Cato Daily Dispatch for October 17, 2005
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Considering DemocracyHouse Republicans Push for Budget Cuts
Rumsfeld Visits China
Considering Democracy
"Iraq's war-battered voters apparently approved a new constitution in voting Saturday, preliminary and unofficial results showed yesterday, but disaffected Sunni Arabs proved unexpectedly formidable in their first venture into post-Saddam Hussein politics with a strong vote against the U.S.-backed charter," The Seattle Times reports.
"Province-by-province tallies yesterday showed the constitution winning approval in Saturday's voting with the unified backing of Iraq's Shiite Muslim and Kurdish communities, who together are about 80 percent of the country's population. Sunni Arabs, who account for about 20 percent of Iraq's people, apparently did not muster enough votes to defeat the measure, which required rejection by two-thirds of voters in at least three of Iraq's 18 provinces."
In "Building a Free Society in Iraq," published in Cato's Letter, Cato senior fellow Tom Palmer writes, "Whatever one thinks of the war, we all want Iraqis to achieve a government that can live at peace with the world and that secures the rights of Iraqis to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. ... A democracy of the sort worth striving for is not merely the unbridled rule of the majority, nor a path toward `one man, one vote, one time,' but a system of limited government dedicated to the definition and protection of rights. It has a democratic component in the form of elections, but the scope of such collective choice is limited, and the state itself is subject to the law."
House Republicans Push for Budget Cuts
"House Republican leaders have moved from balking at big cuts in Medicaid and other programs to embracing them, driven by pent-up anger from fiscal conservatives concerned about runaway spending and the leadership's own weakening hold on power," according to The Washington Post.
The article continues: "Beginning this week, the House GOP lawmakers will take steps to cut as much as $50 billion from the fiscal 2006 budget for health care for the poor, food stamps and farm supports, as well as considering across-the-board cuts in other programs. Only last month, then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.) and other GOP leaders quashed demands within their party for budget cuts to pay for the soaring cost of hurricane relief."
In "Bush Beats Johnson: Comparing the Presidents" published in the Cato's Tax and Budget Bulletin, Cato's director of budget studies Stephen Slivinski uses revised data released during the summer by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to make side-by-side comparisons of the spending habits of each president during the last 40 years. While the data show that all presidents presided over net increases in spending, President Bush is shown to be one of the biggest spenders of them all, even outpacing Lyndon B. Johnson in terms of discretionary spending.
Rumsfeld Visits China
"Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. defense secretary, this week travels to Beijing to discuss U.S.-Sino military relations during a trip that will include a meeting with Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, and an unprecedented visit to China's strategic nuclear forces command," reports The Financial Times.
"In his first official visit to China, Mr. Rumsfeld will attempt to improve military relations between the two powers, which have been strained since the collision of a Chinese fighter jet and an American EP-3 spy plane off the Chinese coast in 2001."
In the 2003 Cato Policy Analysis "Is Chinese Military Modernization a Threat to the United States?," Ivan Eland, former director of defense policy studies at Cato, writes: "Although not officially calling its policy in East Asia `containment,' the United States has ringed China with formal and informal alliances and a forward military presence. With such an extended defense perimeter, the United States considers as a threat to its interests any natural attempt by China -- a rising power with a growing economy -- to gain more control of its external environment by increasing defense spending. If U.S. policymakers would take a more restrained view of America's vital interests in the region, the measured Chinese military buildup would not appear so threatening. Conversely, U.S. policy may appear threatening to China. Even the Pentagon admits that China accelerated hikes in defense spending after the United States attacked Yugoslavia over the Kosovo issue in 1999.
"The United States still spends about 10 times what China does on national defense -- $400 billion versus roughly $40 billion per year -- and is modernizing its forces much faster. In addition, much of the increase in China's official defense spending is soaked up by expenses not related to acquiring new weapons. Thus, China's spending on new armaments is equivalent to that of a nation that spends only $10 billion to $20 billion per year on defense. In contrast, the United States spends well over $100 billion per year to acquire new weapons."
Holiday Dmitri, editor, hdmitri@cato.org
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