Ask Not What Ted Kennedy Can Do For You, But What You Can Do For Ted Kennedy's Sense of Paid Voluntarism

Yesterday, President Barack Obama delivered (finally!) on arguably his most hope-changiest of all his campaign promises to use your tax dollars to support make-work jobs that will (finally!) allow America's vast, all-ages reserve army of the unemployed to be paid volunteers with AmeriCorps.

The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act

reauthorizes and expands national service programs administered by the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency created in 1993. The Corporation engages four million Americans in result-driven service each year, including 75,000 AmeriCorps members, 492,000 Senior Corps volunteers, 1.1 million Learn and Serve America students, and 2.2 million additional community volunteers mobilized and managed through the agency's programs.

Channeling the legislative history of, I don't know, The PATRIOT Act and authorization of force in Iraq, the current head of AmeriCorps boasts that "its remarkably swift journey through Congress" and its bipartisan heritage (GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah cosponsored the Senate version, don't you know, apparently between belting out tunes as a solo artist ever since the Singing Senators lost more band members than Spinal Tap over the past decade) proves it's a fan-fucking-tastic indicator of the "growing national consensus that service is a powerful response to the economic and social challenges facing America today" (I must have been out working when the pollsters called my house about that one).

The law shovels out $5.7 billion of your taxes over the next five years to "boost volunteerism" at AmeriCorps and elsewhere. In an era of trillons of dollars in wasteful spending, that's a real bargain.

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As an interesting side note, AmeriCorps already got an extra $200 million from the stimulus bill. But it's good to know that they are now getting enough cash to consolidate funding streams and delve into the thorny question of strengthening "management, cost-effectiveness and accountability." Hope and change. Obama, you've done it again!

More on the bill here.

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