October 27, 2000

Bush, Gore Plans Undermined By Federal Spending Spree
Clinton, Congress Face Showdown Over Immigration
Trial Lawyers Win Big in Utah

Bush, Gore Plans Undermined By Federal Spending Spree

Congress and the Clinton administration are still wrangling over the final pieces of this year's federal budget, but by the time they are finished they could spend more than 40 percent of the surplus that the two presidential candidates are counting on to pay for their own proposals, according to The New York Times.

Without even taking up most of the big-ticket promises made by Vice President Al Gore or Gov. George W. Bush in their race for the White House, the Republican-controlled Congress and President Clinton are negotiating over tax cuts and spending increases that could use up $900 billion or more of the projected non-Social Security surplus of $2.2 trillion over the next decade, analysts from both parties said. In "Making Better Use of the Budget Surplus," Cato President Edward H. Crane writes that although the projected surplus depends on revenue assumptions that are reasonable, it also depends on a grossly optimistic assumption: that Congress and the White House will resist the itch to spend. "If by some miracle a federal budget surplus does materialize," he writes, "under no circumstances should the president and Congress be allowed to use it to buy more goodies for favored constituencies."

Clinton, Congress Face Showdown Over Immigration

With the White House waving a veto threat, Congress barreled into a politically charged showdown with President Clinton today over his plan to grant amnesty for many illegal aliens, according to Reuters.

Just days before the Nov. 7 elections in which both parties are courting Hispanic voters, Republicans rejected as a boon to lawbreakers Clinton's plan to grant amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who arrived in this country before 1986. Instead, as part of a $37.5 billion budget bill, Republicans offered a narrower measure they say would help reunite families and give legal recourse to immigrants barred from applying for residency 15 years ago.

Clinton in a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R - Ill.) repeated his threat to veto the budget bill for the Commerce, Justice and State departments, saying it "would not help most of the people who need relief and would perpetuate the current patchwork of contradictory and unfair immigration policies."

In the Cato Handbook for Congress, Daniel Griswold and Stephen Moore call for easing immigration laws and expanding quotas for immigrant workers. In "Keep Giving Us Your Best and Your Brightest," Moore argues that "immigrants are generally assets to our economy and our culture."

Trial Lawyers Win Big in Utah

Attorneys representing the state of Utah in the 1998 settlement with the tobacco industry will be paid $64.9 million in compensation fees by the tobacco companies, the Tobacco Fee Arbitration Panel said yesterday, according to Reuters.

The fees are separate from the $1 billion Utah will receive over the next 25 years from the settlement and any additional payments in perpetuity, the panel said in a statement. The panel said its findings are final and cannot be appealed by any party.

In "States' Share Blame for Tobacco Lawyer's Greed," Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies Robert A. Levy shows how members of the private bar were hired as government subcontractors with their remuneration tied to the magnitude of their conquest in the tobacco lawsuits. He explains that there is no possible basis for the astronomical fees that are being paid out.

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