Gents — not sure I like the idea of any Editor censoring the thoughts, unless they go beyond the pale (profanity, etc.).

You are each responsible for your comments.

Enough on that, we are all adults.

I agree that the Heritage Foundation (on the right) has an axe to grind, (like other foundations on the left, or in this case Rep Rangel). My suspicion is that the Heritage Foundation wants to debunk Rep Rangel’s assertions.

His assertions re: racial make-up of the force is easy check, since those are known numbers. We know that the casualties in current OIF/OEF efforts are not racially skewed.

I never took Rep Rangel’s spouting off re: draft seriously, I am surprised anyone else has.

It is an interesting topic, and I would like to see some data.

This number would particularly interest me: the number of folks commissioned each year vs. total college graduates and vs. total Ivy League and Business school graduates (service academy, ocs, ROTC, etc.).

Obviously what Rep Rangel is getting at is his idea that the services are far too under-represented by children of the wealthy (not just the middle-class, which I will define as a a family income of under $200K, no matter the size of the family or the location).

My assumption here is that most of the folks who enlist do so as an option instead of college (given the relative low cost of state funded schools), for a variety of reasons (patriotism, learning a technical trade, earning benefits for future college, among others).

My assumption is also that folks seek a commission due to patriotism, payback for education funding, learn leadership, etc.

I still think that mandatory civil/community/national service is a good idea.

Perhaps the military doesn’t collect the family income background data is to avoid exactly this kind of non-factual debate?

And yet more analyis of the analysis here: “So 50 percent of the enlisted recruits (i.e., not including the officers’ corps) come from families in the top 40 percent of the income distribution, while only 10 percent come from the bottom 20 percent. It is worth noting that the income information here is not perfect: the data do not include actual family income for each recruit, but rather use the median household income of the recruit’s home census tract. But still, one look at that graph tells you that the conventional image of a military full of poor kids doesn’t reflect the reality.

“These trends are even more pronounced in the Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (R.O.T.C.) program,” reads the report, “in which 40 percent of enrollees come from the wealthiest neighborhoods — a number that has increased substantially over the past four years” (i.e., since the September 11 attacks).”

A quintile represents one-fifth of the population. 1/5 live in neighborhoods where the incomes are 65K and above. 1/5 live in neighborhoods where the incomes range from 0 -33,000, etc.
“In 2007, the median annual household income rose 1.3% to $50,233.00 according to the Census Bureau.[3]The real median earnings of men who worked full time, year-round climbed between 2006 and 2007, from $43,460 to $45,113. For women, the corresponding increase was from $33,437 to $35,102.” According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States

I told you not to feed the trolls. See what you get

CDR,

Sir, if I didn’t feed the trolls then how would I amuse myself at work?

Not a deep thought, FFry.

Term limits aren’t the answer to the problem you perceive. If you have a Senator or a Representative who is doing a great job, why would you want wish to arbitrarily remove him or her after X years? If he or she is doing a lousy job, they have these things called “elections.”

You really should look into campaign financing instead.

A much bigger problem than using America’s disadvantaged classes as a mercenary force to support foreign misadventures.

URR: Don’t quit your day job speed-dialing Rush.

There’s not a prettier way to put it. Foreign misadventures are much easier to get entangled in if the ones making the sacrifices are largely poor. It’s about as close to an immutable fact as occurs in politics.

Odd thing this..of all the many young men and woman that have served in the armed services from my area over the last decade or so…literally zero even come even close to matching any description that would include ‘poor, disadvantaged’ or anything even close. Same goes for all the sailors that I have worked with at sea as we worked the bugs ou of the ‘Sea Fighter’ for example, although I did come to know a couple who were looking to gain citizenship s a consequence of their service. They must keep those poor wretches well hidden indeed.

Jay;

I don’t find it odd or surprising that many of humble means or origins take the opportunities offered by military service. That I didn’t personally meet them or know them well enough to ‘categrize’ them as such during my various stints at sea in their company was in no way intended to become a broad-brush assertion on my part. I’ll even grant that, for some, it may be the only way ‘out’ that was ever available to them.

My intended point was simply that it is obviously not as simple as some want to paint it; i.e “we are sending an underclass to fight on foreign soil because they don’t really matter anyway.Expendable.” BS. If that were even remotely true then a) nobody from my rural, but not poor, area would have ever enlistd in the first place (yet so many did…some re-upping and serving as many as three tours in the sandboxes) and, b) the men and women I know would not have returned with so much pride in their service time,so complimentary of their fellow men and women in arms, and with so little bad to say about the government that sent them on the mission they were assigned.

FOD Detector Says:

As a result, such foreign misadventures are undertaken with some measure of public support. Such support is possible because the vast majority of the public is unaffected by the effort. OTOH, if the public did have a personal stake in the matter, such misadventures would more carefully be considered.

……

I find it a little bit disingenuous to think that the “vast majority of the public are unaffected by such efforts.” In fact the opposite is true.

Maybe a reminder of what George Bush said in his 2002 State of the Union address is in order. Referring to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, Bush said the following,

“States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world,” Bush warned. “We’ll be deliberate; yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” (Fiasco, p. 35)

The vast majority of Americans have recognized that Iraq has been a mistake. Their one peaceful course of action to correct such a mistake has been to vote out those individuals who have failed to recognize their errors. Just because “America is at the mall” does not mean they are not “effected” by the effort.

I’m in the process of preparing a comment on the subject of the draft, but until I get that finished I want to state my disagreement over the notion that the public does not have a personal stake in the matter. Such a statement is outright false.