Cato Daily Dispatch for October 6, 2005
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GOP Struggles with Spending CutsIllegal Immigration: A Local Issue?
CIA Dodges Calls for Accountability
GOP Struggles with Spending Cuts
"President Bush's call for spending cuts to offset the cost of hurricane relief has sharply split the Republican Party, with small-government conservatives emboldened to scale back the overall reach of government while moderates drive for more anti-poverty spending, not less," The Washington Post reports.
"The rift is growing wider as Congress moves toward a late-October deadline to produce legislation saving at least $35 billion from social welfare and health care programs over the next five years. That target was set this spring by a budget blueprint that narrowly passed Congress, largely along party lines."
Hurricane Katrina required some federal relief spending, but the huge costs also demand a rethinking of budget priorities. With entitlement costs exploding and the war in Iraq an ongoing budget drain, Congress and the administration need to make sure that the Katrina disaster doesn't become a federal budget disaster. Cato Institute scholars Stephen Slivinski, director of budget studies, and Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies, have compiled $62 billion in spending cuts that would offset Katrina relief in the short-term and create savings to reduce the federal deficit over the long-term. The cuts are targeted at business subsidies, welfare for the well-to-do such as farm subsidies, and activities that should be funded by states and the private sector. The cuts would not affect programs for the poor, and thus could get support from reform-minded Democrats. Many of the cuts were proposed, but not realized, by House Republicans in the 1990s.
Illegal Immigration: A Local Issue?
"Suburban politicians once had to master a small but demanding catalog of local issues. Taxes, garbage, crime and schools were always the big ones. But recently a volatile new issue has been showing up on the local meet-the-candidate circuit, and it is pretty much the opposite of the familiar and the local. It is illegal immigration," The New York Times reports.
The article continues: "Though municipal officials have no statutory control over immigration, a rising population of illegal immigrants in suburban communities ... has prompted some of those officials to attack the problem with the limited means at their disposal. In the process, they have won and lost political support; grappled with issues beyond their usual bailiwicks; and, whether intentionally or not, begun incorporating immigration into the calculus of local politics."
In "Legalization is the Way," Daniel T. Griswold, director of the Cato Institute's center for trade policy studies, writes: "Longtime critics of immigration demand more of the same failed policies: more walls and barbed wire, entire divisions of troops at the border, the massive deportation of undocumented workers at great economic and human cost.
"A more responsible approach would be to recognize reality by creating a temporary worker program and a path to legalization for the 9 million or more people already living here illegally. President George W. Bush endorsed that approach in January and again during the presidential debates. So did Sen. John Kerry. Three Arizona Republicans, Sen. John McCain and Reps. Jeff Flake and Jim Kolbe, have introduced legislation that would create just such a program."
CIA Dodges Calls for Accountability
"C.I.A. director Porter Goss, defying the spy agency's inspector general, said on Wednesday that he will not pursue disciplinary action against former and current C.I.A. officials over intelligence lapses involving the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks," Reuters reports.
"Despite widespread calls for accountability, Goss said the CIA would risk undermining the readiness of its operatives to take risks in the U.S. war on terror if it were to single out individuals for missteps that occurred in the run-up to the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington."
In "Intelligence Services Are Not 'Intelligent,'" Leon T. Hadar, a research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, writes: "Proposing that we can 'fix' this system to make it an open, objective, and independent information-processing system, is not very different than arguing that we can make a centralized economy more efficient, or that we can liberalize a communist government. Boys will be boys -- and intelligence agencies will continue to be politicized, incompetent, and wasteful government bureaucracies. And, occasionally, they will even get lucky. As a result of sophisticated technology, the courage of an American agent, or a defection by an enemy spy, they may end up providing a marginal advantage to the U.S. government during time of crisis and war.
"Instead of trying to 'fix' the CIA, Americans would be better off by electing hubris-free presidents and lawmakers who don't go to war, invade other countries, and try to change the world based on the kind of incomplete information and distorted analysis that this government agency provides."
Kristen A. Kestner, editor, kkestner@cato.org