Cato Daily Dispatch for November 24, 2004
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Corporate Welfare Alive and WellCDC Admits Mistake in Obesity Report
U.S. Ends Peacekeeping Mission in Bosnia
Corporate Welfare Alive and Well
"Austerity in big-ticket government programs hasn't dulled lawmakers' appetites for special interest spending items that curry favor back home," according to the Associated Press. "The spending plan awaiting President Bush's signature is packed with them, doling out $4 million for an Alabama fertilizer development center, $1 million each for a Norwegian American Foundation in Seattle and a 'Wild American Shrimp Initiative,' and more, much more."
The Cato Handbook for Congress recommends a "two-pronged attack" to end corporate welfare programs like those mentioned by the AP. "Because corporate welfare is doled out by dozens of federal agencies, it is difficult for taxpayers to find out which firms are receiving what amounts of money," according to the Handbook. "A first reform step should be financial transparency. The administration should begin providing a detailed cross-agency listing of companies that received direct business subsidies and the amounts received in its annual budget documents.
"In addition to full disclosure, a corporate welfare termination commission should be established, akin to the successful military base closing commissions of the 1990s. The commission would present a list of cuts to Congress, which would be required to vote on all the cuts together with no amendments allowed. As an added way for members to gain support for the measure, the full value of savings could go to immediate tax rebates for all taxpayers."
CDC Admits Mistake in Obesity Report
"The government, acknowledging a mistake in a highly publicized health report, is expected to significantly reduce its estimate of the number of Americans who die because of obesity," USA Today reports.
"The much-touted study, reported in the March 10 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, indicated that diet and physical inactivity accounted for 400,000 deaths in 2000, compared with 435,000 from tobacco. A CDC researcher predicted that obesity would overtake smoking as the leading cause of preventable death by next year."
In "What You Eat Is Your Business," Cato policy analyst Radley Balko writes: "The best way to alleviate the obesity 'public health' crisis is to remove obesity from the realm of public health. It doesn't belong there anyway. It's difficult to think of anything more private and of less public concern than what we choose to put into our bodies. It only becomes a public matter when we force the public to pay for the consequences of those choices. If policymakers want to fight obesity, they'll halt the creeping socialization of medicine, and move to return individual Americans' ownership of their own health and well-being back to individual Americans. ... We'll all make better choices about diet, exercise, and personal health when someone else isn't paying for the consequences of those choices."
U.S. Ends Peacekeeping Mission in Bosnia
"The U.S. military on Wednesday ended a nine-year peacekeeping role in Bosnia but kept on a small contingent to hunt down top war crimes suspects Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic," Reuters reports.
The Cato Foreign Policy Briefing Paper "Killing with Kindness: The UN Peacekeeping Mission in Bosnia" recommended that the United States withdraw its troops from Bosnia in 1995. UN expert John F. Hillen III writes: "The UN intervention has imposed an artificial life-support system on a Balkan society bent on continuing to fight. The 'middle way' between traditional passive peacekeeping and large-scale coercive intervention has left all the local parties with greater incentives to continue the conflict than to negotiate a settlement.
"... Disengagement may not provide the American or the international community with the false comfort that intervention affords. But prolonging the conflict in the name of humanitarianism is likely to doom Bosnians to longer term pain."
Wyatt DuBois, editor, wdubois@cato.org
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