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Cato Daily Dispatch for September 17, 2003

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GAO Head to Warn of Nation's Dismal Fiscal Outlook
Administration Unveils Plans for Terrorist Database
More Money Doesn't Equal a Better Education

GAO Head to Warn of Nation's Dismal Fiscal Outlook

"Even though the government is on track to run a record deficit in excess of $500 billion next year, neither President Bush nor congressional leaders have proposed doing anything to balance the budget anytime soon. Their strategy: to wait for a vigorous economy to do the job for them," according to the Los Angeles Times.

"David M. Walker, head of the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm, is giving a speech today warning that the nation's long-term fiscal outlook is seriously out of whack. And he challenges the assumption that economic recovery will solve the problem painlessly."

In the Cato Handbook for Congress, Director of Fiscal Policy Studies Chris Edwards offers several suggestions for budget reform, including discretionary spending caps and a balanced-budget amendment. "Both Congress and the administration must end their shortsighted jostling for more taxpayer cash," he writes. "Not only is the government running huge deficits again, but the looming explosion in entitlement costs demands that all aspects of the federal spending empire be overhauled."

Administration Unveils Plans for Terrorist Database

"The Bush administration, hoping to overcome the government's failures to share sensitive counterterror information, unveiled plans yesterday for a master database of 'known and suspected terrorists' that would be used in background checks around the world," reports The Washington Post.

"The FBI-run Terrorist Screening Center will cull information from nearly a dozen watch lists held by agencies throughout the federal government to provide 'one-stop shopping' for U.S. consular officials, airport workers, border agents, local police and some private industries, officials said."

In "Protecting Privacy in the Database Nation," Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., director of technology policy, writes: "To safeguard civil liberties in the new surveillance state enabled by digital technologies, there are basically three requirements: (1) avoid mandatory databases or any form of National ID, because they violate the 4th Amendment, and because government's dominance of the evolution of these technologies would effectively destroy the privacy sector's ability to offer any privacy guarantees to us at all; (2) ensure 4th amendment protections even for surveillance in open, public places; and (3) avoid the mixing of public (compulsory) and private (voluntary) databases as new technologies emerge and proliferate."

More Money Doesn't Equal a Better Education

"Given its investment in education, the United States isn't getting the return it expects when compared with the performance of other nations, a report shows," The Associated Press reports.

"Among more than 25 industrialized nations, no country spends more public and private money to educate each student than the United States," according to an annual review by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

"But American 15-year-olds scored in the middle of the pack in math, reading and science in 2000, and the nation's high-school graduation rate was below the world average in 2001."

David Salisbury, director of Cato's Center for Educational Freedom, made the following comments regarding the report: "In spite of the fact that the U.S. spends more than any other nation on education, U.S. students show only mediocre performance on math, reading, and scientific knowledge in comparison to their international peers. What this should make perfectly obvious is that putting more money into education will not raise student performance. What will? Cut out the bureaucracy in public schools at the federal, state, and local levels; give teachers and schools more autonomy to select their curriculum, textbooks, and methods; and, most importantly, allow student funding to go to whatever public or private school the parents choose for their child. Giving parents control over the dollars being spent on education is critical if we expect to see improvement in education."

Jonathan Block, editor, jblock@cato.org