The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News
1. CONGRESS
New Democratic congressmen warn Speaker Pelosi to stick to a politically moderate legislative agenda.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: President Fred L. Smith, Jr. on ideas Democrats in Congress and free market advocates can agree on:
“Speaker Pelosi has suggested revising some of the more burdensome aspects of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; we hope to work with her and others on this issue. We hope to share with the new Congress our ideas on how to jump-start the stalled economic liberalization process—hampered by botched, partial deregulations in electricity, telecommunications, airlines, and other network industries. We also hope to work with the new Congress on Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reform, to speed the process of brining new life-saving drugs to market.”
2. AUTOMOTIVE
Detroit’s North American International Auto Show showcases dozens of new models and concept vehicles.
CEI Experts Available to Comment: Journalism Fellow Jeremy Lott on what’s holding back the development of exciting new technologies like flying cars:
“Regulation will become increasingly important over time. Initial flying car prices are set high enough that only well-off, highly motivated customers will buy them, but that will change. As with any technology, early adopters pay a novelty premium and help knock the bugs out, thus allowing later, cheaper mass production.”
3. HEALTH
The prospect of wider use of cloned livestock sparks debate among farmers and scientists.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Director of Food Safety Policy Gregory Conko on why milk and meat from cloned animals is safe for consumers:
“After reviewing hundreds of scientific and medical studies, experts at the notoriously risk-averse FDA have given the [cloning] process a clean bill of health, as have the agency’s panel of independent scientific advisers and a National Academy of Sciences committee. That comprehensive risk assessment includes research by the U.S. Department of Agriculture examining more than 140,000 individual measures of nutritional and other compositional characteristics and finding no statistically significant differences between offspring of clones and conventionally bred animals.”