Debunking the Ridiculousness of the 'Poverty Draft' Legend….

In the annals of history, there are fewer people easier to rile up than myself. I blame it on my Irish ancestors.

Case in point, one time in Afghanistan I was in a guard tower with one of my best friends, SGT RoRo. We were there for 12 hours at a time, guarding the perimeter of Bagram that hadn’t been attacked in like 5 years, so it was a pretty weak-sauce assignment. And so we occupied our time either surreptiously playing chess, or discussing politics. This one day we somehow got on the topic of man made global warming, or “Anthropogenic Global Warming.” Now, I am a bit of a skeptic. Not that the Earth is in fact warming (I think it clearly is), but that Homo Sapiens, and Americans in specific, are the cause of it. And even on that issue, I admit to not knowing as much as I should. So RoRo started in on me. And it went on for hours, with him just yelling at me, and me yelling back. Finally I was freed from my imprisonment with this raving lunatic, and went back to Camp Cherry-Beasley where I immediately ran to the MWR shack and logged onto Amazon. I got a ton of books on the subject and had them shipped to me.

For weeks I poured over the books I got, like The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World by Danish environmentalist author Bjørn Lomborg. And I plotted my Guard Tower revenge where I topped RoRo with my extensive knowledge of the subject. At long last I arranged for us to be in the tower, and up we went with all my notes ready to eviscerate him. I immediately broached the subject and he started laughing. “Dude, I’m not a scientist, I don’t know or care” he said. “I just wanted to see how pissed off I could get you.”

Anyway, my current hostility is with the phrase “poverty draft” and its various progeny. By this theory, the military recruits from the lower socio-economic demographic, because these folks have no other option. This makes them all victims. See, you don’t join the military because of a sense of Patriotism, or hope, or to help the oppressed; no you joined because you had no other options, and those dastardly recruiters suckered you into it.

Want to see the prevalence of this thinking?

From the “Black Agenda Report“:

When questioned about restoring the draft back in 2004, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, in a moment of rare frankness, replied that the old-style draft was no longer needed. “We have,” he told reporters, “an economic draft.” In even plainer language, the United States armed forces rely on a poverty draft.

Millions of youth emerging from high school every year face bleak prospects for careers and higher education. Good jobs are hard to find, vocational training slots aren’t free and don’t guarantee a job on completion or even completion itself. Their already strapped families can’t even borrow the sixty, eighty or hundred thousand it will take for one child to get a bachelor’s degree. But the military recruiter they see in high school every day drives a flashy new car, has a nice apartment, dresses well on and off duty, picks up the tab at restaurants every day, and has an answer for everything. Really, just one answer, that the straight road to acceptance, independence and adulthood lies through the military.

From a Mennonite Peace website:

Many critics have noted that social class discrimination occurs during military recruitment. One Mennonite response would be to allow the system to continue working unjustly – after all, we shouldn’t engage ourselves in the duties of a warfare organization. We can’t dirty our hands in matters of the state. However, a more effective response would be to take a closer look at the problem and devise a solution that in some way reflects ideals of peace and justice. A bold possibility involves rethinking the draft. Currently, there stands a concealed, undocumented military draft: a selection of our nation’s poor people. Rather than this type of biased selection, the draft should be reinstated in the United States.

From the Communist Party we get this:

Without shame, the Bush administration is creating and using the desperate conditions to starve our country’s youth into war. The military flaunts scholarships, promises of good employment and visions of success and prosperity in front of our young people as their only hope for a solid future. The primary targets are Black and Latino youth, the working class and poor. Under-funded education and high unemployment produce an economic draft, a poverty draft, which many young people will not be able to avoid. We call this a poverty draft because we understand that young people are not flocking to the military because of support of Bush’s war drive, but rather because of economic desperation. With the current economic crisis and constant rounds of layoffs, the military becomes one of the only viable paths for young people, who are concentrated in low-paying jobs without benefits or job security.

OK, I know what you are saying: “Yeah, but those aren’t actual decision makers, and they don’t really purport to be experts on the issue.” Well, then how about the testimony of a Nobel Laureate before the House Veterans Affairs Committee:

Now, what truly has me unhappy with Nobel Laureate Dr. Stiglitz is that I actually send him several emails on his testimony, asking that he provide me with the source of his comments. He declined because he was simply too busy. Now, he wasn’t too busy to testify, or to use this (unidentified) source, but he was too busy to send a link to whatever it was. Bear in mind that this man is purporting to *help* veterans, and is an economist, which would imply that he basis his comments on facts. Well, where are they? I tried to find out, he refused to discuss it. Maybe you can have better luck with him.

Now, in the past I have always gone with the ubiquitous study from Heritage that found the exact opposite of what the “poverty draft” folks would have you believe. I won’t link again, because it is largely irrelevant in the context I will be looking at. But what is important is this attack on the Heritage study that is so replete with stereotypes and baseless things about the military that it gives me a genuine chuckle:

The claim that U.S. combat troops come from richer families and enjoy higher levels of educational attainment than the average American defies both conventional wisdom and everyday observation. Active-duty soldiers earn less than their civilian counterparts. In a capitalist society low-paying jobs seldom attract people with higher educational credentials. A disproportionate share of blogs by soldiers serving on the frontlines are poorly written. High-ranking officers, even generals, come off as hick bureaucrats on television. Many troops believe they’re in Iraq to fight those responsible for 9/11 or to prevent them from invading the U.S. And a majority of soldiers are conservative Republicans, voting for Bush over Kerry by a 4-to-1 margin in 2004. (The most educated group of voters are liberal Democrats, 50 percent of whom have bachelor’s degrees or higher. Republicans tend to be less educated.)

