Apparently, My Kids Have Committed Some Kind of Crime

... because they're being sentenced to 50 hours of mandatory community service.

The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.

I guess this has been airbrushed away and required has been changed to recommended and there's now a reward that goes with it.

Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by setting a goal that all middle school and high school students do 50 hours of community service a year and by developing a plan so that all college students who conduct 100 hours of community service receive a universal and fully refundable tax credit ensuring that the first $4,000 of their college education is completely free.

The fundamental problem here is that if the products and services created by the kids in their 100 hours of community service aren't worth $4000, then the remainder will have to be made up by taking the money away from the people that actually produce things of value. How will we afford this? Who is John Galt?

By the way, $4000 for 100 hours of service equals $40 an hour. How many adolescents produce $40 per hour worth of value to anyone? We're guaranteed to be getting far less than $40 per hour from these kids, so the productive people better start working even harder. Redistribution takes many forms, comrades! Perhaps after just a bit more of this kind of "change" we can even do away with that icky, militaristic national anthem we've got now and replace it with this one.

Aside: That YouTube link has the single, all-time greatest comment anywhere, ever. Commenter withoutcompare says this: "I think before the collapse of Soviet Union, Soviet Union should have attackted on The USA (sic). Love from Turkey." Translation: "I wish we'd had a full-scale thermonuclear war! Love from Turkey."

Hilarious!