Cosmoline
Member
Nobody suggested such a thing. What I suggested (specifically to counter your argument that a mandatory Reserve commitment was too expensive) was that there would likely be a collatoral benefit in the reduction in payments of other entitlements. Never was that suggested to be the goal - merely a possible (and IMO likely) outcome.
How is this likely or even possible. You'll be paying them out of government coffers for their service, and the two year period will keep them from two years of earning real money and putting it into the entitlement system. Why do you think two years of mandatory guard service is going to make people less likely to turn to the government for entitlements later on? And if this isn't what you think, how is it the program would reduce the payments of other entitlements?
You're being disengenuous in comparing a mandatory NG/Reserve committment to ditch digging brigades of convicts.
But if you increase the guard from a few hundred thousand to twenty or thirty million, what else are they going to do? They'll either be going through pointless drills or they'll be put to work cleaning the roadsides and digging ditches.
I don't confuse them at all. I'm just willing to admit that one is an inevitable outgrowth of the other, and that separating them as entities is an arbitrary and intellectually stunted approach.
My community is composed of the people around me. My neighbors and friends. Governments are composed of the elected representatives, but the only ones with any tie to MY COMMUNITY are local and state governments, and those links get weaker as you go higher up the chain. The state government represents my community a little less, since it represents many communities in the state at once. The federal government barely represents me or my community at all. It's distant and knows almost nothing about life here.
This is why I have less of a problem with the notion of a state or local government calling up crews of locals to help deal with emergencies than with a NATIONAL SERVICE LAW which by definition is going to have to come from the Federales.