… that D.C. police have to carry around increasingly more-powerful firearms while walking the beat.
June 30 can’t come soon enough.
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… that D.C. police have to carry around increasingly more-powerful firearms while walking the beat.
June 30 can’t come soon enough.
The latest Rasmussen national survey “found that 62% of voters would prefer fewer government services with lower taxes. Nearly a third (29%) disagrees and would rather have a bigger government with higher taxes. Ten percent (10%) are not sure.”
No doubt that if Downsizing the Federal Government were on college reading lists, support for reform would jump from 62% to at least 90%.
Still, no matter how well-informed the public becomes, Congress poses a barrier to reform. The magic of Congress is its ability to consistently transmogrify the long-standing public preference for smaller government into ever larger budgets. Part of the trick is that members always claim that they support budget restraint in general, while arguing at the same time that each particular program, when it is up for a vote, desperately needs to be expanded.
How then can we realign congressional procedures to better reflect the 62 percent support for government downsizing? Part of the answer is to impose a cap on growth in the overall federal budget, allowing it to grow no more than the average family budget each year.
“The war on drugs has never seemed less like a metaphor” claims The Economist this week, referring to Mexico’s drug violence. The British newspaper is right. Just yesterday, there were 34 drug-related executions in that country. So far this year, there have been 1.356 similar killings in Mexico.
Cato’s Ted Galen Carpenter wrote a few years ago that Mexico risked becoming the next Colombia. It’s seems we’re already there.
During their time in the Senate, John McCain has voted in a free-trade direction on 88 percent of major votes affecting barriers to trade, Barack Obama only 36 percent of the time. But on trade with the pathetic, socialist island of Cuba, the two presumptive presidential nominees swap places.
In a speech yesterday, McCain accused Obama of changing his position on the U.S. government’s almost 50-year-old embargo against Cuba. “Now Senator Obama has shifted positions and says he only favors easing the embargo, not lifting,” Mr. McCain said, according to a story in this morning’s New York Times. “He also wants to sit down unconditionally for a presidential meeting with Raúl Castro. These steps would send the worst possible signal to Cuba’s dictators—there is no need to undertake fundamental reforms, they can simply wait for a unilateral change in U.S. policy.”
Cuba is one of the few trade-related issues where Democrats generally come down on the right side and Republicans on the wrong side, and the two presidential front-runners are true to type.
According to the Cato Institute’s “Free Trade, Free Markets” web feature that tracks congressional votes on trade, Sen. McCain voted in 2003 against ending the ban on Americans traveling to Cuba. In 2005, Sen. Obama voted to defund enforcement of the ban. In their public statements, McCain has supported the comprehensive embargo in place since 1960, while Obama has questioned its usefulness.
The politics behind the embargo are quite straightforward. Florida is a swing state that is home to half a million politically active Cubans who rightly detest the communist regime in Havana. Many of them wrongly see the embargo as a test of America’s resolve to bring an end to the regime. But the embargo’s lack of substance is also equally straightforward. After almost half a century, the embargo has failed to prompt the Cuban government to undertake anything remotely resembling “fundamental reforms.” It has made the Cuban people a bit poorer, while not making them one bit freer.
For a comprehensive argument against the embargo, check out the text of a speech I gave in 2005 at the James A. Baker III Institute at Rice University in Houston. The only thing I would consider changing is the title, which was, “Four Decades of Failure: The U.S. Embargo against Cuba.” My new title would be, “Almost Five Decades of Failure.”
Goldwater Institute VP Matt Ladner offered his thoughts today on an exchange between the Ed Sector’s Kevin Carey and myself. In the process of defending Cato, Matt suggested that: “The Cato Institute can be accused of being fundamentally opposed to public schooling. I’d guess that they would happily plead guilty to that.…”
As I explained in my reply to Kevin, Cato doesn’t take positions, only its scholars do. So, am I “fundamentally opposed to public schooling” as Matt imagines? No.
I’m not fundamentally opposed to, or in favor of, any policy. I do my best to rationally derive policy recommendations by examining the best and broadest possible array of relevant evidence. That means studying school systems from ancient times to the present, from all over the world, and determining if some systems consistently work well or poorly regardless of variations in cultural and economic circumstances. I recommend a free market approach to education, coupled with need based financial assistance to ensure universal access, because that is the pattern that emerges from the evidence.
Policy scholars who find these conclusions inconsistent with their beliefs might wish to familiarize themselves with the historical and international evidence so that they can form conclusions of their own and offer informed commentary on mine. I’m sure we would all benefit from that process, as would American children.
Last month, I debated the direction America should take in reforming its health care sector with Prof. Hugh Waters of Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. We squared off in front of students and faculty at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, under the auspices of the college’s Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement. Those interested can find more information here or listen to the debate here.
Earlier this month, I spoke at a Federalist Society event on a panel titled, “Health Care: How Our Tax Laws Affect How Health Care is Paid for and Delivered,” with Bob Helms of the American Enterprise Institute and Prof. Amy Monahan of the University of Missouri-Columbia. (Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania was scheduled to speak, but had to cancel.) For the most part, I plugged my Large HSAs proposal. Those interested can watch or listen to the forum online.