Promising is one thing...

...Delivering quite another.

LGF notes how the Obama team has quietly changed his website from requiring community service of students from middle school to college to "setting a goal" for the middle and high school students and "developing a plan" for the college students in exchange for getting $4000 for their tuition. Apparently, they realized that all those dewey-eyed kids who supported his campaign might not like being forced to "volunteer."

Other concerns Betsy raises include the bureaucracy required to deal with all these "volunteers", what counts as "community service". Among other things, does working for a church organization count?  (When my Adopted Nephews needed to do their mandatory "volunteering" for school, I signed their paperwork for more than enough hours for working on my staff at a science fiction convention.)

And do some of these groups really want a kid who has been forced to volunteer coming in an hour or so a week? Someone has to supervise that kid and find something for the kid to actually do that would be helpful. It's not that charities don't want volunteers, but they want those who come willing and eager to help, not forced into it by an all-knowing federal government.

The Adopted Nephews were going to be at the convention, and were going to be volunteering to work there anyway. I think part of the idea is, force kids to volunteer, and hopefully they'll find something they'll like doing volunteer work for.  And then, there's:

Eugene Volokh points out the concerns that unions might have if, for example, student aides in schools displaced those employed to be aides. That wouldn't be a problem for the middle and high school "volunteers" but it could be for college kids who want to volunteer at a local school.

And then there are demographic issues:

UPDATE: Ilya Somin wrote last year about the calls by several politicians for mandatory service for the young. He wondered why these calls are just for the young and not for the middle-aged or elderly.

Indeed, the moral case for conscripting the elderly for civilian service is arguably stronger than that for drafting the young. Many elderly people are healthy enough to perform nonstrenuous forms of "national service." Unlike the young, the elderly usually won't have to postpone careers, marriage and educational opportunities to fulfill their forced-labor obligations. Moreover, the elderly, to a far greater extent than the young, are beneficiaries of massive government redistributive programs, such as Social Security and Medicare--programs that transfer enormous amounts of wealth from other age groups to themselves. Nonelderly poor people who receive welfare benefits are required to work (or at least be looking for work) under the 1996 welfare reform law; it stands to reason that the elderly (most of whom are far from poor) can be required to work for the vastly larger government benefits that they receive.

Middle-aged people are also not obviously inferior candidates for civilian "national service" than the young. I know I could do most kinds of service better today than when I was 18. To be clear, I am not arguing for imposing forced labor on the elderly or the middle-aged; but I do believe that doing so would be no worse than imposing that burden on the young.

Somin goes on to say posit that such calls for national service target the young because they're not politically potent. But after touting the youth vote all year and celebrating their turnout to elect Obama, that doesn't seem to be the explanation. I chalk it up to the sort of governmental paternalism that we often see where the government sees its role to create better citizens of the young. In these politicians' views, mandatory service isn't a far cry from mandatory education that includes a mandatory curriculum on character development and civics.