Bonds of citizenship: a new route to universal national service and economic fairness.

• Author: Garfinkle, Adam
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE

It is time to enact a baby bond/national service program in America. There is a crisis of civic participation in America, one that marches in step with the erosion in social trust over the past several decades. Notwithstanding the Tea Party (which is more a governmental phenomenon than a grassroots social one) and Occupy Wall Street movements, we've become increasingly a nation of cynical spectators, not participants, in our own governance. No democracy can be healthy with the levels of mistrust and alienation that exist today in America. (Although, as California's catastrophic referendum politics illustrates, it may be possible to overdo democratic participation.) We need to recreate a culture of national service that will have long-lasting benefits for civic participation, that will frontload some equity for those younger Americans who don't experience equality of opportunity, and that, above all, will refurbish our country's depleted stock of social capital. Once we get the plague of plutocracy under control, here's how we can do it.

When an American citizen is born, the U.S. government should create, along with a Social Security number, a savings account for that child into which between $5,000 and $7,500 is placed--called a baby bond or, as some prefer to call it, a service bond. That child's parents, family, and friends may contribute to that fund until the child becomes eighteen, and those contributions are treated like charitable deductions for tax purposes (assuming the continuation of the current tax structure), and can be subtracted from taxable income. Through the miracle of compound interest, every child will have a considerable nest egg upon reaching the age of consent--upward of $20,000 to $30,000.

The baby bond or service bond idea has been operating in this way in Great Britain on a modest scale since 2003; even if we just copied that model, it would be a way to get equity spread around to more young people who can put it to productive use.

But under my plan, the model would be expanded: to access the accumulated money, every citizen would have to perform national service in one of eight categories: the military, the Peace Corps, Educore (an organization like Teach for America), forestry and environmental remediation, urban "broken windows" brigades, hospice and elderly care, hospital ship duty, and a Habitat for Humanity-style program. (Military service should be made to attract only a small percentage of baby bonders...