[MineralMan]

"I agree that it wouldn't do them any harm, but this is going to be HORRENDOUSLY EXPENSIVE. Can you imagine? It's just a giant government jobs program. I thought that was why we have fought communism all these years?"

Not in the long run, in my opinion. We have a lot of jobs that need doing, from fixing our damaged infrastructure to creating a pool of well-trained and responsible workers for our corporate and private businesses. I see Universal Service as a tool, nothing more.

Unemployment among young people is high, particularly in some demographic groups. Part of this is that many youths are completely unready to hold a job.

Futher, the costs of crimes committed by young Americans is very, very high. One advantage of Universal Service is that they would be placed in positions where they are far from the local gangs, drug dealers, etc.

I think the costs, in the long term, would be negative.

[walden]

I went and looked at the US census data-- there are 20.5 million people ages 15-19 and 19 million ages 20-24. So, if everyone was in the program for 1 year, that would be about 4 million at any one time. Assuming you can run this for $20,000 per person, that's a program that will cost $80 billion dollars every year. However, that's EXTREMELY conservative-- more realistically, it costs about $40,000 to keep someone in prison for a year, so call it $160 billion dollars a year, EVERY year.

This is a non-starter, and it's stupid, to boot. Aren't conservatives AGAINST big government? Talk about huge government, this is it.