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Cato Daily Dispatch for August 5, 2003

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Palestinians Call Off Peace Talks
FOX's New Drama Addresses Social Security Insolvency and Young Americans
Global Warming Politics Heat Up

Palestinians Call Off Peace Talks

"A planned summit between the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers fell apart Tuesday as a U.S.-backed peace plan hit a rough patch over a Palestinian shooting attack and Israeli plans for a limited prisoner release," reports The Associated Press.

"The Palestinians reacted with scorn over Israel's announcement that it would release 440 Palestinian prisoners Wednesday. The Palestinians want more freed and say the list contains few long-serving detainees. In protest, they called off a summit set for Wednesday between premier Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Palestinian sources said."

In "Roadmap to Nowhere," Cato Vice President for Foreign Policy and Defense Studies Ted Galen Carpenter writes: "The main obstacle to peace is the inability of Israeli and Palestinian moderates to rein in the extremists. At some point, an Israeli government will have to compel the militant settlers on the West Bank to leave. Without that concession, there is no hope of a durable accord with the Palestinians. For their part, the Palestinians must renounce terrorism and treat the tactic of suicide bombing as the anathema it is. Until the members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other extremist organizations become pariahs, the confrontation with Israel will never abate.

"Israelis and Palestinians will end their bloody struggle when, and only when, they conclude that they can gain more from negotiations and compromise than they can from confrontation and violence. At that point, they can achieve peace without a high-profile U.S. role. Until then, no amount of creative diplomacy, prodding, or bribery by the United States will produce a breakthrough."

FOX's New Drama Addresses Social Security Insolvency and Young Americans

Tonight at 9:00 p.m. Eastern, FOX debuts its new drama, "The O.C." The program centers around an angry and rebellious 16-year-old boy. "What's his problem?" asks Tom Shales in his review of the series premiere in The Washington Post today. "He has a drunken mother and an abusive stepfather, but what's really bothering him, according to an unlikely burst of dialogue early in the show, is that Social Security funds are going to run out in 2025, thereby forcing people to work into their eighties."

So that may not be "the typical 16-year-old's lament," as Shales sarcastically calls it, but perhaps it should be on the minds of more young people. According to "What Do Younger Americans Have to Gain from Reform?" an article published by Cato's Project on Social Security Choice, "An average American born in the 1970s will pay over $200,000 into Social Security (in today's dollars), the biggest tax most workers will pay, but by the time he or she retires the program will be insolvent. Social Security's 12.4 percent payroll tax is the biggest tax most workers pay. To remain solvent, Social Security tax rates would eventually have to rise to 20 percent."

"That is why young people do not believe that Social Security will be there for them," says Michael Tanner, Cato's director of health and welfare studies, in "No Longer the Third Rail." "Fully 60 percent of all individuals under the age of 65 express that belief, as do larger majorities of younger voters."

"Every day that passes without reform diminishes the potential retirement benefits of young workers," writes Tanner in "Social Security Reform: The Clock is Ticking."

Global Warming Politics Heat Up

"Just as the global climate ebbs and surges, with droughts followed by deluges, so does the politically charged atmosphere that has long surrounded research pointing to potentially disruptive global warming," reports The New York Times.

"The week started with an effort by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, to force a vote on their proposed bill requiring eventual limits on emissions of greenhouse gases. Opponents of curbs on emissions responded with an intensive challenge to the broadening scientific consensus on global warming. Around the capital, there was a flurry of debates, Senate speeches, inflammatory editorials and talk-show commentaries, some contending that global warming was an alarmist fantasy and others saying action was essential."

In "Brave New Climate," Cato Senior Fellow Patrick Michaels writes: "For years, enviro-luddites have assumed that anything we humans do to the global temperature is bad. The implication is that the earth's climate before the industrial revolution was somehow the Garden of Eden.

"Hardly. Much of the northern hemisphere, if not the world, was at the depths of what climatologists call the Little Ice Age. Winters in Europe were miserable. Thomas Jefferson, who, among other things, was fascinated with the notion of climate change, wrote that the oldest citizens of his time recalled that the snow in Virginia would lay on the ground for months at a time, as opposed to the few weeks that characterized his day. Now it's more like a few days. Whether the Little Ice Age was the beginning of a natural progression to the next big ice age (which is overdue by some calculations), is an experiment that cannot be run. However, the reality is that human-produced carbon dioxide has warmed things up a bit.

"Is this all so bad? I sincerely doubt that a panel of the most esteemed ecologists would argue that we should bring planetary temperature down. Perhaps the most logical temperature would be the average since the last big ice age, 11,000 years ago, about a degree warmer than today. The flowering of human civilization and its co-evolution with the earth's biota are the hallmark of the post-ice age regime. Consequently, it's a pretty good argument that the mean temperature during this period is a salubrious one."

Wyatt Dubois, editor, wdubois@cato.org