You certainly got a lot of interest in this intellectual naval gazing exercise.

But I've long stated my opposition of compulsory service of any kind. OK so you have an opt out clause. Great. But then you're going to create a society of the haves and havenots. And most of the people who are too stupid to know better will opt out right up til they realize they need those services. So how far do you take that? Guess you can't use the roads? Right? In the end you'll create the pseudo-fascist, communist country that no one really wants anyway. The options all have to have a viable means to create people with an equal opportunity to get the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. You've created what us OPORD generators call - an Aunt Sally Course of Action.

Your opt in clause doesn't work either because what is the demand for 60 year old General drivers? There's far too many Generals but even they only number in the hundreds. As long as you have more people working on the government dime at some full living salary than you have hard-working citizens paying a percentage of a living salary towards taxes you have a recipe for deficit disaster.

It would have been nice to see TARP used towards some transparent benefits like New Deal projects like the CCC, or TVA. Programs that would be temporary and beneficial to worker level people, who are currently unemployed. But no such thing happened.

We're headed that way already. An interesting intellectual exercise, but an farce in the end.

I always find it interesting how people not subject to a "National Service Requirement" are the ones proposing them. Goes back to the "old men sending young men to war." Sorry TR but at 55 no one wants you in their outfit.

(For the record I'm 40, been in the service in some form or another for 22 years - still serving and still subject to deployment. In other words maybe those who have served have the right to promote such claptrap - those who haven't probably should not. Maybe there is something to that Service equals citizenship idea from Heinlein [joking])

the amount of comments calling Mr. Ricks out for his radical authoritarianism. Addiction to militarism has side effects.

if the point of reinstating the draft is to get the wealthy elites to have some "skin in the game," then to include the libertarian opt-out, noble as it is, defeats the purpose.

the libertarian opt-out proposes this deal: "You do nothing for Uncle Sam. In return, you ask for nothing from him. For the rest of your life, no tuition aid, no federal guarantees on your mortgage, no Medicare"

so a person from the wealthy elite gives up an opportunity to work for minimum wage for a year and a half. and the penalty is no help with college? no help with shaving a couple of points off the mortgage? for the wealthy elites, this amounts to zero disincentive. in fact, many of them will take the chance to earn more for those 18 months and pay for all the penalties up front, with cash left over for a villa somewhere.

throw in a loss of consular services when overseas and a few of them will agree to participate (or you'll just create a new private consular services industry). but this idea, to work needs actual teeth.

how about this-- a lifetime increase in tax rates that can only be offset by service. income, capital gains, inheritance.

thanks very much for connecting the dots on this issue. i am not a huge fan of social engineering, but i do share the sense that america's wealthy have checked out to a certain extent. we need them in the game, on our side.

This is all a lovely academic exercise for a lazy fall day. A few points, though:
First and foremost, there is no stomach for mandatory service in the U.S. It’s not going to happen.
Assuming reality away for a moment, think about the implications of a draft. We’re not going to dramatically expand the size of the military (our defense budget is 20% of our GNP, and BOTH parties agree somewhat that it must be cut), so that means that a draft would not have a large societal impact anyway. Assuming some people are still going to volunteer, how many people would be enter the military from other walks of life? 30,000? Wow.
There would costs incurred for all involved with a draft that was implemented fairly, too. For instance, there would be an opportunity cost for people who were working towards advanced degrees if their academic pursuits were disrupted for two years of service as an infantryman. Assuming a draft removed requirements for enlistment bonuses, many people who would've otherwise joined the military seeking a new start would be denied a benefit that assists people seeking a new start (a $20K enlistment bonus is a pretty good deal for a 20-year old with a high school degree, a spouse, and an infant). Finally, there would be costs for the military as well. Would it really be better to have a chemical engineer grad student who absolutely DOES NOT want to be in your rifle squad, or the high school grad who joined because his dad was in the 3/187th Infantry in Desert Storm? I do not think reliance on conscription would be beneficial for our corps of Non-commissioned officers either, another key consideration. Our army is built upon the strength and professionalism of our non-commissioned officer corps.
And WHAT exactly is with this Americorps nonsense, anyway? What would mandatory service accomplish? Would it instill a sense of camaraderie or, uh, patriotism? Perhaps every fall the Americorps could gather in a massive rally on the national mall. Doesn’t anyone find that idea a bit unnerving?Why does everyone think it would be a great idea for to impress youth into service all of a sudden? Health Insurance mandates, Federal service mandates, pretty soon it will be reasonable to argue everyone should have a bar code imprinted on their right hand with all their critical information. . .

