Massive Hiring In Store for Federal Government

The federal government’s workforce will be much larger out of necessity in three years according to a government survey.

…The survey makes clear that the majority of new hires will be needed in five broad fields — medical, security, law enforcement, legal and administrative.

Mission-critical jobs are those positions identified by the agencies as being essential for carrying out their services. The study estimates that the federal government will need to hire nearly 600,000 people for all positions over President Obama’s four years — increasing the current workforce by nearly one-third.

The medical and public health area is most in need of hires, according to the study. Stier described the Department of Veterans Affairs as a “dramatic example” of an agency with pressing needs, as a result of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. VA, according to the report, will need more than 48,000 hires over the next three years, including 19,000 nurses and 8,500 physicians.

There are a few implications here.  One is the obvious: Millennials will enjoy far greater representation in the federal bureacuracy, potentially leading to a new flavor of government.  This leads to the next consequence — the federal gov’t could be in a position to increasingly adopt new technologies with minimal training, given the technological proficiency of many youth.  Yes, many more young people than you’d think can barely turn on a computer, but those applying for federal jobs should be reasonably equipped with technical skills.

From My Reading

Occasionally I will read something for class that will be startlingly relevant to our current societal dialogue.  Yesterday, I read something from This I Believe II: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women that applied to our current health care reform debate in this country.

In 1951, Edward R. Murrow wrote:

We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion.  A lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism, or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria.  Opinions can be picked up cheap in the marketplace, while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply.  Around us all — now high like a distant thunderhead, now close upon us with the wet choking intimacy of a London fog — this is an enveloping cloud of fear. (p. 6)

Why can’t we have intelligent discussion? Why can’t we legitimately, passionately but rationally, discuss the various proposals on the table instead of shouting our representatives and each other down?

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Some Wisdom from First Read

NBC News’s First Read, one of the bastions of inside-the-beltway conventional wisdom, actually makes a wise observation. Emphasis is added.

Yet getting something done increasingly looks like it will happen via reconciliation, which would require a simple majority in the Senate versus a filibuster-proof majority. And it also looks like it will get done without much help from Republicans. Chuck Grassley’s recent comments, as well as Mike Enzi’s weekend GOP radio address, really don’t suggest that these guys are negotiating in good faith. But ask yourself this question: Do voters ever remember HOW legislation is passed, or do they simply remember if policy is enacted or NOT enacted?

Thank you. (The answer would be NO – they don’t remember.) Not when it’s something this country needs. Rather, in 2080, when children are reading their history reading assignments on their Mac invisi-screens linked to their own hovertrons, they’ll hopefully be reading about the courage summoned by the Obama-led Democrats to vote for universal health care legislation.

Youth Not Turned Off By Healthcare, But By Tone of Debate

After posting my piece last night on youth and government health reform, I thought more about the attitudes of young people on the issue. The meme out there is that we consider ourselves to be “invincible,” therefore we’re not engaging in discussion on the issue. Luckily, in true Millennial form, some young people collaborated, started an organization, and fought back against this “invincible” myth.

But if we’re not perceiving ourselves to be invincible, what’s going on here? Why the minimal “noise” from young people?

First, let’s remember that today’s young people don’t make “noise.” Our generation wants to solve problems, not settle ideological scores, whether that’s through technology, multi-tasking, collaborating with others, etc. Our change-making skills are generally different from the Boomers currently running our major institutions. While our conservative elders are best-served to confuse voters of all ages in this debate, many of our older Democratic brothers and sisters don’t have the stomach to avoid the false clamors for bipartisanship. As a result, Democrats and Republicans who run the debate continue to yell at each other, while millions of Americans – including too many young people – gamble their already-precarious life savings on not getting hurt or sick. So whether young people are attempting to make change or not, the “chorus of cynics,” and in this case, cowards, distracts from anything we would be doing anyway.

