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Cato Daily Dispatch for December 12, 2001

Social Security Commission Recommends Private Accounts
House, Senate Agree on Education Bill
Bush to Withdraw U.S. from ABM Treaty

Social Security Commission Recommends Private Accounts

A presidential commission yesterday made three proposals that would allow workers to privately invest some of their Social Security taxes in an effort to define the debate over the future of the country's largest government program, according to The Washington Post.

At its final meeting, the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security concluded that Social Security cannot be rescued from the financial precipice it will reach by the middle of the next decade without cutting benefits for retirees and disabled Americans, using money from elsewhere in the federal budget, or both.

Michael Tanner, director of the Cato Institute's Project on Social Security Privatization, was at the commission meeting and made the following statement:

"I applaud today's bipartisan recommendation for reform of Social Security. Individual savings accounts will empower Americans to accumulate wealth, control their retirement future and pass on to loved ones a lifetime of savings. Such worker empowerment can close the `savings gap' between rich and poor in America. It can assure our retirees will no longer receive a disgracefully low rate of return on their contributions. It will end the scandal whereby American workers--especially minority workers--pay into a system for a lifetime and never receive benefits.

"Over the life of this presidential commission the naysayers have been outspoken in their attacks against all significant reform ideas. Yet they have been unclear about what they would do to save our nation's retirement program. In their few public statements, however, they reveal a preference for draconian new taxes for young workers and the slashing of benefits to America's elderly as their `solution' for Social Security. That is unacceptable and America eventually will reject the `Do Nothing' crowd."

House, Senate Agree on Education Bill

Capping months of stop-and-go talks, House and Senate negotiators yesterday agreed on a far-reaching education plan that would dramatically expand student testing and attempt to hold schools responsible for closing the achievement gaps separating many poor and minority students and their middle-class and white peers, according to The Washington Post.

Approval of the plan, which had been stalled in congressional negotiations since the summer, clears the way for final action on the measure within the next week. President Bush, who said the measure would "ensure that no child in America is left behind," is expected to sign it into law, probably before Christmas.

"Ronald Reagan dubbed the fledgling Department of Education 'President Carter's new bureaucratic boondoggle,'" writes Dan Lips in "Reagan's ABCs." "Two decades and billions of dollars later, Reagan's assessment holds true. Yet a Republican president will soon sign a bill passed by a Republican Congress that increases spending on that bureaucratic boondoggle by more than ten percent."

In "Give Parents the Reins," Darcy Olsen takes a look at government's plans for school accountability and writes that, "real accountability doesn't come from politicians. If it did, the past 30 years of declining student achievement would have forced them into the unemployment lines. Genuine accountability can happen only when parents control education spending. Parental choice, through such mechanisms as tax credits for education purposes from tuition to tutoring, makes educators accountable immediately, not in another 10 or 20 years. Until parents can demand that schools do it right and do it now, so-called accountability measures amount to little more than fresh paint on an old jalopy."

Bush to Withdraw U.S. from ABM Treaty

President Bush plans to give Russia notice soon of a decision to withdraw the United States from the 1972 treaty banning deployment of a nationwide antimissile system, according to The Washington Post.

The officials said the announcement, which could come as early as this week, would invoke a clause in the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty that requires six months' notice before abandoning the pact.

In "National Missile Defense: Examining the Options," Charles V. Peņa and Barbara Conry discuss a realistic view of the challenges of deploying missile defense. In "George W. Bush's Vision for Nuclear Security: Vestiges of the Cold War," Director of Defense Policy Studies Ivan Eland writes that Bush's "willingness to abandon the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia and explore the feasibility of robust missile defenses (including space-based systems) should make the Russians leery that they are not regarded by him as the primary threat."