Two main points in Mr Ricks' post.

Firstly if wealth becomes concentrated in too few hands (as happened in Rome towards the end of the second century) then the effective demand in the economy falls. There is less economic activity and deflation and stagnation follow.

You end up with a situation like Ireland's where accountants and asset strippers are moving in to gut the country before leaving the body by the roadside and driving off. If the Irish government can't avoid an election you may have an Argentina situation where a populist politician appears and tells the IMF et al to get lost.

Will that kind of thing happen in America? You can usually grow your way out of trouble but if the system breaks then it could be fifteen or twenty years before things get back on an even keel. Meanwhile the world will move on.

As far as national service goes, Most current politicians of W's generation did what he did and paid lip service to it, whoring and boozing round Texas or somewhere else for a few years while daddy's influence ensured their number never came up for foreign service.

There are some innovative solutions that could reconnect the wealthy with America. In the early Roman Empire the emperor would lend wealthy citizens money to buy land at low rates of interest. Instead of repaying the emperor the money would go to pay for the upkeep of poor and indigent Romans. It would also pay for hospitals, roads, the upkeep of ports and a thousand other things. The land itself would grow crops to feed poorer people.

This all generated economic activity and forced the wealthy to engage in social activity. So lend Buffet, Gates and a few others a sum of money, tell them they have to use the interest they owe the government to repair the nation's highways and bridges or build hospitals to care for the poor. This would generate employment and give the country a 21st century infrastructure. Why not just raise tax? If you can afford the best lawyers and accountants you can always cheat the system.

There is an inchoate need in America to fix the glaring problems afflicting the country but unfortunately battle lines seem to have been drawn around social values and 19th century economic ideas (the Gold standard for f**cks sake!). Time to think clearly.

Mr. Ricks, as always a thought inducing topic that has merit but leaves me questioning some of your proposals on the basic tenants of our current military retirement system. Deep in thought I see correlations from Atlas Shrugged to our current Military carrying the burden and responsibility of our Nation while national debate picks apart the value of military service. I am glad that I am in an all volunteer service comprised of professional military men and women who continue to answer the call to serve. This is despite the unparalleled operational tempo and personal demands placed on our current force and their families.

Specifically on "The Military Option". I love it and having visited and served with other militaries in which this is the norm, I see the personal and national value in incorporating such a system within the United States. I agree with you though that any type of national service system would need to have multiple pathways to fulfill your obligation. Not everyone is suitable for military service and the professionalism of the services would be degraded dealing with the volume of raw manpower.

Extending the retirement age to thirty years of service I certainly have issue with. I offer a few thoughts that are echoed by those that I currently serve with.

- Service in today’s military (and current conflicts) is a young man’s game. Twenty years is the right mix to cultivate and build a professional core of SNCOs and Field Grade Officers. Those that go beyond 20 are the select few who become Regimental Commanders (and beyond) and serve within the Senior Enlisted and Warrant Officer ranks.

