.

[noblemountain]

I really like Brazil's system, but I read that it failed miserably in NYC. Could be small sample size or any number of other things though.

[Athas]

I don't think American's problem is with attendance rate and more with the schools, some districts are failing. And public schools require vaccinations anyway.

[quannum]

I really like Brazil's system, but I read that it failed miserably in NYC.

I wasn't familiar with NYC's attempt at this, so I checked wiki. Wiki says the Opportunity NYC program had shown positive results. At a glance, I don't see why they stopped the program

The program was constantly evaluated by MDRC, and data from the first two years of the program has been released, with the hope that research covering all 3 years of the program will be released in March 2011. [7] The data shows the program in terms of overall poverty, created the greatest improvement in reducing the share of families living in severe poverty from 30% to 17%, and increased the likelihood that parents had bank accounts. In terms of education, positive results were most seen in high school and less in elementary and middle school students. The program group was shown to have an increased likelihood of passing at least two Regents exams by 6%, and increased the likelihood of having a 95% or better attendance by 15%.[8] The effects of the program on improving heath was marginal, as the most significant statistic was an increase in the receipt of at least two preventative dental care visits by 10%. The program also had marginal effects in enhancing the parents’ work and training, as it had a 2-3% greater likelihood of receiving a training certificate or associates degree. [9] [10]

This isn't to say it's a slam dunk, the implementation details do matter as can be seen from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditi...ailed_programs

[ringthree]

Since you said yes in response to schooling, what do you think of the following?

Personally, I'd like to see more options on the table:
- Military service
- Accredited trade training
- Educational background. (This would include getting an associate's degree and performing work for your educational institution, like federal work study.)
- Civil service (this could be defined as a number of things, from working for your local or state government in some capacity.)

Completing any of the above undoubtedly leads to some kind of useful training that can be applied to a trade.

Things you should not be eligible for if you have not completed one of the above:
- Voting
- Accepting government benefits
- Running for or holding any kind of government office

In short, I'm pretty much all-for the idea of a Starship Troopers idea of government participation. You want something out of it? Put in your time and earn it. You eliminate the stupids and the deadbeats from the voting and entitlement pools, and having a more educated base of citizens moves the workforce from being more service-centric to one more manufacturing and idea-centric. Let the people who are unmotivated or lazy work for Burger King and Starbucks forever. There are, of course, obvious holes in this idea: where the cost should come from, what to do with people who are physically or mentally disabled in some way etc., but its a rough idea.

EDIT: it was Starship Troopers, lol. Such a great movie.

Fascism sounds awesome! :/

[BaneTheBrawler]

The most successful governments thus far haven't actually been pure examples of one type of government. They're mashups. For example, the U.S. isn't a democracy. It's a democratic republic, with elements of socialism thrown in.

Not a large leap to say the best real-world government is going to have elements of most forms of government... including fascism. It's all about cherry picking... and community service is a pretty good cherry.

[Andalusian girls]

a two-tiered system of citizenship is not

[BaneTheBrawler]

That depends entirely on what the entry requirements are for the higher tier- and who gets to change those requirements. It's a very risky system, given the amount of misery it can cause if mishandled, but if handled properly...

of course, when setting up a government,y ou have to plan on people trying to mishandle things, so it would require all kinds of checks and balances. I dunno how you'd do that, either. But if you could find a way, it could be highly beneficial.

[Hatedregret]

Public schools don't require vaccinations. My oldest doesn't have hers. Went through hell to get her in, but it's not required.(wasn't my call on the shots.)

[Athas]

My school required them, guess it's a state/county thing then but whatever.

[Kyte]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure my school did too.

[Drex]

Pretty sure all of Illinois does, so it's probably a state thing

[Esvedium]

A better question, why wouldn't you get your kid vaccinated?