Hope the town hall meeting draws better than Merkley's Cleland event a couple of Fridays ago. This discussion sounds like it might have some actual substance to it.

I consider Max Cleland an American hero and while I might quibble with his choice of candidates (well, OK, I DO quibble with it), I honor his service to our country, He's a good, good man.

that's a good point Brienne--where's the funding meachanism? And why do you have to die to give your kids the benefit?

Hope the town hall meeting draws better than Merkley's Cleland event a couple of Fridays ago.

Um, what? This is Max Cleland's first visit to Oregon for the Jeff Merkley campaign.

So, we're going to create a larger financial incentive for more people to go to war?

Yeah, right, Jerry. I can imagine it now: "Honey, I've decided to go to war. Why? Well, I'm planning to get killed so our kids can have a college education."

I'm sure we'll have lots of people signing up for that program. rolling eyes

"Um, what? This is Max Cleland's first visit to Oregon for the Jeff Merkley campaign."

He didn't have an event with Merkley in Portland the Friday of the DPO Convention? Who was there, then?

This is a fantastic proposal from Merkley. Personally, I'd support expanding it to include anyone in the Peace Corp who dies in the line of duty as well.

We need only look back at the original G.I. Bill and its enormous effect on our economy to grasp the value of a renewed G.I. Bill. The vanishing middleclass in this nation largely owes it's very existance to the original G.I. Bill.

The suggestion that this proposal would be tantamount to a financial incentive to go to war is ludicrous on it's face and only looks more absurd the closer one examines it.

Grunts in uniforms don't get to decide when, where or why a war is started. That dubious honor is reserved for elected chickenhawks willing to destroy an eardrum to get out of serving in a war themselves.

John Bradach's comments make great sense to me.

The current military recruitment system places the burdens of war disproportionately on a small number of families, and is skewed by an unequal poverty or economic draft (in addition to the backdoor draft reflected in stop-loss provisions and the inversion of "regular" vs. reserve and national guard roles). Having the full social costs of the war borne by these families paid by the public is both a moral obligation and a way to partly spread the burden around more broadly. In the case of education benefits to family member survivors and families of the substantially disabled, such benefits may in part compensate for the more economic dimensions of the family's loss, in terms of capacity to earn a decent livelihood.

The scale of this program in Oregon so far has been quite small, and would be too at a national level, compared to the overall numbers of students in higher education each year, even if it is expanded to include disability and Peace Corps dead and disabled (which would be quite a small number).

However, for that reason, the "GI Bill" effect would be limited. U.S. military forces demobilized after World War II were approximately 16 million at a time when the national population was about 120 million. It covered a very high proportion of the male population between ages 18 upward (decreasing with age I suppose), though discriminating against women and having a ripple effect on those who followed. My father, born in 1929, who started college in 1946 at age 17 having not been in the service, claims that the phrase "beat generation" had at least one meaning as people who felt "beat before they started" because in competition with older, more mature men who had spent the war thinking about what they would do afterwards, who had a sense of having paid their dues so that it was now their time to get what they needed, and who had financial support. That picture probably does not adequately account for post-traumatic stress issues and other disabilities for G.I. Bill era vets.

But warts and all, the G.I. Bill as an imperfect social wage unleashed a huge development of human capabilities and creativity, along with a development of higher education and related institutional research capacities, promoting social mobility and contributing greatly to the shift within the working classes of the proportion between "working poor" and "working middle class" after the war.

For an idea of scale, in the 1990s, the Labor Party, led by Tony Mazzochi, former leader of the scienc and technology-oriented Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers' International Union (OCAW), who had been a beneficiary of the G.I. Bill personally and was committed to education for workers in his own union in part for ability to deal with health and safety issues, proposed that higher education at public institutions at all levels should be free for anyone who qualified for admission. This was loosely linked to a proposal for periodic worker sabbatical years that could be used for education, training or retraining, family purposes, health promotion or whatever.

Anyway, the LP estimated that the cost of their proposal, if applied to everyone currently attending public higher ed. institutions would have been ca. $50 billion in the late 1990s. Had it actually gone through, the costs would have been higher as demand for higher ed. would have risen. There would also have needed to be regulation to prevent universities and state legislatures from gaming the system and to account for unequal commitment to supporting public higher ed. in different states.

