Social Security Takes the Forefront
Making the Grade
Bye-Bye Spending Caps
Mars Attacks
A Crime By Any Other Name
Social Security Takes the Forefront
A heated exchange between front-runner George W. Bush and Steve Forbes took place over Social Security during last night’s New Hampshire Republican presidential debate. In August, the Cato Institute and the Public Interest Institute cosponsored an informational forum on Social Security reform in Ames, Iowa, site of the Republican Straw Poll. Among the speakers were presidential candidates Steve Forbes and Alan Keyes. Excerpts from both Forbes’ and Keyes’s speech, as well as their entire remarks, are available in RealAudio on the Cato website. Cato also sponsored a poll by Zogby International which found wide support in the general population for allowing people to invest in privately owned retirement accounts.
Making the Grade
The tough academic standards that policy makers have recently invoked, imposing high-stakes tests on students, are beginning to yield uncomfortable results: few of the students are making the grade. Many students are at risk of dropping out or being held back, their parents are venting frustration, and school systems are beginning to reverse themselves, according to the New York Times.
Schools continue to fail despite the growing sums of money being thrown at them, writes Benjamin Zycher in “When Schools Already Get so Much Money, Do They Need More?” In “Public Schools: Make Them Private,” Milton Friedman writes that schools need to be restructured by “enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools.”
Bye-Bye Spending Caps
A final accounting of congressional spending this year confirms that Congress blew off the FY2000 spending ceiling by $37 billion, and, in the process, heavily relied on the Social Security surplus to help cover the additional spending, according to a Congressional Budget Office report.
Congressional budget resolutions are all too often like New Year's resolutions and are soon forgotten, write Stephen Moore and James Carter in the commentary “The Grand Old Spending Party.” In the Cato Handbook for Congress section “The Federal Budget,” (pdf) Moore and former congressman Tim Penny propose that the budget be balanced without relying on Social Security Surplus money. They also propose eliminating many federal programs to keep the budget in check.
Mars Attacks
Today, the Mars Polar Lander will reach the Red Planet in search for signs of water. It will also deliver new up-close images of the Martian surface and, for the first time, relay back to Earth the actual sounds of Mars via a small microphone.
Although the landing may be a technical success, one must wonder how much more a privatized space program would have been able to achieve. In “Time to Privatize NASA,” Ed Hudgins writes: “Why are no regularly scheduled commercial spaceflights available for Mr. Glenn to book? Because no government agency that runs with the efficiency of the Pentagon and the U.S. Postal Service will ever realize the dream of commercially viable orbiting stations or moon bases.” In “A Tale of Two Spaceships,” he examines the different track records of the airline industry vs. the government-regulated space industry.
A Crime By Any Other Name
A federal grand jury issued a new indictment yesterday against white supremacist Buford Furrow, charging him with hate crimes in the shootings of five people at a Jewish community center in Los Angeles and the killing of an Asian postman in August, according to the AP.
“Eliminating hate crimes and eliminating bigotry are among this nation's most important and most enduring challenges,'' said U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno.
Although the crime is heinous, David Kopel asks in the Cato Handbook for Congress section “The Expanding Federal Police Power,” (pdf) “What is the point of enacting a federal statute to deal with criminals who are already being punished as severely as possible at the state level?” He also proposes that Congress reject all new proposals to make existing state crimes federal crimes and repeal all federal laws that address conduct that took place solely in one state.
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