-Yes, we lose valuable experience when a service member retires at 20, however the military services are structured in an up-or-out promotional system. This allows the junior to step into leadership positions and billets vacated by the retired. What needs to be fixed is the glut of service members "civilianizing" their positions upon retirement. Upon retirement the service member takes off the uniform and the following day puts on a suit and returns to the same job as a GS-13 (going for the double dip retirement). This freezes out billets for Field Grade Officers and SNCOs to progress into and degrades the direct leadership Company Grade Officers and NCOs need. If I have done my job, my junior officers and SNCOs will be more then able and wanting the opportunity to take the helm in my retirement.

-The family strain is too high for 30 years of service to retire. I have spent too many days deployed, on ship, on exercises, at conferences, at WAR to continue this pace for 30 years (as I write this deployed yet again). Yes, I knew the cost when I signed up to serve and so did my wife when we were married. Twenty years is plenty for the normal grind of serving in the services, personal sacrifices required of the service member and their families, and the physical mortality of serving in times of war. I will be proud and happy to hang it up at 20 and spend some long overdue time with my Son and Wife while not being required to uproot my family again to move all over the world or leave again for another deployment.

Do not interpret my words as complaining, I am happy to serve and truly love it. I could go on and on but simply stated, we ask a lot of our military. For our nation, twenty years of service for a retirement is a bargain. Looking forward to your next book.

""The real game is capital gains taxes, and the rate there is just 15 percent. I suspect it will double sometime down the road.""

Pure insanity, ricks.

(and don't give me this, "elites", crap; who here went to Scarsdale High?)

Capital gains taxation has a greater effect on 'retail' (read: consumer) investment than it does personal wealth. Most personal investors are 'buy-and-hold', not miniature hedge funds making block trades every day. Raising rates would have almost no effect on the individual 'rich', but would cut billions out of the capital markets by institutional investors and corporations. Basically, it would be blowing the economy's feet off with a shotgun. If the goal is revenue-generation, there's simple ways to get to that without going straight to the tap and making private and corporate investment *less rewarding*. In the semi-noble cause of rebalancing the wealth spectrum, destroying the economy isn't exactly the best starting point.

I will note that Scarsdale has never had any economics requirements to graduate. :) Worse, some people go to the Alternative-School.... and *then* become economists.

... has been giving rhetorical blowjobs to the Pentagon for a decade or so.

Not pointing any fingers or anything.

Hahaha, this weird plan would make the problem Ricks is trying to solve much worse. Most young people would opt out of military and civilian service, and then 1) support reducing taxes and services to their barest minimum, 2) show contempt for those whose stint with Uncle Sam gave them an olympian sense of entitlement.

If the US ever faced a WW2-like threat I have no doubt young people would volunteer for service. There just aren't that many people who believe in the post-9/11 "Team America" vision of foreign policy to the point where they're willing to sacrifice for it.

"You can do what you want so long as we can stay uninvolved". That's the contract which most Americans have with their elites. And yeah, that's problematic, but in order to have voluntary participation from the majority of young people the US has to pursue a foreign policy which is genuinely popular--and who thinks that'll happen anytime soon?

Brilliant Idea having the three options. No one could argue against all three, and I suspect the military option would be the most popular. I am sick of hearing these baby boomer's telling us how the majority of young people do nothing for the nation but complain and protest. Other than looking after their self managed super funds, maybe they could drive a general around for a year?

While I don't necessarily share your populist view that the Reagan tax cuts (which, if one looks deeper into the issue, couldn't properly be considered tax cuts on the coupon-clipping classes) have somehow removed the upper classes from their commitment to America, I fully support your 'semi-voluntary national service' idea.

From my perspective, it isn't the 'rich' who have opted out of America, but two sets of people, i.) the educated supra-nationalists (as the Tea Party would refer to them, 'the elites'): these are the folks who have upper-middle class backgrounds, are relatively privileged, and spend their lives in urban enclaves such as NY, LA, or SF. The whole idea of "America" or nationalism seems just too gauche for these people to even contemplate. Their efforts are focused on getting their kids into the right schools, worrying about climate change, and ensuring health care for all. ii.) the transitory Americans, are the elites from other nations who come to American, make a fortune, and then leave.