Given the sway that lobbyists and special interests still have within Congress and other halls of government, young people unfortunately can’t yet enact their brand of change in every institution. In 2008, this was overcome by advocating and voting for a candidate who displayed a mastery of the peer-to-peer tactics, and the pragmatic and “no drama” approach that Millennials embrace. Millennials saw this approach on many issues the first part of this year as well, particularly on pieces of legislation like Serve America, the large expansion in national service through the federal government. But now that the most important issue has appeared in front of us as a nation, young people are missing that refreshing call for collaborative, pragmatic problem-solving. Instead, talking points and yelling abounds. To paraphrase from today’s op-ed piece in the Post, “We have the hope. Where’s the audacity,” Mr. President?

Eight months into the Obama administration, as we mourn the senator from Massachusetts, many of us retain the hope, but we are wondering what happened to the audacity that is needed to move the country in a new direction. In recent weeks, many progressives have expressed concern that Obama’s bold plan to reform health care may be at risk. A defeat on this key issue could undermine other elements of his agenda. We don’t believe that the president has changed his goals, but we wonder whether he underestimated the power necessary to bring about real change.

If we’re going to be successful in getting this done, we need the chief facilitator of the “millions of voices calling for change” to return to his role.

An LA Times article, also published today, discusses the widespread support among young people for government-led health reform. It contained the statistics that are more startling and worrisome every time I read them:

Young people account for 30% of the uninsured population, according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a health policy research foundation. They are least likely to be offered health insurance through employment benefits — just 53% of working young adults are eligible for employer-based coverage. And since their incomes tend to be low, buying coverage on their own is usually too expensive.

The problem is still there, and getting worse with each day. Contrary to the conventional wisdom spread by AP writers, the youth of the nation don’t feel invincible. Try disgusted. In the midst of a cacophony that, at best, lacks courage, and, at worst, is hate-filled, we simply want to see some semblance of the problem-solving politics for which we voted.

Youth Growing Queasy About Public Option, But Firmly Support Government Health Care Reform

In a post today at Daily Kos, DemFromCT discusses some data from the most recent ABC/WaPo poll (don’t even bother reading the article — youth are skipped over in the analysis), specifically covering health care reform. The post was inspired by a WaPo analysis, found here. What I found to be interesting was the comparison of the 18-29 year old crosstab with seniors:

On the top you can see that youth in June supported — either strongly or somewhat — the addition of a public plan to our health care system at a 71 percent clip. Two months later, the number has dropped to 61 percent. Much has been said in the blogosphere over the last week regarding the fading of Obama’s base, the youth vote included, so this drop — especially with President Obama on vacation the last week — isn’t surprising. The GOP has been able to run with the death panels meme without being challenged by the media, and until the last week or two, the DNC and OFA sat on their laurels, watching HCR opponents turn town hall meetings into a mush consisting of hyperbolic warnings of America ending and disruptive and undemocratic tactics.

But even with all of this, according to this poll, youth aren’t changing their mind about the benefits of health care reform. Responses to a question not published in DemFromCT’s analysis but published instead in the WaPo write-up show that 18-29 year olds, when presented with a chance to evaluate whether or not government-inspired reform of the health care system would help or hurt, still believe that it would be a positive development — their response didn’t change over the course of two months. Seniors, though, disagree. 48 percent of those polled believe that government health reform would harm the system, up from 39 percent in June. Furthermore, the percentage of senior respondents strongly feeling reform would do more harm than good surged seventeen points.

The bottom question in the initial set asked whether or not the health care system would lead to improved care for the respondents in particular, and the affirmative responses from June to August nearly doubled among Millennials. 15 percent believed their health care would be better in June, with 28 percent answering the same way two months later. The “betters” seem to draw both from the “worse” and “same” groups. Seniors, again, differed from youth. More seniors believed that health care reform would lead to worse health care.

So, as on many current political issues, there’s a generation gap. While both young and old are at least feeling queasy about the public option — much thanks to GOP/insurance industry-led obstructionism and timid Democratic leaders — the two groups begin to diverge from there. Elder voters, already feeling lukewarm about Obama, do not believe health care reform will benefit the system or their own health care. Youth, meanwhile, still widely support government-led health care reform, while maintaining a belief that, in the end, the government will get it right.