Curious about anything that challenges my assumptions, I looked into the Heritage Foundation study. As it turns out, military personnel are poorer and less educated than the average American civilian. Moreover, they’re also a lot more likely to be African-American. (State-controlled media continues to repeat Heritage’s claim that the military reflects American racial demographics.)

Man, this one is such fun, I don’t even know where to begin. Let’s start in the beginning:

• Active-duty soldiers earn less than their civilian counterparts. In a capitalist society low-paying jobs seldom attract people with higher educational credentials.

True, in so far as being a soldier is akin to any other job. Here’s a clue: It is not. No one I ever met joined the military for the money. Just looking at my unit, we had a lawyer as a E5, I was in law school, I had a buddy that was an E5 that had his Masters from Georgetown….well, I could go on, but what is the point. My point is that I never met someone in the military whose motivation was largely pecuniary.

• A disproportionate share of blogs by soldiers serving on the frontlines are poorly written.

Have you been talking to my Editor? Using the logic here though, can one assume that the horrific abuses to grammar committed by rap musicians heralds the fact that most rappers are illiterate cretins? And, just as an aside, wouldn’t the use of “[a] disproportional share” neccesitate the use of “is” and not “are”? I don’t know since I am afflicted with sub-moronic intelligence, but Microsoft Word tells me that your sentence is FUBAR.

• High-ranking officers, even generals, come off as hick bureaucrats on television.

I’ll take “what is Elitism in its undistilled version for $400 Alex.”

I’m not even touching who is more educated as a political party, mainly because I have no clue, and it really doesn’t pertain to us with the exception of smearing the troops by extention.

Anyway, this little piece of ridiculousness contains a section that advises those interested to avoid the Heritage Study:

There is, however, a nifty study by the non-partisan National Priorities Project that compares home ZIP codes of new recruits to tax return data for those areas. “Neighborhoods with low- to middle-median household incomes are over-represented,” finds the NPP. “Neighborhoods with high-median household incomes are under-represented.

Well, guess what? The NPP just came out with their latest and greatest, and they found that:

FY09 recruits over-represent middle-income households, and under-represent households in the highest and lowest income brackets. To determine this, we first created 10 equal brackets of all youth based on their zip code’s median household income (MHI). We then assessed the proportion of FY09 recruits that came from zip codes with median household incomes from each of these income brackets. Income brackets with less than 10% of recruits are considered under-represented, and brackets with more than 10% of recruits are considered over-represented. In FY09, the middle 6 income brackets (MHI = $36,562-68,252) were over-represented by Army recruits while the lowest (MHI = $0-36,561) and highest (MHI = $68,253-375,000) were under-represented. Relative to FY08, there was a slight upward shift of recruits along the income distribution meaning that a lower proportion of recruits were in lower income brackets and a higher proportion of recruits were in marginally higher income brackets.

Want to see a nifty little graph on that? Well, have at it!

OK, so the source they tell us to look at doesn’t support their premise. I know, real shocker there.

How about the racial demographics?

Most recruits were male (84.4%, female: 15.6%). 78.1% of recruits identified their race

as white, 17.2% as black, 3.8% as Asian or Pacific Islander and 0.9% as Native.

10.9% identified their ethnicity as Hispanic.

So, let’s compare that with the United States.

Recruits were male at 84.4%, and for the ages 15-64 (which includes all service ages) it is 1:1. So, anyone waiting for a huge movement to protect the males? Yeah, me either.

78.1% were white. In the United States, 75%, meaning the Army is whiter than the civilian populace as a whole.

17.2% of recruits were black. In the US as a whole, African Americans make up 12%. So, both white and black are over-represented.

3.8% of recruits are Asian or Pacific Islanders. Meanwhile, that group makes up 0.14% of the US as a whole. Oh boy, they are recruited at SIGNIFICANTLY higher levels.

So where does the difference come in? With Hispanics, which account for 15.4% of our populace, but fewer than 11% of the military.

According to the Black Agenda Report that I quoted earlier, this means (somewhat paradoxically) that since they are under-represented now, that they will be the targets of those lecherous recruiters:

DREAM Act propaganda emphasizes the availability of college to immigrant youth, and it will enable some to attend college who otherwise couldn’t. But with the cost of higher education sharply rising and no extra funds for undocumented students, that part of the DREAM Act campaign is pure deception, bait-and-switch, a mirage. DREAM Act green card holders will face the same bleak economic choices as other young people of modest means, with additional challenges of language, discrimination and identity. The military will be even more attractive a choice for qualifying immigrant youth than it is for citizens.

Look, the military is made up almost exactly as society as a whole. We aren’t all uneducated folks with no options in life. And money isn’t the exlusive driver of where people work. I’m not a blogger with a law degree because it is the most lucrative occupation ever, and I really like my seaside villa. I do it because I can come in to work every day and make a difference. It’s not a huge difference, I’m not curing cancer or anything, but I can give voice to the soldiers out there who are doing their jobs and don’t want to be treated as victims.

And that is where the true problem is here. When people start classifying all service-members as of sub-par intellect and incapable of making it outside the military, the perception starts to affect our ability to get jobs when we get out. It’s not just this specific issue either, take the PTSD discussions. While Dr Phil went on TV after the Ft Hood massacre and bemoaned how PTSD could force someone to such an act, no one except us veterans bothered to say, “Hey, wait a minute and slow down chief, we don’t even know if this guy has PTSD.” Turns out he was WAY OFF (as you know) and yet the perception is out there now. We need to fight back against this, and so next time your neighbor, a politician, or a Nobel Laureate starts spouting this nonsense, call him or her on it.