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Cato Daily Dispatch for September 10, 2003

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House Approves Vouchers for D.C. Students
WTO Meetings Underway in Cancun
Former Envoy: U.S. Should Have Direct Talks with Pyongyang

House Approves Vouchers for D.C. Students

"The House of Representatives approved the nation's first federally funded voucher program by a single vote Tuesday night, sending the Senate a plan that would provide $10 million in private school tuition grants to at least 1,300 D.C. children next year," reports The Washington Post.

"Supporters argued that the program would free several hundred children from a failing, 68,000-student D.C. public school system and, through competitive pressure, force reforms on a powerful teachers union and an indifferent education bureaucracy."

David Salisbury, director of Cato's Center for Educational Freedom and author of the recent Cato Policy Analysis, "What Does a Voucher Buy? A Closer Look at the Cost of Private Schools," made the following comments today regarding the House vote: "The bill will provide tuition vouchers of up to $7,500. A recent survey of D.C. private schools revealed that the average cost for private elementary schools in D.C. is $4,500. So a voucher of this amount would give students access to most elementary schools in the district. The District's private secondary schools, however, tend to be somewhat pricey, with average costs running at $16,075. Lawmakers should consider allowing D.C. students to use the vouchers at nearby schools in Virginia and Maryland where the average private secondary school costs $6,920."

WTO Meetings Underway in Cancun

"Deeply divided over the make-or-break issue of farm subsidies, rich and poor countries begin five days of talks today aimed at preparing the ground for a deal to tear down barriers to global trade," according to Reuters.

"Progress at the meeting in the Mexican beach resort of Cancun would be a shot in the arm for the still-fragile world economy. Stalemate would encourage governments to strike deals with each other, sapping the strength of the multilateral trading system overseen by the World Trade Organization and possibly splitting the world into rival blocs."

In conjunction with the World Trade Organization meetings in Cancun, Cato has recently released two books. In Defense of Global Capitalism, written by Johan Norberg, who describes how capitalism is creating a better world. A call to reform the WTO's antidumping agreement comes in Antidumping Exposed: The Devilish Details of Unfair Trade Law, written by Brink Lindsey, director of Cato's Center for Trade Policy Studies and Daniel J. Ikenson, a policy analyst with the center.

Former Envoy: U.S. Should Have Direct Talks with Pyongyang

"The State Department's former senior expert on North Korea said Tuesday that the Bush administration's refusal to engage directly with the country made it almost impossible to stop Pyongyang from going ahead with its plans to build, test and deploy nuclear weapons," reports the Los Angeles Times.

"Six-nation talks are a good step, but not enough, said Jack Pritchard, who was the department's special envoy for negotiations with North Korea until he resigned last month. The United States should immediately initiate direct talks with the communist nation, he said."

In "Wrong War, Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Why Military Action Should Not Be Used to Resolve the North Korean Nuclear Crisis," Cato Senior Fellow Doug Bandow writes: "Rather than adopting the most dangerous course of action as a first resort, the United States should instead take the opportunity to reduce its threat profile in the region by focusing on multilateral diplomatic efforts that place primary responsibility for resolving the crisis on those regional actors most threatened by the North Korean nuclear program."

Jonathan Block, editor, jblock@cato.org