Obama (was) to require 100 hours of community service a year by college students

Personally I suspect that the government showering money onto the higher education industry is a major factor in causing tuition to rise, but this doesn't seem to be a widely discussed issue in the public sphere so the chances of getting it fixed soon seem slim.

They seem to be making this stuff up on the fly...

For the kind of students who party their way through college, it would merely be a big waste of time. (Yes, waste. Forced community service always ends up going into lame make-work projects.) But for more earnest college students it would be a disaster. For the kids working their way through college, it would be a crushing burden to lose 2 1/2 weeks of fulltime work every year to government mandated projects. And for students who already spend their time on genuinely public minded projects, like open source, it would mean either (a) filling out a lot of paperwork to get the project certified, or (b) being yanked away from it for 100 hours a year, which is a large fraction of the time a college student can afford to spare for side projects.

No way. For one, most top professors get paid from government grant money. Second, you way underestimate the benefits of the non-profit status. Most colleges have accumulated vast land holdings because they do not have to pay property tax. They then lease this land out to retail stores and restaurants and make mad cash. The tax free status also gives them a big advantage in equity trading: "Its endowment managers can trade rapidly in hedge funds without paying the short-term capital gains rates that we peons pay. This gives them a big advantage over most investors. If it were taken away, I wonder what the endowment's return on investments would be in stock or commodities trading." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/business/yourmoney/23every...

Also, you make the assumption that for-profit means more expensive. Personally, I'd expect the opposite.

The other thing that the government should do is separate credentialing from schooling. Want to become a teacher? Pass a test and do a year apprenticeship. Want to be a lawyer? Just pass the bar exam. If going to college helps you learn the information you need to pass these exams, then great. But if you are poor and determined, you should be able to teach yourself and enter your chosen career without having to pay the college tax.

Of course, none of this has any chance of happening. The universities are probably the most politically powerful organizations in the country. That's how they got all these advantages in the first place.

The point of this exercise is to show 1) there are plenty of solutions to the problems of this country that don't actually require spending more money and 2) the current political system is not even capable of talking about these solutions, much less actually enacting them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvee

"Corvée is labour, often but not always unpaid, that persons in power have authority to compel their subjects to perform, unless commuted in some way such as by a cash payment; sometimes this was an option of the payer, sometimes of the payee, and sometimes not an option."

"Corvée has existed in modern and ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, China and Japan, France in the 1600s and 1700s, Incan civilization, and Portugal's African colonies until the mid 1960s"

As a thought experiment, suppose the value of the "tax credit" were increased to $1000 an hour, so that you need to either do your 100 hours of community service or pay $100,000 extra in tax. Since the vast majority of us can't possibly afford to pay a $100,000 fine for not doing our "community service", this would in effect be a government-run slavery system.

At $4000 (forty bucks an hour for college students who otherwise be lucky to earn 25% of that) it's pretty borderline.

This policy was always one of my strongest reasons for opposing an Obama presidency. It's facepalm-worthy to find out that many of his supporters are only just finding out about this policy now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_tax

"The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.[16]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments

US far-right conservatives are anything but Adam Smith. They are more like the conservative lords Adam Smith was revolting against. US far-right is closer to the Victorian, or even Feudal system (saving the distance of centuries!)

Note by US far-right I mean people like Richard "Dick" Cheney, Bill O'Reilly, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush.

For them talking about moral or equal oportunities means socialist, commie, or something else.

http://www.liberalhistory.org.uk/item_single.php?item_id=37&... "[...] Although both Smith and Quesnay criticised the mercantilists belief in state interference with foreign trade and capital flows as a way of augmenting national wealth [...]"

It will take many years to undo this US government's deeds in the world. And as it starts affectig the interests of this powerful groups there will be a dirty smear campaign like we've never seen before.