Step right up and get your austerity, my friends.
A proposal in our newly Republican House suggests cutting wasteful and unnecessary spending by $60 billion. Sounds fine, right?
According to House Republicans, "wasteful and unnecessary spending" includes the USDA, Pell Grants, Head Start and the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS).
Other diarists can no doubt extol the virtues of many of these programs better, but I'm going to focus on the latter program after the jump.
The CNCS runs three similar programs - Senior Corps, Lean and Serve America and AmeriCorps. It also helps run United We Serve, a nationwide day of service on September 11th.
I don't want to shock anyone, but while politicians on both sides like to say pretty things about national service, when it comes to putting tax dollars where their mouths are, Republicans don't quite measure up.
If you can stand to listen to Dick Armey, here he is calling for the elimination of AmeriCorps, calling it "obnoxious"
A bit more high-profile was Glenn Beck comparing AmeriCorps to the Hitler Youth. Here you can see him saluting the program sarcastically, wearing his lederhosen.
Actually, don't click that. The image is scarred into my eyes now. Thanks, Fox.
Michele Bachman, never one to miss the crazy train before it leaves the station, calls AmeriCorps 'Re-education camps for young people'
Now, full disclosure - I've served one year 'under' Bush and one year 'under' Obama. I say 'under' because whoever the President is has no impact on what you do or what you learn.
For the uninitiated, AmeriCorps helps kids pay for college by giving them a small grant (I think it's up to $5,000 now) after they spend a year working with a non-profit organization. AmeriCorps are paid a small stipend - think around minimum wage - and provide valuable services for these often cash-strapped charities.
In 1995, IBM did a study of AmeriCorps and saw that for every dollar spent on the program, up from $1.60 to $2.60 in tangible benefits were seen . This program works, there's just no other way around it.
In these times, it is more important than ever to foster a sense of volunteerism and community. There's a lot of hurt out there. If we can spend hundreds of billions of dollars to kill people in other countries, why can't we spend a few billion to help our own citizens?