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Now
When Ronald Reagan convinced the nation
that the nine most dangerous words in the English language are:
I'm from the government and I'm here to help, the Gipper knew
better, even if his audience didn't. Reagan was a member of the
WW II generation and half his colleagues in Hollywood, from Newman
to McQueen to Matthau, got their educations, training and first
homes through the biggest of big government programs, the G.I.
Bill.
Yet Reagan's 1980s laugh line
has become 21st century conventional wisdom, justification for
slashing and spurning every government cause that doesn't have
pork on its label shortchanging even the veterans our current
leadership claims to support.
Consider these two contrasting
images to understand just how far we've sunk since June 1944,
when Franklin Roosevelt signed the original G.I. Bill: After
World War II, millions of veterans lined up for hours for a remarkable
purpose: to register for free college educations, to buy homes
with no money down and mortgages cheaper than rent, to sign up
for vocational training and job counseling, and to apply for
business and farm loans -- all courtesy of Uncle Sam and the
original G.I. Bill. In the wake of the Iraq war and occupation,
very different but no less remarkable lines now snake across
many military bases nationwide: bread lines.
This is the dirty secret in
a war filled with them: Thousands of military families have been
left so desperate they must queue up for donations of surplus
cheese, day-old bread and damaged boxes of frozen food. This
is especially true for bases in areas with high costs of living,
such as the Marines' Camp Pendleton near San Diego, where food
lines have become a weekly fixture. When our warriors come home
from Iraq, all too many find empty bank accounts, maxed-out credit
cards and the realization that the college benefits used to entice
enlistees won't cover the costs of a 4-year degree, nor support
their families while they're in class. Still others, wounded
in a war costing the country $10 million an hour, learn that
their president and Congress have cut programs to heal their
injuries, post-combat stress, and economic distress. "It
is a scandal," says Paul Rieckhoff, director of the Iraq
& Afghanistan Veterans of America. "You can be sent
to Rikers Island (New York's jail), and you'll get better transitional
assistance when you get released than you do getting out of the
Marines."
Sadly, this is not merely a
story of slighted veterans, but of America's dismal failure to
invest in its future. Just imagine how a politician today would
be pilloried if he proposed offering an entire generation free
college, subsidized mortgages, job training and medical care.
Why that would be a costly boondoggle, outright social engineering
it would violate Reagan's dictum that government isn't
the solution, it's the problem.
Today's unthinkable was yesterday's
matter of course. In the midst of war, FDR and Congress overwhelmingly
passed the bipartisan G.I. Bill to aid 16 million veterans
1 out of 8 Americans rebuild their lives. But this investment
in America's future powered far more than a return to the status
quo. It transformed the nation and the American Dream. It opened
up the colleges (formerly elite bastions), raised suburbs out
of bean fields (a nation of renters became a nation of homeowners),
grew the middle class (from 1 in 10 before the war to 1 in 3
a decade after), and provided the medical, engineering and scientific
prowess to conquer dread diseases, usher in the information age,
and win the Cold War.
Such luminaries as Bob Dole,
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, William Rehnquist, Warren Christopher,
Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, and George McGovern, among many
others, got their starts through the G.I. Bill, as did 14 Nobel
Prize winners, two dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, 238,000 teachers,
91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 450,000 engineers and a million
assorted lawyers, nurses, businessmen, artists, actors, writers
and pilots. We seem to have forgotten that it was not unfettered
free markets that transformed postwar America so much as a massive
government program that intervened mightily in the housing, lending
and education businesses, pushing (and subsidizing) them in ways
they had long resisted spreading the wealth as never before.
Or since.
Costly? Sure, but the G.I.Bill
was truly a hand-up, not a hand-out. It more than paid for itself.
A 1988 congressional study found that every dollar spent on education
under the bill returned $7 through increased productivity, consumer
spending and tax revenue. Fifty billion (in today's dollars)
earned a $350 billion return. Unlike the $450 billion and counting
being flushed down the Iraq drain, the G.I. Bill left us safer,
stronger, more united, and more prosperous. That's called investing
in the future -- not for the next quarter, but the next quarter
century.
The original GI Bill had sweeping
power because it touched a whole generation. Today's pale imitation
reaches less than 1% of Americans. Decency and patriotism demand
that it be strengthened, and our vets deserve every cent. But
short of world war and a massive draft, it will never again be
the same engine of opportunity. And America needs such an engine.
Before he died, FDR had a solution:
national service. Young people would do good while earning education,
medical, housing and pension benefits -- not just veterans, but
everyone, a civilian GI Bill. Polls suggested a receptive public,
but the idea died with Roosevelt. Bill Clinton tried a modest
resurrection with his AmeriCorps project. Much more is needed.
In an era when college is a
growing financial burden for families, when home ownership grows
less affordable each day, when we are losing our competitive
edge in advanced degrees, and when the American Dream so generously
nurtured after World War II is under siege, it is time again
to expect greatness from our government our common enterprise,
our commonwealth. It is time to realize Reagan's old saw was
not truism but self-fulfilling prophecy. Before he convinced
us otherwise, our magnificent American government bested the
Great Depression, created Social Security, won WW II, ended racial
segregation, eradicated the scourges of polio and small pox,
harnessed the atom, put a man on the moon, invented the internet,
rebuilt war-ravaged Europe and Japan with the Marshall Plan,
and raised America to new heights with the visionary G.I. Bill.
Such is the legacy of greatness we inherited.
Now, for the first time in
our history, polls show that Americans expect their children
to inherit less prosperous lives than the current generation,
a direct result of our embrace of those nine dangerous words.
Is that really the legacy we want to leave behind?
Edward Humes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
and author of Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed
the American Dream (Harcourt
2006). He has contributed to Talk, the Los Angeles
Times Sunday Magazine, Los Angeles magazine, and others.
Humes's numerous other books include School of Dreams
and the bestselling Mississippi Mud, Mean Justice, and No
Matter How Loud I Shout. For more information, visit www.edwardhumes.com
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