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Cato Daily Dispatch for May 2, 2005

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(Links to outside sources were active as of the date of this dispatch; however, not all news sources maintain links to current stories indefinitely. Some links also may require registration.)

Will Social Security Be a New Welfare System?

"President Bush will not insist that personal retirement accounts be included in any Social Security reform passed by Congress, a senior White House aide indicated yesterday," reports the New York Sun. "In a round of television appearances following Friday's presidential press conference, the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, emphasized the president's openness and flexibility in reaching a bipartisan compromise to put the fraying entitlement program on a path to permanent solvency."

"A former presidential hopeful, Steve Forbes, who ran on a platform advocating a flat tax, said the indexation proposal [highlighted by the president's first week] was a 'mistake.' 'If you start means-testing Social Security, you will turn it into a welfare system and undermine popular support for it,' Mr. Forbes, a publisher, said on CNN."

"Social Security reform has gotten off track because Republicans have wandered off message," writes Jamie Dettmer, Cato's director of media relations, in "Social Security Reform." "Tricks, schemes and gimmicks -- like add-on accounts, tax increases, wage cap increases and the rest -- are not the keys to winning the debate over Social Security reform."

"... Major reform requires political toughness and tenacity and a real thoughtfulness when it comes to explaining why change is necessary. Alas, neither congressional Republicans nor the White House has excelled at presenting the case for reform. They are failing to draw on the rich populist themes of the dignity of ownership and the right to dispose of one's own earnings and savings that can win the political debate."

North Korea Tests Missile

"North Korea apparently launched a short-range missile into the Sea of Japan on Sunday, a move likely to raise tensions on the eve of a United Nations conference on nuclear nonproliferation," according to the New York Times.

"The reports of a missile test come at a time of maximum scrutiny of the North Korean nuclear program, and of growing frustration among outside powers that North Korea has not returned to the six-nation nuclear negotiations, stalled for nearly a year, even while making a series of aggressive steps and statements."

In the Foreign Policy Briefing "Options for Dealing with North Korea," Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president of Cato's defense and foreign policy, explains how the current options for handling North Korea are problematic: "One option [is] to pursue the same strategy embodied in the 1994 agreement: bribe North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions. Given the failure of bribery in the past, however, there is little reason to assume that sweetening the bribe would induce Pyongyang to honor the commitments that it is already violating."

Carpenter writes: "Washington should consider another approach. It should inform North Korea that, unless it abandons its nuclear program, the United States will encourage South Korea and Japan to make their own decisions about also going nuclear. That prospect might well cause the North to reconsider and keep the region nonnuclear. Even if it does not do so, a nuclear balance of power in northeast Asia might emerge instead of a North Korean nuclear monopoly."

PBS Faces Accusations of Media Bias

"The Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is aggressively pressing public television to correct what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias, prompting some public broadcasting leaders -- including the chief executive of PBS -- to object that his actions pose a threat to editorial independence," the New York Times reports. "Without the knowledge of his board, the chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, contracted last year with an outside consultant to keep track of the guests' political leanings on one program, 'Now with Bill Moyers.'"

"Mr. Tomlinson said that he was striving for balance and had no desire to impose a political point of view on programming, explaining that his efforts are intended to help public broadcasting distinguish itself in a 500-channel universe and gain financial and political support. 'My goal here is to see programming that satisfies a broad constituency,' he said, adding, 'I'm not after removing shows or tampering internally with shows.'"

In a Cato Journal article "Can the Media Be So Liberal? The Economics of Media Bias," Daniel Sutter, a University of Oklahoma economics professor, explains that maintaining a news cartel will some day vanish and the news industry in the future will feature organizations catering to a range of political perspectives: "The probability of sustaining a news cartel diminishes as the number of firms in the market increases. Technology, and to a lesser extent regulation, have combined to keep the number of news organizations of any one type in the national news market relatively small. Until about 20 years ago there were basically only the three television networks, two weekly magazines, and perhaps four newspapers in the national media market. All but a handful of cities had only one daily newspaper and the three network affiliates with news operations; even multi-paper cities have only two or three dailies. As cable television, satellite printing, and the Internet increase the number of news organizations in a truly national news market, the profit incentive for product diversification will become overwhelming."

Greg Garner, editor, ggarner@cato.org