October 20, 2000

Congress Feasts on Last-Minute Pork
Britain and Germany Reach out to North Korea
Oil for Poverty in Iraq

Congress Feasts on Last-Minute Pork

Budget bargainers have found hundreds of millions of dollars for a soul music museum in Memphis, a Cleveland carousel and hundreds of other campaign-season projects in an end-of-session blitz that observers say will set a new record for "pork-barrel" spending, the Associated Press reports. The spending continued what is expected to be a record amount lavished on lawmakers' home districts, surpassing last year's record of $17.7 billion.

In "The Return of the Living Dead: Federal Programs That Survived the Republican Revolution," Stephen Moore notes that the 106th Congress is well on its way to becoming the largest-spending Congress on domestic social programs since the late 1970s. "A major reason for all the new spending is the inability or unwillingness of Republicans to eliminate virtually any government program. Many of the more than 200 programs that the Republicans pledged to eliminate in 1995 in their 'Contract with America' fiscal blueprint now have fatter budgets than they had before the changing of the guard," he writes.

In "Making Better Use of the Budget Surplus," Cato President Edward H. Crane argues that "if by some miracle a federal budget surplus does materialize, under no circumstances should the president and Congress be allowed to use it to buy more goodies for favored constituencies. Rather, it should be used in only two ways: to cut taxes or to finance a transition to a privatized Social Security system, or both."

Britain and Germany Reach out to North Korea

Britain and Germany have announced plans to establish diplomatic relations with North Korea, according to the Washington Post. "The basics have been decided. It could go very quickly, but there's no definitive timetable," said German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. This year North Korea has opened diplomatic ties with Canada, Italy and Australia.

In "Korean Détente: A Threat to Washington's Anachronistic Military Presence?" Doug Bandow examines the rationale for the continued U.S. military presence on the Korean peninsula, and finds it wanting. "The U.S. troop deployment has been unnecessary for years," he writes. "South Korea has twice the population of North Korea and an economy at least 30 times as large. South Korea is fully capable of building whatever military force is needed to defend itself against the North if détente should fail."

Oil for Poverty in Iraq

The administrator of the United Nations "oil for food" program, Tun Myat, said yesterday that the lot of ordinary Iraqis had failed to improve because their living conditions remain mired in chronic deprivation, the New York Times reports today. Mr. Myat was appointed UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq earlier this year after his two predecessors resigned in protest over the suffering caused by the sanctions against Iraq. Mr. Myat pointed out that medicine and food alone were not sufficient to lift Iraqis out of poverty.

In "Imperial Overreach: Washington's Dubious Strategy to Overthrow Saddam Hussein," David Isenberg argues that sanctions are unlikely to provoke a rebellion against Saddam Hussein. "Revolution usually happens when economic conditions are improving, but not fast enough to keep up with expectations of prosperity that are rising more rapidly," he writes. Instead, he recommends that general economic sanctions be replaced with a limited export-control process that would restrict Iraq's ability to rearm.

"What should the United States do about Saddam Hussein?" was the title of a Cato policy forum held earlier this year. The debate featured former U.N. Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter, Cato Adjunct Scholar David Isenberg, and Daniel Byman of RAND. The event can be watched in streaming video on the Cato Web site.

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