Cato Daily Dispatch for November 4, 2005
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Snow Sets Spending Restraint as Highest PriorityHouse Votes to Protect Property Rights
Registered Traveler Program Takes Off in June
Snow Sets Spending Restraint as Highest Priority
The Financial Times reports: "The Bush administration's highest economic priority for its remaining three years is to control the growth of federal spending and bring down the US budget deficit, John Snow, U.S. Treasury secretary, said."
"'The clear priority of the administration right now is the deficit, making sure that we achieve the president's objective of cutting the deficit in half by the time he leaves office,' he said in an interview with the Financial Times. This would put the deficit below 2 per cent of gross domestic product, low by historical standards."
In "The Grand Old Spending Party: How Republicans Became Big Spenders," Stephen Slivinski, director of budget studies at the Cato Institute, writes: "President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years. His 2006 budget doesn't cut enough spending to change his place in history, either."
House Votes to Protect Property Rights
"Conservative defenders of private property and liberal protectors of the poor joined in an overwhelming House vote to prevent local and state governments from seizing homes and businesses for use in economic development projects," the Associated Press reports.
"The House legislation, passed 376-38, was in response to a widely criticized 5-4 ruling by the Supreme Court last June that allowed eminent domain authority to be used to obtain land for tax revenue-generating commercial purposes."
In "An Excess of Power," Cato policy analyst Radley Balko writes: "If the Supreme Court killed off the Ninth Amendment with Raich, Kelo in many ways represents the culmination of its complete disregard for even our explicitly enumerated rights. ... A government that doesn't respect the title to your land is in all likelihood a government that will in time lose respect for your property in your right to speech, arms, and due process. And indeed in recent years, with help from the Supreme Court, government at all levels has run roughshod over even our explicitly enumerated rights.
In a brief of the Cato Institute as Amicus Curiae in support of petitioners in Kelo v. City of New London, Cato scholars, Mark Moller, Tim Lynch, Robert Levy and Richard Epstein, argue: "The romantic assumption that legislatures act only for the common good leads to travesties like this New London project. This Court should follow the lead of the Michigan Court in Hathcock and overrule Midkiff insofar as it holds that any assertion of a generalized public benefit should be routinely blessed under the rational basis standard of review."
Registered Traveler Program Takes Off in June
"A program that speeds pre-screened travelers through security will begin June 20, launching what airports hope will be a new era of checkpoint screening," USA Today reports. "Transportation Security Administration chief Kip Hawley announced the start date Thursday at a congressional hearing. The Registered Traveler program will allow people who have passed a background check to go through checkpoints quicker. Participants must pay a fee, go through a records check for criminal warrants, and provide a fingerprint and eye scan. They'll be checked against databases of known terrorists."
In his testimony before the House Subcommittee on Economic Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Cybersecurity, Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, had this to say: "There are problems with Registered Traveler. It is unseemly to have government agents associated with segregating 'preferred' travelers from others. The Registered Traveler program essentially denies fairness, due process, and privacy protections to volunteers. And the 'voluntariness' of the program could disappear at any time. Because it is a government program, no promise about it being optional can be assured.
"The problems with Registered Travel are premised on the error in having government provide security services to the air transportation industry. There are emotional and political justifications for it, but there is no principled, security-based, or economic rationale for providing a massive security subsidy to airlines."
Kristen A. Kestner, editor, kkestner@cato.org