You can't do much about the second group (although the IRS is working on limiting their ability to leave); it is the first group that

For the truly wealthy, I am just not sure if your assumptions apply. Shelby Foote used to say that the idea of noblesse oblige is overstated in America; he noted that of all the healthy young men who participated in the Harvard/Yale crew races during the Civil War, not one man on either team served in either of the Armies engaged in America's most deadly conflict. So, it seems the rich have traditionally opted out when they can. It is accordingly on the well-to-do that we should probably place our focus, and your plan does exactly that - offering up some middle class entitlements in exchange for some partriotic effort. The really rich can presumably afford to do without social security; so they can opt out if they please, but the upper-middle class cling to every economic and social privilge they can get their hands on, and furthermore, they set the tone for the rest of the nation's attitudes (as they did by opting out of the Vietnam war).

So your plan nicely accomplishes the key objective of tying in a key elite group with the future of the nation. Of course, there is little or no chance of anything like this being implemented; but you never know, something like it could be.

Don Bacon, your near-absolute stupidity is mostly self-contained, not infectious, so mostly harmless. Gracious host Tom Ricks, how do you picture roping the rich, or even the remaining middle class, into making their young serve in any way? JPNREL, the National Guard has never been trusted by the active military to train inductees, we don't have any facilities or personnel to do so, and we're a large part of what's overseas fighting the wars now, so what part of our ass do you think we could pull that out of?

Tom Ricks, good socialist that he is, makes the fatuous assumption that transferring 'wealth' back to politicians from the private sector so they can redistribute it to the putative aggrieved is of course a good thing and therefore an efficient use of capital - this opinion is entirely detached from common sense macroeconomic thinking - but who cares, right? as long as liberal fantasies are appeased everything will surely be fine. It's the same kind of naive thinking that swept an empty suit like Obama into the presidency - and now liberals want to double down! a la Jon Stewart - Obama is failing not because he's too liberal but because he's not liberal enough! Brilliant. Pelosi for president!! Brilliant.

Tom, before you go about transferring billions upon billions of dollars back to the idiot congress simply to fulfill your ideologically driven fantasy of punishing the wealthy who you seem to think there's no sin they are not guilty of, why don't we put some effort into redoing the tax code as a whole - not as a means to punish the evil rich - but rather because the tax code as a whole is a misbegotten mess - tax rates will go down, revenues will go up, business interests will be served and the wealthy will get to keep their wealth without being made to feel guilty about it or without feeling the need to hide it out of country which is how they managed things before Reagan - I'd much rather they have the money than Harry Reid - sure, a lot of them are scumbags, but here's a news flash, a lot of poor people are scumbags too.

As for your draft plan - much like your economics, it's idealistic and detached from reality - it would be grossly expensive, the benefits of it would be tentative at best and highly speculative, and distortions to private labor markets caused by the huge infusion of gov't sponsored low wage workers would have deleterious effects no one can predict. Plus, what happens when one of the political parties figures out they can get elected by promising to repeal the draft? You'd have chaos - you'd have to make military service compulsory and write it into the constitution.

So, in short, an entirely illogical post on your part - this is what happens when you let idealogical prejudices undermine clear thinking.

Irish are at 12.5% and they are still going bankrupt. Not sure low taxes upon the rich, ie, superior rent takers, will do anything but increase their desire for more rent margin and without fixing the tenements from which their annuity comes. And landlords don't risk heirs for anything other than margins.

Does the libertarian option get you out of paying taxes?

I know plenty of people from "gated communities" whose children volunteered to be in the military. I don't buy the correlation. I think there are some people that are interested in public service and some who just aren't. Just like some mulit-millionaires set up charites and some don't. Its their business what they do with their time and money, not mine. Who are these elites that aren't doing their part? It looks like plenty of "elites" are doing their part to me. But it depends on your definition of "elite." Is Sarah Palin elite? Well, her kid is in the military. Is John McCain elite? Well, his kid is in the military. Is Joe Biden elite? Hmm...his kid is in the military. Are the Hiltons elite? Well, I really don't want to see Paris Hilton in the military to be quite honest.

