Old Enough to Fight, Old Enough to Vote; Old Enough to Vote, Old Enough to Drink (and Smoke)

REFERENCE:

Jonathan J. Cooper, AP, "Bill would make California 2nd state with smoking age of 21"

           <http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/health/sns-bc-ca-xgr--california-tobacco-laws-20160303-story.html">

Editorial: "State should pass bill to increase smoking age to 21"

   
        
In spite of short-term public health benefits of raising the "smoking age" for tobacco to 21, the State of California should resist the temptation to do so and move instead to a thorough revamping of our drug and criminal laws to make them more rational and to make 18 a consistent and rigorously-enforced "age of majority" (legal adulthood).

            As many Americans argued during the 1960s, "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote," a principle enacted in 1971 in the 26^th Amendment to the US Constitution. I.e., if someone is responsible enough to decide whether or not to register for the military draft and, if called, whether or not to agree to conscription; if someone is mature enough to decide whether or not to put his (sic) life in danger for his country; if someone is capable of deciding whether or not to agree to kill for his country — then that person is responsible enough to vote and deserves the vote.

            Alternatively American society would have to say that what we want for the Army is pretty much cannon fodder who needn't think a lot; and/or acknowledge that in approving the 26^th Amendment we knew that not enough young people would vote as a bloc to matter much whether they're responsible citizens or not.

            And if someone is old enough to vote — again, unless we say voting isn't really important — that person is old enough to decide whether or not to use a drug like ethyl alcohol or nicotine.

            As long as it's set a decent interval after puberty, the age for legal adulthood is more or less arbitrary and should be part of rites of passage that make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people are told they're adults, expected to act like adults, and are held accountable as adults a rite of passage can work its magic and children become adults. "Late adolescence" was invented during my lifetime, and treating young Americans as adults at 18 — including demanding adult behavior — could have them again young adults. As Mike A. Males has demonstrated in two major books and other writing, older American teens are pretty much a normal adult American population or frequently doing better than their elders. If a fair number of teens are irresponsible jerks, well, so are many of their elders, the older folk just having less energy to be noisy in our evil and experienced enough to be, usually, more discreet.

            Instead of the traditional grousing about them damn youngins and their bad habits, older Americans need to admit that main-stream adult America is a drug culture with a lot of immature, irresponsible and self-destructive behavior starting with pounding beers and popping pills. And then we need to take vigorous public health actions to help addicts, and public policy actions to significantly tone down the marketing of drugs of all sorts and reverse the message that relief from all manner of pain is at the bottom of a bottle.

            As long as it's illegal for an adult to give 20 grams of marijuana to a friend, it should be a felony to design a marketing campaign around "Bitter Beer Face" and push a gateway beer like Keystone Light to young people.

            Rather than passing laws so that "Parents that host / Lose the Most," we should encourage parents to teach their children that drinking is a choice, and if they choose to drink they can sip like ladies and gentlemen and use alcohol (and softer drugs) responsibly. It should not be too hard to return to the old idea that getting sloppy drunk and puking on a date isn't signaling sophisticated maturity.

            As for tobacco use, we need more to harness even more of those fiendishly brilliant pushers of beer and wine and stronger booze and get them working on ad campaigns that show nicotine use "Soooo 20^th-century!", fit only for old people and the terminally uncool (or whatever the cool word will be for "uncool").

            Making cigarettes a symbol of adulthood is not a good idea.

            Taking yet another step teaching 18-20-year olds that we think they're children and expect them to act that way: that is an invitation to even more arrested development among American youth and a very bad idea.

Boycott! (Orientation, O Parents of Undergrads)

