Will the coffee table implicated in the Pretzel Incident be available for viewing?

Upon graduating from the University of Tennessee in May 2006, I knew that I wanted to serve my country, but I didn’t want to kill people, help kill people, or risk being killed like some of my high school friends who joined the military. Could I still have served my country without taking tax-payer money from the feel-good AmeriCorps brand? Probably. But at the time I signed up, I wanted that feeling of joining something bigger than myself, something official, something that people would respect me for. In other words, something that I could put on a resume

Naive? Probably. How many young, idealistic graduates aren’t naive? We all want to make the world a better place and we all want to be taken seriously.

AmeriCorps gave me that opportunity. AmeriCorps granted about $11,000 to Knoxville Habitat for Humanity so that they could pay me $201.38 a week (after taxes) for 50 weeks to pour concrete foundations and sidewalks, frame walls, shingle roofs, side exteriors, pull wire, install cabinets, paint interiors, pick up and drop off supplies, and train and supervise volunteers to do the same.

Could Knoxville Habitat for Humanity have hired a normal, non-AmeriCorps employee to do the same thing? Of course. They pay full-time construction staff two to three times the amount AmeriCorps pays me to do the exact same work.

Could the homeowner have paid a for-profit builder to build her a house? No.

I and most AmeriCorps members I know do work that poor people can’t pay full price for and that non-profits theoretically could pay full price for, but don’t need to pay full price for thanks to AmeriCorps. You see, most AmeriCorps funding goes to non-profits that write grants to support X AmeriCorps members to do A, B, and C for a year. Please think of AmeriCorps as a federally-funded nonprofit internship program rather than welfare for uneducated liberals.

So, in that light, I believe one relevant non-rhetorical question to ask everyone is: should tax-payer money go to non-profit agencies?

One way I think of it is like this: let’s say that we the people, or our elected representatives, have decided to devote $48,000 of our collective taxpayer money to housing the poor.

Which is a more efficient solution:

A) Paying for-profit builders full market price for materials and labor to build public housing projects, whose occupants build no equity and continue to drain our collective resources.

B) Paying an AmeriCorps member far less than market price to train and supervise volunteers who use discounted and donated materials to build permanent homes.

I myself have often wondered if my service to my country was actually worth the $16,000 it costs all of you each year. I hope that in 20 years I’ll have a chance to ask some of the 50 families I helped build homes for as an AmeriCorps member and see what they think. After all, as homeowners, off of public assistance, they will have paid back quite a bit of taxes by then.

If the President does it, it’s not illegal.

Now the rule is:

If anyone in the Executive Branch does it or any corporate entity contracted by the Executive Branch does it, it’s not illegal (or will soon be legal).