Tom,

I've read your columns for a while as I valued the insight into the issues faced by the members of our armed services and because you often provided a tactical view of the current conflicts that was lacking in typical media reports. I also appreciated what I believed to be a lack of significant partisanship.

However, after reading your open call for what can only be called slavery, despite whatever socially acceptable terms you chose to use, I will never again read your column. I understand why you propose national service; the belief that a class of individuals shielded from military service, particularly one with great political power, may promote less rational and limited use of military power. Regardless, the end of preventing this do not justify any and all means.

There are two truer, and more honest checks against systematic misuse of military power, and the public chooses to ignore them. First, the citizenry continually accepts only political candidates from a two-party system that, despite rhetoric to the contrary, offers little choice in the extent to which military force is used to solve real and perceived world problems. If a certain class of citizen feels that their commitment to the military is abused, then an obvious solution is to stop voting en mass for politicians from both parties that will continue the abuse. And second, and of greater importance, is the fact that every member of the military is there by choice. If citizens believe that a commitment to the military will be abused, then they have an obligation to NOT enlist and therefore force change.

Slavery, or "national service," is not the answer.

- A lost reader

Mr. Ricks comes off like a fascist with his slavery plan for the youth of America. Why not have the youngsters work in bomb factories as well. The doners at CNAS would love that deal.

Slavery is Freedom

War is Peace

Told u not to drink while watching it...toldya, u would end up writing this kind of of cheap chovinistic nonsense.

A current debate concerns whether to allow the George W. Bush-era tax cuts to expire. One idea I have not heard is to maintain the tax cut on those making more than $250,000 per year, but only for veterans of military service. This might give an incentive for hedge-fund/investment banker types, MBA's and lawyers to sign up for service. ( It could even increase the quality of the forces, with a influx of smart , and motivated recruits). The pro-military crowd often has a great overlap with the pro-tax cut crowd. As such,this "tax cut for veterans" idea should have great resonance in the next congress.

Tom -

Usually I just lurk and don't comment, but the reactionaries posting here have me all riled up.

As a mid-level officer (going on 12 years in now) I definitely feel like some of your ideas have merit. Particularly a 30 year retirement. For quite some time it has made no sense to me why we give major incentive for our personnel to get out when they should be at the most productive phase of their careers.

You would need to revamp the promotion system, making it slower overall. You would also allow more flexibility in assignments, affording a more diverse experience base through additional opportunities through joint tours, sabbaticals, and education (education tours are something my branch in particular, the Navy, does not do very well),

This system would also allow flexibility for servicemembers, and officers in particular, to stay assignments for longer duration. Too many billets in the Navy allot only two years (or less!) before rotation. In my experience, it takes at least six months to learn the ropes of an organization before you are effective. From this view, a two year rotation system is very inefficient.

Furthermore, operational tour length could be extended providing more bang for the training buck. Consider the example of a typical Naval Aviator. After graduating from 2 to 3 years of training, an officer will spend 36 months flying operationally in his first sea tour. He will then go on to other assignments, returning about 5 years later to an operational squadron as a department head for 24 - 30 months. After that some more time spent in other tours. Then if he is competent and very lucky he will come back for a combined XO/CO tour of 24 months. So out of an entire flying career, he will at best spend 7 1/2 years in operational tours actually performing the mission. If he fails to screen for command (and the vast majority won't) it drops down to only 5 1/2 years. Considering the millions of dollars it takes to train an aviator and the 1 to 2 million or so the taxpayers will pay to support him in retirement (considering all benefits), extending careers to 30 years and providing for additional or extended operational tours provides for better return on investment. Not to mention the benefit of having more experienced aviators in the aircraft.

Cheers,

- HJ