Nonetheless in the context of national budgets of well over a trillion dollars and Iraq war costs of more than $100 billion annually (possibly much more, depending on how one conducts the accounting), this clearly was an idea the U.S. could afford, if we chose to afford it (compare say to choices not only to burn bales of money in war spending, but well over $500 billion "off the budget" 1980s dollars for Savings & Loans bailouts, to the bailouts now being given to the big financial institutions for bad loan practices, to relieving big companies of their contractual pension obligations, to subsidizing relocation of production overseas etc., etc.)

(BTW, Milton Friedman supported full public funding of higher education, interestingly enough, articulated in "human capital" terms I think.)

This all may seem off-topic, but it isn't. It has two points. First, we should not confuse the proposed benefits with the post-World War II G.I. Bill, because the orders of magnitude aren't the same, and wouldn't be if the proposal was for full G.I. Bill-like benefits not only for survivors of those killed or disabled, but were for everyone who served (as the G.I. Bill was).

But second and more importantly, it should put into perspective arguments that "we can't afford this." Basically, if we can afford the war, we can and must afford these costs of the war, and if we can't afford these costs, then we can't afford the war. This is a minimal social obligation.

Good on Jeff Merkley for proposing this. Regardless of what happens in the primary, the DPO should get behind this idea, call upon our existing reps and senators to promote it as well as any new ones, and bring it to the national convention as a proposal for the national platform.

We should all get behind this idea, and avoid playing primary politics with it.

About the Max Cleland event tomorrow... the Town Hall with Merkley at PSU.

I just found out that Colonel Zall will be there too. He won't be a participant alongside Cleland and Merkley, but he will be there.

Colonel Zall, of course, has pro-veteran/anti-Shrub creds as strong as anyone I've ever heard of. He first wrote (by himself) the old Veterans for Dean blog and then transformed that into Voice of a Veteran after Howard Dean withdrew in 2004.

Unfortunately he hasn't written anything since August of 2007. But read either blog and you'll soon see that his harsh criticism of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal took a backseat to nobody!

I've only met Colonel Zall once myself - at an early 2004 Portland area Dean Meet-Up where he gave the keynote speech. But we'd emailed back and forth quite a bit in 2003/04 and he was kind enough to email me the text of his speech which I posted on my old website and which has since been reused at least once at my blog.

Chris,

Count me as long since aboard with free higher education to all who qualify just as Tony Mazzochi proposed. For all of the not insignificant initial costs, it would pay dividends both economic and social which would far outstrip the costs.

Frankly, it seems insane to me that we as a nation have failed so utterly to connect the dots between funding higher ed and how that results in lifting all boats, to borrow the rising tide analogy. We're actually throwing money away with the current system, IMHO.

I find many of the comments here somewhat offensive. This proposal is a very minor cost to the government but would mean everything to the children of a dead soldier or the spouse. This is not a question of war policy or politics, but basic decency. Most of those who are killed in action are relatively young. Many have young children or spouses without prospects for a career who now have to find a way to survive. I believe that we as a society have an obligation to those children and to the spouse to help them survive. The best tool for survival in this world is an education. It is the least we can do.

I think this is a terrific idea but it should be a part of a comprehensive and well-thought-out (not to mention fully funded) complete package of benefits for veterans, not just a one-off "issue of the week" to talk about in a debate.

Stephanie,

It is "part of a comprehensive and well-thought-out (not to mention fully funded) complete package of benefits for veterans, not just a one-off "issue of the week" to talk about in a debate".

Edison, I agree with you completely.

We (via our president) fail to provide sufficient services through our existing veterans' programs

Our Senate and Congress fail to provide sufficient oversight when extent of the first failure becomes apparent.

Band-aid proposals like this are easy to drum up support for, but don't address the core problem. I believe this sort of incremental, targeted legislation is the sort of thing that leads to a monumental body of code that is not fair in any overall way, and is difficult to maintain and enforce. (Think of the tax code.)

I'd rather see a Senator Merkley doing the harder and perhaps more thankless work of fixing the implementation of VA programs we already have.

James gets my sympathy vote for a great idea. Too bad it'll never happen for fairly obvious legal reasons (think: charges of blackmail). But I suspect that more justice would be served by it than injustice.

Back to the Cleland/Merkley Town Hall. I just got off the phone with someone who was there and it apparently went spectacularly well.

In addition to Max Cleland and Colonel Zall, whom I mentioned upthread, Jim Rassman also participated. Presumably other members of the Veterans for Merkley group were in attendance too.

I was also informed that Colonel Zall and Jim Rassman will also be at the Bridgeport Brew Pub fundraiser later this evening, which should be a lot of fun.