Michael Tanner, senior fellow of the Cato Institute, says people in Massachusetts who had health insurance and were happy with it are having to change their coverage because their current plan does not comply with the state’s mandates. It is just one example of the lessons he believes the federal government should take from the results of Massachusetts’ 2006 health care reforms. (0:23)
Daniel J. Ikenson, a trade policy scholar at the Cato Institute, discusses President Obama’s pro-trade agenda and the positive impact it could potentially have on foreign affairs. (1:00)
By Learned Foote- Talk Radio News Service
Advocates of free trade argued for reestablishing a bipartisan consensus in favor of open markets during a briefing on Capitol Hill. The panel included Congressman Henry Cuellar (D-TX), founder of the Congressional Pro-Trade Caucus, and Daniel J. Ikenson, Associate Director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.
“The bipartisan pro-trade consensus which existed after World War II collapsed during the Bush administration,” said Ikenson. He said that Democratic support of free trade began to decline in the 1990s. Ikenson cited the political allegiance between the Democrats and advocates for labor and the environment as one influential factor in this trend, but also said that Republican efforts to push through the pro-trade agenda without involving the Democrats sharpened the partisan divide during the Bush years.
Rep. Cuellar argued that both parties should work together to form a consensus. “You have to do it in a bipartisan way, and you got to include the minority from the beginning,” he said. “For the Democratic Party, it would be a mistake to turn our backs to trade.”
Ikenson noted that Americans now view trade agreements with increasing disapproval. “America’s souring on trade over the past few years is the product of a top-down process,” he said. He argued that public opinion is influenced by false myths about free trade, which discount free trade’s potential to engender wealth creation and peaceful foreign policy.
Both Cuellar and Ikenson said that they believed President Obama would sway public opinion by advancing a pro-trade agenda. Cuellar sad that he was worried by some of Obama’s campaign rhetoric, which included harsh criticisms of the North American Free Trade Agreement, but has been impressed by Obama’s cabinet appointments, including Ron Kirk as United States Trade Representative. “I feel very, very good about President Obama,” said Cuellar.
With health-care reform and global warming bills coming up in Congress, Cuellar said that trade agreements may be put on hold for the summer, in order to avoid splitting the Democratic caucus. He said that he hopes trade agreements will be established with Panama and Colombia before the year is over.
Christopher Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, insists that a public education campaign is necessary to make Americans aware of true terrorist capabilities. This might help quell public demand for overreaction and reduce the fear exerted by terrorists over people. (0:54)
Coffee Brown, University of New Mexico, Talk Radio News
Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said, “The president is proposing to increase our national debt more than all prior 43 presidents combined,” adding $2.3 trillion more “to the national debt in higher deficits” than his own budget office stated.
Ryan said the budget increases taxes and spending. “But what’s so galling about this – we read today the Chinese are talking about a new currency, the Russians are talking about a new currency. We are debasing the value of the American dollar by borrowing way beyond our means,” he said.
“We are consigning our next generation to an inferior standard of living,” Ryan said.
He estimates the national debt will double in six years and triple in ten.
Dan Mitchell, senior fellow at the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, said, “That’s just the tip of the iceberg, because … we have trillions and trillions of unfunded liability for entitlement programs, … tens of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities in the future. We are in effect on a path to become the next Argentina.”
That other countries would consider a reserve currency other than the dollar is, he says, “a referendum that we are on the wrong track.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Chairman of the Fiscal Responsibility Task Force of the Republican Study Committee, said that one of the elements of greatness is the willingness of one generation to sacrifice for the next. The next generation, he said, will never be able to repay this debt.
He quoted Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) as saying this budget would bankrupt the country.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said “One of my constituents said it best, ‘I am tired of Congress spending money I haven’t made yet for things I don’t want.’ When you look at the push for nationalizing healthcare, when you look at the cap-and-tax scheme (Cap-and-Trade), this is what people are afraid is going to pile on more and more debt.”
“I look at this as being economic abuse of (her grandchildren’s) future,” she said.
Rep. Gregg Harper (R-Miss.) said, ”When you find out you’ve dug yourself a hole, you should quit digging, but we’ve brought in heavy machinery, and we’re making the hole so deep that we’re not going to be able to get out of it.”
“We tell our children we can’t afford to get everything,” he said, and now the children, the public, are telling the parents, the legislators, “We don’t really have to have that.”
Brink Lindsey, Cato Institute, says international cooperation on the global economy is a dream, but that separate approaches will test all approaches.
vice president of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute Ted Galen Carpenter says that the U.S. has to accept that Afghanistan will not be a western style democracy. (0:54)
While Iraq has dominated the majority of media and military attention since 2002, the public focus is beginning to shift.
The border between Afghanistan and western Pakistan, a region known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas that remains ungoverned by either Afghanistan or Pakistan, has been marred with violence and an increase in al-Qaeda and Taliban presence.
“In many of these settled areas relentless Taliban incursion have already lead to the complete collapse of tribal and civilian administration,” said foreign policy analyst Malou Innocent at the Cato Institute.
“According to senior U.S. intelligence officials al-Qaida, Taliban, and allied terrorist groups have 157 training camps in the tribal areas alone and more than 400 logistical support locations in the tribal areas and the northwest frontier provence.”
The situation in Afghanistan has been strained as well. Current troop levels have been insufficient for restoring security, due in part both by the amount deployed to Iraq and limitations put on NATO troops.
“We have a fair number of NATO forces, some 30,000, but many of them are stationed up North in the country where there is virtually no threat and virtually no fighting…a number of caveats, restrictions, on the use of their forces. Some can not be used at night, some can not be used in combat zones,” said vice president of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute Ted Galen Carpenter.
The drug war has also threatened the chances for stability. While some funding from the international heroin reaches al-Qaida, warlords loyal to Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai and a substantial portion of the general population profit as well. According to Carpenter, these are allies that the U.S. needs to keep.
Still, Carpenter said, even if these problems are addressed it is unlikely that the shape Afghanistan takes will be particularly pleasing to the U.S.
“We have to accept the realities of Afghanistan, of regional power-brokers and less than a western style democracy…the reality is that the Afghan system, such as it was, worked pretty well for a good many decades…”
Carpenter added, “We may even need to see if we can cut a deal with the Afghan Taliban, to divide that fraction from its al-Qaida allies. Much as General Petraeus, rather shrewdly, cut a deal with indigenous Iraqi sunni insurgents to separate them from al-Qaida in Iraq.”
Ilya Shapiro, senior fellow of the Center for Constitutional Studies and editor in chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review at the Cato Institute, says a brief by the Cato Institute argues that the millionaires amendment of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law forces an unconstitutional choice between self-funding and restricting speech, and that the disclosure provision will “chill” a person’s speech. (1:00)
Ilya Shapiro, senior fellow of the Center for Constitutional Studies and editor in chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review at the Cato Institute, says that the purpose of McCain-Feingold law was to get money and corrosive influences by special interests out of politics. He says that “therefore, a candidate that can fund their own campaign is cleaner, is purer, for our political system than even an incumbent.” (0:52)
