November 16, 1999

by Peter J.M. Orvetti

UN Negotiations
Covering Children
Sprawled Out On The Gore

UN Negotiations

The Clinton administration and congressional Republican leaders are working out a plan under which Clinton would accept limits on U.S.-subsidized abortion activities internationally in exchange for nearly $1 billion for dues said to be owed to the United Nations, AP reports. The plan would prevent federally supported groups from lobbying for liberalized abortion laws overseas.

But should we be paying the United Nations anything? In the Cato Policy Analysis "The United Nations Debt: Who Owes Whom?", Cliff Kincaid writes, "Claims that the United States owes the United Nations more than $1 billion are false. No legal debt exists or can exist. The UN Charter does not empower the organization to compel payment from any member state. Even the notion that the United States owes money in the sense of a moral obligation is fallacious. It ignores the military and other assistance that the Clinton administration has provided the UN and for which the United States has not been properly credited or reimbursed. Over the past five years, that assistance has amounted to at least $11 billion, and perhaps as much as $15 billion. The administration has been diverting funds from federal agencies, especially the Department of Defense, to the United Nations.

"Allegations of debt have distracted attention from a disturbing administration policy of providing resources, personnel, and equipment to the UN without the advance approval of Congress. In effect, the administration and the UN have been conducting important elements of U.S. foreign and military policy and bypassing Congress's power of the purse. That tendency raises grave constitutional concerns." The Cato Institute-published book Delusions of Grandeur: The United Nations and Global Intervention, edited by Ted Galen Carpenter, examines the UN and its role.

Covering Children

Many private health plans permit noncustodial parents to put their children on their coverage, but only one-third of the nearly four million noncustodial parents actually do so, AP reports. The federal government now wants to simplify the procedure, with the Department of Health and Human Services proposing regulations that would give states one simple form to send to employers to enroll a child in the parent's health insurance plan, AP reports.

"Nationwide there are roughly 10 million uninsured children. Of those, the 3 million poorest are Medicaid eligible, and 1.5 million come from families earning $40,000 or more, who should hardly expect taxpayer subsidies. Half of the remaining 5.5 million are uninsured for no longer than six months. About 2.8 million children, or 4 percent, are chronically uninsured -- that is, they lack health insurance for two years or more," writes Darcy Ann Olsen in the commentary "The Federal Government Should Not Make House Calls". "This is not to suggest that 2.8 million children are insignificant. Every child matters. But it is hardly a crisis when 96 percent of the nation's children do not lack health insurance most of the time. Moreover, lack of health insurance does not necessarily preclude children from obtaining medical care."

Michael Tanner and Naomi Lopez wrote in the commentary "Beware Kidcare": "The answer for uninsured children -- indeed for uninsured Americans of all ages -- lies not in a massive and expensive new federal intrusion into the health care system but in changing the tax treatment of health insurance. Currently, employer-provided health care is purchased with tax-free dollars, while workers who purchase health insurance on their own must do so with after-tax dollars. That difference in tax treatment creates a disparity that effectively doubles the cost of health insurance for people who must purchase their own. For example, a small business might purchase each employee a $4,000 health insurance policy using tax-free dollars. A person working for a small business that offers no health insurance would have to earn over $8,000 before taxes to pay for the same $4,000 policy. As a result, Americans have been increasingly driven to pay for their health care through third-party insurers and to purchase insurance through their employers. That, in turn, has led to rising health care costs and made it harder for Americans without employer-provided insurance to obtain coverage."

Sprawled Out On The Gore

Vice President Al Gore has proposed spending $2 billion over the next decade to set aside more federal park land to combat what he calls suburban sprawl, AP reported. Gore's plan would pay for the new land by charging mining companies fees for extracting minerals from federal lands. "We will turn minerals that we already own into new park lands and protection of open spaces and smart growth initiatives to make our communities more livable, to make our world a better place and to make our country a better place for all of the families that live here," Gore said.

In the Cato Policy Analysis "Should Congress Transfer Federal Lands to the States?", Randal O'Toole writes, "The fundamental problem is, not federal incompetence, but the political allocation of natural resources to favored constituencies, which subsidizes some at the expense of others and inflicts harm on both the ecological system and the economy as a whole… People who are concerned about the inability of the federal government to intelligently manage public lands can best address the problem by getting politics out of land management to the greatest extent possible. While that would mean privatization to many, it can also be achieved in the near term by creating public land trusts." An early Cato Policy Analysis, "Inside Our Outdoor Policy", offers a six-step program to reform land management. And in the current Cato Policy Analysis, William A. Fischel examines a different kind of sprawl: that of the federal government.