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Cato Daily Dispatch for January 29, 2004

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Rumsfeld OKs Emergency Army Expansion
Despite Bloated Budget, Bush Will Increase Arts Funding
Postal Service Bailout on the Way?

Rumsfeld OKs Emergency Army Expansion

"Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, invoking emergency powers, has authorized the Army to grow temporarily by 30,000 troops above its congressionally approved limit of 482,000 to facilitate a restructuring of forces severely strained by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and counterterrorism missions elsewhere," The Washington Post reports.

"The increase, disclosed yesterday in congressional testimony by Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, surprised members of the House Armed Services Committee, many of whom have been pressing for a larger Army."

Rather than increase the number of Americans in uniform, the Defense Department should reallocate its existing forces, according to Charles Peña, Cato director of defense policy studies. In "A Bigger Defense Budget Is Not Needed to Win the War on Terrorism," he calls for "a more restrained military posture, particularly overseas deployments, many of which are holdovers from the Cold War and have little to do with safeguarding vital U.S. national security interests. For example, the U.S. continues to station 100,000 troops in Europe as part of NATO even though the threat of invasion by Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces no longer exists. The same situation exists with a similar number of U.S. troops stationed in South Korea and Japan. These obsolete deployments need to be phased out.

"In addition to reducing deployments, the United States needs to reassess the use of military force to intervene in a bewildering array of so-called 'crises' around the world--from Haiti to Bosnia to Kosovo--that have nothing to do with protecting vital national security interests or the war on terrorism. Indeed, such actions may unnecessarily fan the flames of future terrorist actions."

Despite Bloated Budget, Bush Will Increase Arts Funding

"President Bush will seek a big increase in the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts, the largest single source of support for the arts in the United States," The New York Times reports. "Administration officials, including White House budget experts, said that Mr. Bush would propose an increase of $15 million to $20 million for the coming fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. That would be the largest rise in two decades and far more than the most recent increases, about $500,000 for 2003 and $5 million for this year."

This announcement comes days before the president is expected to announce a goal of holding non-defense, non-homeland security discretionary spending to less than 1 percent. "In a society that constitutionally limits the powers of government and maximizes individual liberty, there is no justification for the forcible transfer of money from taxpayers to artists, scholars, and broadcasters," write Sheldon Richman and Cato Executive Vice President David Boaz in the Cato Handbook for Congress.

"Since art museums, symphony orchestras, humanities scholarship, and public television and radio are enjoyed predominantly by people of greater-than-average income and education, the federal cultural agencies oversee a fundamentally unfair transfer of wealth from the lower classes up," they write. Moreover, "Taxpayer subsidy of the arts, scholarship, and broadcasting is inappropriate because it is outside the range of the proper functions of government, and as such it needlessly politicizes, and therefore corrupts, an area of life that should be left untainted by politics."

Postal Service Bailout on the Way?

"U.S. lawmakers warned on Wednesday that taxpayers might need to bail out the U.S. Postal Service unless drastic legislative changes are made to allow the embattled agency to withstand attacks from the Internet and private carriers," according to Reuters.

"First-class mail, the major USPS cash cow, is stagnant," writes Cato Adjunct Scholar Edward Hudgins, in "Privatize the Postal Service." "More people in the future will be paying bills electronically, further reducing postal revenues. The postal service will lose more than a billion dollars every year for at least the next decade."

In "Postal Ploy: 'Give Us Your Money or Don't Get Your Mail!'" Hudgins writes that "a private Postal Service, without special privileges, would have an incentive to operate efficiently and to offer innovative services that profit its stockholders, provide opportunities for its workers, and give customers the best service for the best prices."

Hudgins is also the editor of the Cato book Mail @ the Millennium: Will the Postal Service Go Private?

Wyatt Dubois, editor, wdubois@cato.org