      When I started college in 1961, the University of Illinois at Urbana ran an orientation for frosh (which I didn't bother with), but certainly felt no necessity to attempt to orient our parents.
        In my years at Illinois as an undergrad, the University claimed to be "in loco parentis" — i.e., in a parental relationship with students who could be seen as "legal infants" when convenient for Big U officials — but generally left us alone. There was, though, one custom that cut different ways, and interesting ways on matters parental. The Big U would accept payment for tuition and fees only from the student: no checks from the students' parents or guardians; students wrote the checks.
      Or the students paid cash. My memory of tuition and fees at the time was maybe $150 a semester or year for in-state students: a service charge, plus some important symbolism.
      When teaching (briefly) at the University of Illinois, I sometimes handled parental complaints — not necessarily against me — and found it really good to have a ready answer to the line, as an appeal for some benefit for some student, "I'm paying for my kids' education!" We could usually answer, "No, the people of the State of Illinois are paying for your offspring's education, with the taxpayers chipping in even for students from out of state. And for who's paying our service fees — well that you are is more than we know. It's the student's name on the class roster, and it's the student's check for tuition and fees."
      Nowadays, I'm sure, billing at the U of I is set up to get money from the deepest pockets around, and I'm very sure without checking that the great majority of payments are made by parents: cash, check, or maybe even PayPal, wire, or automatic deductions, but whenever the Big U can arrange it, by the parents.
       And that's too bad.
       When I worked at Miami University, Oxford, OH, I used to say that Miami U succeeded financially by "getting our fair share of young adults who go to college in Ohio and way more than our fair share of children who are sent." To repeat one of my main mantras as a university professor, College is for grownups, and it doesn't help that philosophy when colleges and universities aid and abet keeping young adults financially dependent upon their parents and encourage not just firmly-tied apron strings but what we used to call "the two-hundred-mile-long umbilical cord" and add, "And that really must be really uncomfortable 'cause the parent calling me is a guy."
       So parents of America unite in this: Next fall, drop your offspring off at college, do a little schlepping to help them move in, and then get the hell out, go home and enjoy the extra space and quiet around the house. Boycott orientation, and burn the glossy handout for heat and light.
       Then send a bit of that time you saved lobbying for more sensible ways of funding US higher ed. than the current weirdness of having the State offer (nearly) free schooling to parents' children while they're children, and then asking — demanding? — that parents pay huge amounts on education for offspring who should be adults.
       Tuition and fees should be paid directly by the students, and payment should be structured so that even working-class 18-year-olds can afford to pay.

Usage Note: "Adult Children" (14 Feb. 2015)

My first thought at hearing the phrase "adult child" is, "If you raised an adult child, you failed as a parent."

My second thought is that the first thought was at worst cruel, at best a bit unfair.

        If your child has serious developmental problems and emotionally or intellectually and/or physically  gets to her or his twenties without reaching adult development, then, obviously, you should be respected and complimented on your job of parenting. 

        In less somber contexts — on linguistic grounds, a fair-minded person might object that people speaking of an "adult child" understand "child"   as just "offspring," which makes the phrase mean the harmless "adult offspring." Okay, but come on! There's always "son" and "daughter" and "offspring" isn't that tough a word and works for most people who are biological parents as well as parenting parents.

         On more paractical grounds, the accusation of failure as a parent often overestimates the influence of parents on the outcome of their offspring. Most of us most of the time blame the parents for rotten kids — and we usually should — but not always. If a family is stuck with a 22-year old child, it may not be the fault of the parents.

         It may not be anyone's fault, but it is a problem.

         I first heard "adult child" and such in the phrase "adult children of alcoholics," and the usage seemed wrong. Adult offspring of alcoholics, God and Al Anon know, frequently have issues, but those issues didn't seem to me — at least from a distance — to be some sort of culpable immaturity. If anything, some people with a subgroup of ... what would be the proper term here? ... let's say some variety of fucked up parents take on adult responsibility at an early age and are adult well before leaving their teens, sometimes adult heartbreakingly too young.

         Folks out there using English should remember that children don't have the same rights as adults and should not have the same rights as adults. In the context of the 2014/15 round of the debate on mandated innoculations, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky said, "The state doesn't own your children" and clarified that "Parents own the children." There was widespread denunciation of the idea of anyone's owning children, but it is significant that a US Senator in the libertarian tradition (no less) would think in terms of owning kids and that many of those denouncing the line were of the emphatically non-libertarian strain of the Left who were far some seeing children as autonomous, responsible beings who could usually be trusted to take care of themselves.

         Let's say play alone in a city part or take the subway.

         Children do not have the same rights as adults and do need protection, and there are powerful Americans of a wide swath of political persuasions who go way, way too far in "protecting our children." (As I said when the Powers that Were in the City of Chicago introduced a teen curfew and argued it was to protect teenagers — bullshit! it was to protect grownups afraid, sometimes with justification, of teenagers — "Just do me one favor: Don't do me no favors.")

         Eric Posner recently did a fine job of provocation, arguing that "Universities Are Right and Within Their Rights to Crack Down on Speech and Behavior" of college students because "Students today are more like children than adults and need protection." Which means, of course, that the "kids" need to be not only protected from words and topics and ideas that might upset them but also from misusing freedoms we in America recognize as birthrights for grownups.

         Children may not be owned by the State or their parents, but they do need people to control them.

         If your offspring turned out all right and can do okay on their own, thank you, they're you're adult offspring; don't insult them by calling them children or share with others that feeling deep inside that they will always be your little girl, your little boy. Such feelings fine in your heart of hearts but make for a lousy idea for public policy.

         If Posner has a point and we have wide-spread arrested development among young Americans, well, that is a serious social issue to be dealt with and not to be blandly accepted. The phrase "adult child" can have some very negative implications; it should not be used casually. 