Youth can still serve as a base to Obama. The big question is whether or not Obama has any nerve left to ratchet up the debate, and whether or not Democratic members of Congress have the chutzpah to strongly support a public option. There is a still-formidable cohort of young voters waiting to see some political courage from Obama and the Democrats.

Civic Health Index 2009: Technology and Youth Activism Go Together

One of our biggest battles in reporting on youth progressive politics is pushing back against the faulty view that the use of technology/social networking among youth keeps them from practicing successful activism. Thankfully, we have yet another package of data noting the opposite — those youth who participate in online social networking opportunities tend to be more engaged and involved in their communities offline.

From the National Conference on Citizenship’s 2009 Civic Health Index report:

This year’s survey allowed us to explore the relationships between online forms of engagement and community-based civic activities. We selected a group of Millennials who use social networking sites to promote civic causes, express their opinions on issues, and gather information related to civics, and compared their levels of engagement to that of their peers. We found that Millennials who use social networking sites for civic purposes are far more likely to actively engage in their own communities in each of the activities we measured.

Although we cannot conclude that belonging to social networking sites promotes civic engagement in their community, it is encouraging that civic use of social networking sites cut across income and educational gaps, meaning that low-income youth and youth without college experience were nearly as likely to use social networking sites for civic purposes as youth who had higher income or college experience. As we found in 2008, the civic engagement gap appears to be smaller among young people who engage online, and this year, we found that young Americans who are highly engaged online come from diverse economic and educational background, and are also highly engaged off-line.

Emphasis is mine.

It’s understandably very tempting for elder generations to dismiss peer-to-peer internet-based activism. Even though Boomer and Xer parents continue to join Facebook, they do so for novelty’s sake. The link between technology and youth activism can’t be seen every day, and so, for many, it doesn’t exist.

This report is one more reminder that the connection is there — youth who use social networking sites online are doing more than changing their avatars. They do get involved/engaged in their local communities and make a difference.

Krugman on Co-ops: They’re a ’sham’

Co-ops is the new word in the health care reform debate for capitulation. It’s the status quo masquerading as reform.

Paul Krugman gets at this today in his column:

And let’s be clear: the supposed alternative, nonprofit co-ops, is a sham. That’s not just my opinion; it’s what the market says: stocks of health insurance companies soared on news that the Gang of Six senators trying to negotiate a bipartisan approach to health reform were dropping the public plan. Clearly, investors believe that co-ops would offer little real competition to private insurers.

Again: if health care reform is pleasing those in power, the hegemonic structure, it’s not really reform, or at least not the reform that’s needed.

Clearly, the dropping of the public plan in favor of co-ops is not real change if insurance companies are loving it.

Public Support of Health Care Reform ‘Collapses’ without Public Option

Well this is interesting.

After all the raucous town hall meetings, the truth is revealed: voters’ support of any health care reform collapses without the public option being a part of the plan.

Just 34% of voters nationwide support the health care reform plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats if the so-called “public option” is removed. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 57% oppose the plan if it doesn’t include a government-run health insurance plan to compete with private insurers.

This strikes at the heart of what I was writing about a few weeks ago. If everyone is pleased with the “solution” to a gargantuan problem like reforming our health care system, it’s not really reform. In order to properly fix a societal wound, we as a society have to sting a little bit. If the problem is truly fixed, the mammoth health insurance industry isn’t going to simply be quiet about it.

Voters know that in order for health care to be fixed, there MUST be a public option.

Rachel Maddow on MTP Sunday

Maddow:

But ultimately, if the president decides that he’s going to go with a reform effort that doesn’t include a public option, what he will have done is spent a ton of political capital, riled up an incredibly angry right wing base who’s been told that this is a plot to kill grandma, grandma, and he will have achieved something that doesn’t change health care very much and that doesn’t save us very much money and won’t do very much for the American people. It’s not a very good thing to spend a lot of political capital on.