Nov 21, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
From the UK Telegraph:The European Union is failing to keep track of huge annual subsidies, and 91 per cent of its budget is riddled with errors or cannot be verified, a financial watchdog said yesterday. The European Court of Auditors refused to certify EU accounts for the ninth successive year, saying Brussels has failed to match reform rhetoric with a genuine change of culture. Abuse is said to be endemic in the Common Agricultural Policy, which still consumes almost half the £65 billion budget....
...The court said it was almost impossible to track funds once they had been handed over to member states, which administer 80 per cent of the budget. Money also disappears into Russia, Central Asia, the Balkans and developing countries. Budget controls in Brussels itself are criticised. The report says the European Commission has still not switched to the sort of modern accounting system used by the British Government and World Bank, making it impossible to know if transactions have been "fully and correctly recorded". [EU auditors blast budget failings, November 18, 2003, UK Telegraph]
Nov 20, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
The investigation by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (published by the New York Sun) into the Ford Foundation's funding of anti-Israel radicals seems to be paying off:When the Ford-funded anti-Israel Web site, www.palestinereport.org, deleted its "armed revolution" pages and its direct links to the Web sites of terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad--steps taken after JTA published its investigation--Ford officials declined to acknowledge the change or their role in it.
A staffer at www.palestinereport.org said, "Ford's Cairo office called and insisted we remove the links at once because of the funding articles--and the problems with the Congress was the reason. We redesigned the entire site without those links."
Congress and Jewish groups are insisting on more than cosmetic changes: They want the funding to stop.
The groups funded by Ford have refused to sign a Certification Regarding Terrorist Financing, a pledge required by Usaid, which affirms that no funds have made or will make their way into organizations to "advocate or support terrorist activities."
"A note of reality crept in when Ford saw that the JTA information was credible and the facts against them were solid," said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents. "We are seeing the first signs of change, but they are still funding these same organizations. That is a matter of concern and hopefully we will see a change."
The following day the foundation announced it would work to make sure it did not fund anti-Semitic and anti-Israel activities (though a Sun editorial noted that, given its past history, "Any suggestion that the Ford Foundation was surprised by the kind of charges the JTA raised is poppycock.")
Nov 20, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
FoxNews reported yesterday: Lawmakers Work to Wrap Up Medicare Bill.
Enjoying the blessing of the politically influential AARP, President Bush on Monday began the push for one of his top legislative priorities -- providing a prescription drug benefit to America's seniors.Bush met with lawmakers on the 10-year, $400 billion package of benefits -- the largest expansion of social services in America since the Great Society -- and practically dared negotiators to stop a bill that provides subsidized drug coverage to 40 million elderly Americans.
Comments Allen Forkum: "The Democrats are complaining about the bill, but only because they want it to be even more socialistic. This is what Bush gets for trying to out socialist the Democrats."
Capitalism Magazine has a two recent editorials on the subject that are well worth reading:
The New Medicare Program: A Prescription for Disaster by Richard E. Ralston
Rather than reduce the cost of drugs, like all government medical plans the new program will just add more of the poison that created the disease. Rigid controls and the vast bureaucracies of Medicare and the FDA already add billions of dollars to the cost of drugs. This, not the market place, is responsible for the current high cost of drugs. New government programs and "benefits" will further explode drug costs and result in rationing, restrictions, regulations, less research, and fewer drugs. Adding yet more federal bureaucracy to administer another program will just layer on more expense.Fewer new drugs will become available as a consequence of these plans. When the government is "surprised" after the escalation in drug costs that result from a plan that promises to pay all of the bills, it will inevitably proceed to price controls and other new restrictions on drug companies
How do these Republican advocates of less government and free markets justify this huge new program? The woefully inadequate fig leaf they provide is the introduction of competition to Medicare from private insurance companies. However such competition will be available temporarily in only six cities during a six year test period beginning seven years from now (2010). What a triumph for Capitalism! Yet Senator Edward Kennedy says it will destroy Medicare. Yea. Sure.
Free-Lunch Medicine by Thomas Sowell
None of the various schemes for lowering the prices of medicines seems willing to face up to the simple fact that each new medicine developed costs hundreds of millions of dollars. This huge inescapable fact seems to just evaporate from the discussion as politicians vie with one another for the best way to make these medicines "affordable" at "reasonable" prices.Politicians who claim to be able to "bring down the cost of health care" are talking about bringing down the prices charged. But prices are not costs. Prices are what pay for costs.[...]
Government price controls on medicines and medical care simply mean that these costs do not all get covered. This works in the short run -- and the short run is what politicians are interested in, because elections are held in the short run. But the rest of us had better think ahead, if we value our health.
Nov 19, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
From the UK Telegraph:Chancellor Gerhard Schröder implored sceptics in his Social Democratic Party yesterday to rally behind his efforts to modernise the ailing economy . Many in his centre-Left party are angry at reforms they see as undermining its 140-year history of protecting the weak. But Mr Schröder insisted...that Germany risked a "fatal error" if it kept on raising contributions to pay for a welfare state hit by a lack of economic growth and an ageing population. "Our reforms are necessary and right," said the German leader. "We're trying to ensure that people can get work and lead lives worth living rather than relying on handouts...." [11/18/2003]
Nov 19, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
From a review of Lutz Kleveman's book The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia:American policy in Central Asia and the Caucasus is helping to consign tens of millions of people to life under dictatorships that range from kleptocracies worthy of central Africa to the frankly Stalinist. This shortsighted, corrupt, and morally compromised policy aims to ease our reliance on despotic and unstable OPEC nations by turning to the equally despotic, even less stable nations of the former Soviet Union. It can only end in catastrophe. [NYSun]
Nov 18, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
Here's former New York Comptroller H. Carl McCall, who lost the governor's race last year, in the November 17 New York Sun:"We have found a way to bring about change in New York. And it's called utter failure.... That's the only way we make progress in this state, is when things fail."
In other words, our political system is so unresponsive to people's needs that crisis-mongering is the only way to bring about political change.
