CEI Daily Update
Issues in the News
1. ECONOMICS
President Bush prepares to sign an economic stimulus bill.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Special Projects Counsel Hans Bader on the fiscal irresponsibility of the stimulus package:
“Essentially, the government is going to increase the deficit today (by borrowing money) to give rebates to taxpayers. Years in the future, the government will have to raise taxes by an amount even bigger than the rebates, to pay off the government debt caused by this rebate, plus the interest on that debt.”
2. ENERGY
The Washington, D.C. metro area faces future power shortages due to environmentalist opposition to new power plants.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Adjunct Analyst Steven Milloy on the consequences of this opposition:
“…if we rush to blindly adopt greenhouse gas emission controls, we could disrupt energy markets and cause much economic harm. And in real life, a poorer world tends to be a dirtier world. Moreover, since carbon dioxide is a colorless and odorless gas that naturally makes up a very small part of our atmosphere and since manmade carbon dioxide is an exceedingly small part of total global carbon dioxide emissions, it’s hard to see how reducing emissions will make the world ‘cleaner.’”
3. LEGAL
A majority of Congress petitions the Supreme Court to overturn the ban on handgun ownership in Washington, D.C.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Special Projects Counsel Hans Bader on the questionable research used to support the ban:
“To justify the ban, the D.C. government is relying on ‘studies,’ like a Colin Loftin article in the New England Journal of Medicine, that engaged in deliberate cherry-picking of data and other statistical manipulations in order to reach a preordained conclusion that the ban kept homicide rates lower than they otherwise would have been (Loftin defined even killings in self-defense as ‘homicide’). Even those studies, however, showed at best a modest effect.”
Blog feature: For more news and analysis, updated throughout the day, visit CEI’s blog, Open Market.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
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