Cato Daily Dispatch for November 2, 2001
House Votes To Bring Airline Security Under Federal OversightReturn Of The WPA?
Terrorists Had Social Security Cards
House Votes To Bring Airline Security Under Federal Oversight
The House of Representatives voted yesterday to try to make flying safer by transferring oversight of airport security from the airlines to the federal government, according to Reuters.
But the lawmakers narrowly rejected a competing overhaul of aviation security passed unanimously by the Senate, which would put the nation's 28,000 airport baggage screeners on the government payroll.
In "The Case Against Federalizing Airport Security," Richard W. Rahn explains that if the federal government took over this airport security function, it would have a monopoly on the activity. "We all know that monopolies are bad, because they resist innovation, result in higher costs and poorer service, and tend to engage in cover-ups for their own mistakes and deficiencies," he says.
Return Of The WPA?
The Giuliani administration is quietly offering thousands of New York City jobs paying more than $9 an hour to welfare recipients who are reaching their five-year limit on federal cash assistance just as the city's economy sinks into recession, according to The New York Times.
The workers' hourly wages -- well above minimum wage -- are to be paid out of New York State's $1.5 billion annual welfare windfall, money allocated by the federal government at the same level since 1995, but unspent because the welfare rolls have shrunk by almost half, state officials said. Many of the jobs are as seasonal laborers in the city's Parks Department, where city and union officials said they were prepared to absorb as many workers as the city's Human Resources Administration sends.
A Cato Institute study released on the fourth anniversary of the welfare reform law argued that the drop in welfare rolls has not resulted in helping welfare recipients achieve self-sufficiency. In the study, Lisa Oliphant notes that at least two- thirds of former welfare recipients remain dependent on some form of government assistance, everything from Medicaid and housing subsidies to food stamps and daycare. "Clearly, welfare reform is failing to make people independent," she says.
In "Ending Welfare As We Know It," Director of Health and Welfare Studies Michael Tanner, author of the book "The End of Welfare: Fighting Poverty in the Civil Society," argues that "it is time to recognize that welfare cannot be reformed. It should be ended." In the book "A Life of One's Own," David Kelley challenges the welfare state assumption that people have the right to food, shelter, health care, retirement income and other goods provided by the government.
Terrorists Had Social Security Cards
All 19 terrorist hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks had Social Security numbers, and 13 obtained them legally, according to The Washington Post.
The Social Security Administration's inspector general told House members yesterday that the government needs to tighten the process it uses to issue the numbers.
"We have learned that the risks inherent in failing to adequately protect the integrity of the Social Security number may have serious consequences," said James G. Huse Jr.
The hijackers' Social Security numbers "allowed them autonomy, to operate below the radar," he told the House Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security.
They could open bank accounts, get credit, obtain driver's licenses and apply to flight schools, he said.
The fact that the terrorists could obtain Social Security cards raises questions of how effective a proposed national ID card would be. In an article in National Review, Senior Fellow Robert A. Levy writes that "terrorists who are capable of destroying the World Trade Center are surely capable of obtaining forged IDs (even the high-tech variety), bribing officials who issue or check the cards, creating false identities that survive scrutiny, or using persons with legitimate cards to do their dirty work."
"The prospect of massive computer databases or registries, software data collection systems, digital fingerprinting, handprint scans, facial recognition technologies, voice authentication devices, electronic retinal scans, and other 'biometric' surveillance technologies have suddenly become realistic options for government identification purposes," writes Adam Thierer in "National ID Cards: New technologies, Same Bad Idea." "If Americans are concerned about the recent proliferation of traffic surveillance cameras on roadways and sidewalks, then they ain't seen nothin' yet."