Cato Daily Dispatch for November 30, 2005
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Bush Defends Iraq PolicyGame Over: Restricting Video Game Sales
Lawsuits over Farm Subsidies
Bush Defends Iraq Policy
"President Bush, facing growing doubts about his war strategy, said Wednesday that Iraqi troops are increasingly taking the lead in battle but that 'this will take time and patience,' according to the Associated Press. "But he steadfastly refused to set a timetable for withdrawing American forces as some of his critics have demanded.
"'As Iraqi forces gain experience and the political process advances, we will be able to decrease our troop level in Iraq without losing our capability to defeat the terrorists,' Bush told a supportive audience at the U.S. Naval Academy. 'These decisions about troop levels will be driven by the conditions on the ground in Iraq and the good judgment of our commanders, not by artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington.'
In "Bush Misreads History," Ted Galen Carpenter, Cato's vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, says that the Bush administration must choose between "two bad alternatives" in Iraq: "A decision to withdraw and leave Iraq to its own fate is not without cost. America's terrorist adversaries will certainly portray a pull-out as a defeat for U.S. policy. The cost of staying on indefinitely in a dire security environment is even worse. President Bush and his advisors need to consider the possibility that the United States might stay in Iraq for many years to come and still not achieve its policy goals. Moreover, the costs of such a strategy in blood and treasure would be far more than the nearly $200 billion already spent and the 1,900 fatalities already suffered."
Chris Preble, Cato's director of foreign policy studies, says, "The Iraq mission has cost far more than the administration predicted, and past assertions that we were turning the corner, or that the insurgency was in its last throes, have proved tragically erroneous. Accordingly, the American public is looking for concrete signs of progress in Iraq, hard evidence that we are moving toward an endpoint. The president points to a few cases of Iraqi units performing better than expected. He states that Coalition forces appear to be getting more intelligence on insurgent activity. But these admittedly hopeful developments have not yet contributed to a meaningful improvement in the overall security situation in Iraq."
Game Over: Restricting Video Game Sales
"Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT) announced yesterday they would introduce legislation to prohibit retailers from selling video games rated 'mature' or 'adults-only' to teenagers," reports the New York Daily News. "The proposed bill 'will empower parents by making sure their kids can't walk into a store and buy a video game that has graphic, violent and pornographic content,' Clinton said."
In "Regulating Video Games: Parents or Uncle Sam?," Adam Thierer, Cato's former director of telecommunications studies, argues that the video game industry is doing well at regulating itself: "In 1994, the video game industry established the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), a comprehensive labeling system that rates over 1,000 games per year and has rated more than 8,000 games since inception. The ESRB applies five different rating symbols and over 25 different content labels that refer to violence, sex, language, substance abuse, gambling, humor and other potentially sensitive subject matter. It must be a good system because the self-appointed media violence watchdog Senator Joseph Lieberman called the video game rating system 'a model' for other industries to follow."
Thierer concludes: "[T]he most powerful case against government regulation or censorship of video games is that it's none of government's business. In a free society, parents should decide what their children see, hear, or play; Uncle Sam should not serve as a surrogate parent. After all, 'one-size-fits-all' forms of content regulation are unlikely to recognize that different parents have different definitions of what constitutes acceptable fare for their children. The eye of the beholder makes a difference and in a free society it is the eyes (and ears) of parents that should decide what is in the best interests of their children."
Lawsuits over Farm Subsidies
"A failure by the United States and the European Union to make significant progress toward reducing agricultural subsidies in trade talks in Hong Kong could bring a legal challenges on both sides of the Atlantic, trade and agricultural experts say," the New York Times reports.
"In a report to be released Wednesday, Oxfam International highlights three American commodity crops vulnerable to lawsuits and eight agricultural products in the European Union that could be sources of cases. According to the report, the subsidies for the 11 crops and products noted by Oxfam total $9.3 billion for the United States out of the country's $19.5 billion in subsidy payments, and $4.2 billion for the European Union out of $44.8 billion, on an annual basis."
In "The High Price of Farm Policies," Daniel Griswold, Cato's director for trade policy studies, argues that reforming America's farm policies "would deliver lower food prices to tens of millions of American households, especially low-income families that spend a higher share of their income on food. Americans pay artificially high prices for sugar, milk, butter, cheese, peanuts, beef and orange juice. Last year, according to the [Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development], U.S. farm programs transferred $16.2 billion from U.S. food consumers to producers. That amounts to a regressive annual 'food tax' on the typical American household of $147.
"[R]educing farm subsidies would [also] save U.S. taxpayers tens of billions of dollars during the next decade. The first three fiscal years following the enactment of the 2002 farm bill have seen an estimated $55.5 billion spent on farm subsidies already. While Republican leaders in Congress say there is no fat left in the budget to trim, farm subsidies provide an obvious target for savings. And many of those subsidy payments currently go to large farms and agribusinesses, not to smaller 'family farms.'"
Greg Garner, editor, ggarner@cato.org