[artdutra04]

Having the government directly pay a stipend to mentors may open up a whole can of worms, and also fails to get private industry more involved in the process. If they were instead to either give tax credits to businesses who will pay full wages/salary to their employees for a time period not to exceed three to five work days in the course of a year for the sole purpose of volunteering in the community. Everyone benefits this way, and I really don't think three or five "lost" days will break the bank of most companies.

Now if there are people worried about such actions as this adding unnecessary programs to the federal government deficit, this is a reasonable assessment. But unlike a family household income, which is pretty single dimensional, where the greatest concern is that money in is greater than money out, large businesses and governments think about money multi-dimensionally. They think not about what a dollar is right now, but what it could become. And ultimately, for as much concern as there is about the deficit (and much of it is justifiably), the absolute figures of the deficit don't matter. The only thing that does matter is the deficit as percent of GDP.

It's like how Person A might have $10,000 in debt and Person B has $15,000 in debt. Some might say that Person B is much worse off, because he has more debt. But they forget about what those people make. If Person A had never graduated high school and is only making $30,000 per year at Dunkin Donuts, but Person B makes $100,000 per year at Widgets Inc, Person B will actually have a much easier time paying off their debt.

So what does this mean for the economy and the country? If the rate at which the economy is growing is faster than the rate of the growth of the national debt, then the debt is actually decreasing on a relative scale. It seems weird, but it's true. And if programs can be demonstrated to generate more economic wealth than they cost, they are actually helping lower the federal deficit in the long run. So if funding STEM activities such as FIRST is shown to generate a huge number of new college engineering students, which will design a new generation of gadgets and gizmos, or start new businesses to sell their ideas, (or in other words, create a lot of economic wealth) then the long-term positive economic impacts generates more wealth than funding such programs cost. This is the real reason why there are so many large corporations sponsoring FIRST. It's not just because of the warm and fuzzy feeling, it's because there are long-term, tangible benefits to their bottom line.