November 15, 2000

Last-Minute Middle-East Money
Last-Minute Trade War Treaty
Last-Minute Land Grab

Last-Minute Middle-East Money

The Clinton administration asked Congress yesterday to approve a last-minute, $750 million Middle East military and economic aid package, even as lawmakers struggle to complete work on the fiscal 2001 budget, according to The Washington Post.

The package includes $450 million for Israel to help support its withdrawal of troops from southern Lebanon and for other defense programs. The request came as a surprise to some GOP lawmakers. "We will carefully review the president's request, but we still have some substantial fiscal 2001 appropriations to conclude before we move to other subjects," said House Appropriations Committee Chairman C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.).

In "U.S. Should Stay Out of Arab-Israeli Conflict," Research Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies Leon Hadar argues that the conflict does not threaten any significant national interests and that the United States would be best served by staying out of the ongoing hostilities in Israel.

Last-Minute Trade War Treaty

Congress sent President Clinton legislation to stave off a potentially damaging transatlantic trade war by replacing a U.S. export tax system that is considered an illegal subsidy by the World Trade Organization, according to The Washington Post.

With the presidential race unresolved, lawmakers decided to postpone other major tax and budget decisions until December. But if the tax bill languishes beyond Friday, the European Union is prepared to begin imposing retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products. The bill, which cleared the Senate unanimously this month, passed the House 316-to-72. Clinton is expected to sign it in time.

U.S.-EU trade hostilities were the topic of a policy forum last month at the Cato Institute entitled, "Will the FSC Dispute Ignite a Transatlantic Trade War?" Rep. Phil English (R-Pa.), the leading congressional expert on Foreign Sales Corporation reform, European Commission representative John Richardson and other experts discussed the showdown between the world's two largest trading entities. Video and a transcript of the event and can be accessed at the Cato Web site.

Last-Minute Land Grab

With the clock ticking down on his presidency, President Clinton ordered that nearly one-third of America's national forests be made off limits to logging, mining and road-building, according to The Christian Science Monitor.

To some, the action -- which covers an area the size of Oregon -- is historic. To others, the proposal is unreasonable, skirts the authority of Congress, and could put thousands of Westerners out of a job.

"I don't think [the Clinton administration] cares how many jobs are lost," says Mark Rey, a senior staffer for Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) who works with the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. "The economic impacts will be much greater than it anticipates."

In "More Money for U.S. Land Acquisition? That's a Bone-Headed Move," Deroy Murdock writes that after watching millions of acres of Western land go up in flames thanks to government mismanagement, giving the feds more land is not a good idea. In "How and Why to Privatize Federal Lands," Terry L. Anderson, Vernon L. Smith and Emily Simmons explain that although many Americans support the preservation of lands, both pro-privatization and pro-regulation analysts agree that the federal government has done an exceedingly poor job of stewarding those resources. Giving more land-management responsibility to the government is not a solution, they write; instead, land should be auctioned for certificates to be distributed equally to all Americans.

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