Zero Tuition: Who pays? Who profits? (1 Feb. 2015)

            It's not a name you'd know, but he's important for the current debate on zero or low tuitions at community colleges, and for reducing tuition and fees at four-year colleges and universities.
            As described in a memoir by the Director of the Bureau of the Budget of the State of Illinois in the Ogilvie administration in the late 1960s, "there was a fellow by the name of David Eisenman who had been at the university [of Illinois]. David worked the tuition issue very hard […,] and our thesis on tuition was that low tuitions are a massive subsidy to middle class and upper middle class families. If you really wanted to assure equal access to educational opportunity, what you should be doing is charging high tuitions and then [use] the Scholarship Commission as a vehicle for providing assistance above tuition and fees to low income families to get their kids in the university system." 
            What State legislatures did, of course — mostly for reasons other than class equity and fiscal fairness — was reduce subsidies to public higher education, eventually drastically, with only small increases in scholarships and grants.
            And so the cost of public higher education was shifted significantly to students and their families, even while the those costs increased and then continued to increase.
            In part, that's fair, especially with four-year institutions: most Americans pay taxes, frequently "regressive taxes" like the sales tax, or often-oppressive ones like property tax; only some people go on to higher education, and the ones who go to the big, prestigious public research universities tend to be well-to-do, and even community college students aren't often the wretched of the Earth.
            In larger part, the high-tuition/high-fees system is unfair and unwise: it's depriving young people chances their elders had for inexpensive higher education — those who received The G.I. Bill, "War babies" and Boomers like me who paid only token tuition — because it's depriving the American Republic of a large body of well-educated citizens, and because it's depriving the American economy of educated people who can help America survive and thrive in what will be increasingly sharp global economic competition.
            The non-solution so far has been mostly student loans, which has been great for bankers but not even good for most others. The banks get nice capitalist profit on the loans, while the risks get socialized: your tax dollars in action guaranteeing (for the banks) at least part of the loans.
            It didn't and doesn't have to be that way.
            Here is another name you probably don't know but should: the Honorable John J. Gilligan, Governor of the State of Ohio 1971-75 and sufficiently an advocate of an alternative that it was sometimes called "the Gilligan Plan." It was more commonly known as "Pay As You Earn," or PAYE, and the idea has been around — and implemented on a very small scale — for nearly half a century.
            The version of PAYE I have pushed is one in which the Federal government advances to any qualified resident enough money to actually afford a college or university education: which can be a substantial sum for married people with families, "nontraditional students" such as we had with veterans under the G.I. bill.
            This sounds expensive, and the original outlay would be very large; PAYE would, however, save money and could turn a modest profit.
            PAYE advances are loans that must be repaid, and repayment can be through a surtax on one's Federal income taxes at a rate set by actuaries so that the basic program breaks even, with former students paying back their loans if they can afford to and as they can afford to, and with a time limit on how long they must pay.
            If you graduate and go on to make a lot of money, you pay back the loan with interest; if you don't make a lot of money — or hardly any at all — then you pay back what you can.
            But you do pay back: A well-funded IRS has shown itself to be very, very effective at getting the sovereign capital "P" People money we're owed. And it makes far more business sense to collect money from people who have been out working for a while and have money than to start dunning immediately recent graduates who are broke.
            The rates can be set so that students can pay full freight for the cost of their educations, but between market forces and government arm-twisting, students should have to pay no more than that. Capital expenses, research, public service (including providing cheap semi-pro sport), top-heavy administrations, and other frills — those can be subsidized by the States and, with luck, in some areas subsidized a good deal less.
            As a former college teacher, the major advantage I see to the plan is that it would attract more full-fledged adults to college campuses and help concentrate the minds of younger students. For sure, it will limit the weirdness of the American State's offering more or less adequate, more or less free education to people's children when those children are children, and then asking parents of legal adults to pay for further educating for their adult offspring, helping to reduce our current over-load of "adult children."
            (My slogan as a teacher: College Is for Grownups, not what a couple of my students called, in two very fine essays, "College: Half-Way House to Adulthood," and "College: The Four-Year Vacation.)
            As a very-long-term US resident, I like the idea of reducing subsidies to the well-to-do while helping "to assure equal access to educational opportunity."
            As a taxpayer, I also like the possibility of driving down college costs if colleges have to compete for students who themselves have to pay for their educations, and at the same time having all taxpayers who are paying attention highly conscious that we are putting up money, at least for a while, to support those colleges and universities.
            Many banks will lose a sweet source of income, but right about now a lot of Americans might well say, "Screw the banks"; the money the banks are not lending to students they might put toward carefully-vetted local mortgages and loans to small businesses: that social-responsibilty stuff they may recall from old movies like It's a Wonderful Life.
            So my vote is for "No" to zero tuition, but an emphatic "Yes" to investing in education, but investing with high probability of high return on the investment, starting, crassly, with getting back the money.