Cato Daily Dispatch for September 28, 2001
Bush Says No To National IDANWR Still Won't Solve All Problems
Farmers Fear Drop In Subsidies After Attack
Bush Says No To National ID
Bush administration officials say the president will not support calls in Congress for creating a national identification card to help combat terrorism, according to The Washington Post.
While some lawmakers in Congress have said they'd like to take a fresh look at the issue, White House spokesman Jimmy Orr said President Bush "is not even considering the idea."
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, a number of House and Senate lawmakers have begun dusting off the idea of instituting a national ID card, or adding a biometric identifier such as a fingerprint to all Social Security cards.
The idea is apparently popular with Americans as well. According to a telephone poll of more than 1,200 people interviewed by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, fully 70 percent of the public would favor a law requiring citizens to carry a national ID card at all times.
"The prospect of massive computer databases or registries, software data collection systems, digital fingerprinting, handprint scans, facial recognition technologies, voice authentication devices, electronic retinal scans, and other 'biometric' surveillance technologies have suddenly become realistic options for government identification purposes," writes Adam Thierer in "National ID Cards: New technologies, Same Bad Idea." "If Americans are concerned about the recent proliferation of traffic surveillance cameras on roadways and sidewalks, then they ain't seen nothin' yet."
ANWR Still Won't Solve All Problems
A Republican lawmaker welcomed an OPEC decision to maintain production levels, but said the United States needs to boost its own energy supplies by opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, according to The Washington Post.
Sen. Larry E. Craig (Idaho) said the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington have made it crucial for the United States to open the refuge to ensure adequate oil supplies and economic growth.
In "Bush's Energy Babble," Cato Director of Natural Resources Studies Jerry Taylor writes, "Putting a big ANWR field into the market would be a sizeable addition to global supply as far as these things go. But not one that will radically change the dynamics of the world oil market, particularly when that oil is about 6 times more expensive to produce than Persian Gulf oil. Even if America had opened up those reserves a decade ago, we'd still be in the same boat today. OPEC's ability to manipulate the world market wouldn't be significantly attenuated by the Bush plan."
Farmers Fear Drop In Subsidies After Attack
Farmers are hoping that emergency spending related to the 9/11 attacks doesn't cause Congress to scale back the 10-year, $167 billion farm bill that would continue price and income subsidies to farmers who grow bulk commodities including cotton, corn and wheat, according to The Washington Post.
"I'm concerned that it's gotten put on the back burner," said Chad Healey, 25, who along with his father raises hogs and farms 800 acres of corn and soybeans in Indiana's Jasper County. "Right now farmers are living on that government check."
In "The Farming of Washington: How U.S. Agricultural Policies Affect the American Farm," Don Doig explains that many, if not all, of the problems facing U.S. agriculture can be traced to ill-advised programs designed to improve the economics of farming. He writes that "since the 1930s, a complex web of federal farm subsidy programs has been woven into place, to try to shield farmers from market instabilities and to try to guarantee some measure of economic continuity. These programs may have created more problems than they've solved, and one would be hard-pressed to find any clear-cut, lasting benefits."
In "Archer Daniels Midland: A Case Study in Corporate Welfare," James Bovard uses ADM as a case study to uncover the culture of rent-seeking in Washington. At least 43 percent of ADM's annual profits are from products heavily subsidized or protected by the American government.
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