CEI Daily Update
Issues in the News
1. BUSINESS
Homeowners and small businesses look to yesterday’s interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve to ease a wide-spread “credit crunch”.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Eli Lehrer on how expanding credit unions can help:
“A strong economy requires innovative ways to expand the supply of credit to smaller enterprises. It may surprise many policy makers, but a review of the literature suggests that small businesses often rely on credit cards and home equity loans for financing. Few go directly to banks, credit unions, or other lenders for business loans while they remain small. Yet nearly any small business seeking to grow large cannot do so with credit cards alone: It must go to a lender—often a bank or credit union—to get a loan.”
2. ENVIRONMENT
Congress considers the annual Defense Appropriations Bill, including provisions relating to the cleanup of former nuclear weapons facilities.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Adjunct Fellow Robert H. Nelson on how decommissioned weapons facilities can become havens for wildlife:
“The federal government should abandon the current nuclear-cleanup program as economically wasteful and environmentally counterproductive. It is time for a new form of stewardship strategy, emphasizing those steps necessary to protect public health from any actual threats posed by radioactive waste, while at the same time setting as a policy priority the isolation and conservation of Department of Energy sites for their rich ecological diversity. Such a ‘waste-to-wilderness’ strategy would give DOE a new flexibility to contain risks at existing sites at lower costs. It could save federal taxpayers many billions of dollars—perhaps as much as $1 billion to $3 billion per year.”
3. HEALTH
Politicians on the campaign trail launch competing plans for national health care reform.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Eli Lehrer on the flawed assumptions behind the health care debate:
“As the health care debate heats up in Congress, in the media, and on the campaign trail, proposals to fix America’s health care system have poured in from all directions. Everyone talks the language of good health care, market mechanisms, and personal responsibility. But, in my judgment, one thing is missing from almost all of the proposals: With one major exception, the proposals under serious debate retain the broken framework that assumes that others (employers and the government) should be responsible for paying for individuals’ health care. Some ideas offer various incentives for people to buy insurance on their own but all assume that hardly anyone will pay their own medical bills.”
Blog feature: For more news and analysis, updated throughout the day, visit CEI’s blog, Open Market.
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