CEI Daily Update
Issues in the News
1. TELECOM
Some colleges are ditching expensive landline phones in dorms, since students all have cell phones, anyway. (See story.) American households are starting to do the same. How can we keep landlines competitive enough to remain an option for consumers who still want them? CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Eli Lehrer explains in a new report that de-regulating landline service may be the only hope:
“ … the land line telephone business faces very serious problems across the board. Traditional land line telephone service transmitted over copper and coaxial cable—the traditional Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN)—faces serious peril and could well disappear in the medium- to long-term, at least for residential use. [I]f we wish to maintain universal land line telephone service in the United States, we must leave new voice telecom technologies—VoIP and Device-Based Telephony—as lightly regulated as possible.”
2. TERRORISM
The German government continues to search for accomplices involved in a foiled Islamist plot to bomb airports and US installations in Germany, and the U.S. General Accounting Office has come out with a “stinging assessment” of the Homeland Security Department. In efforts to combat terrorism, governments should allow the private sector to play a crucial role.
CEI Experts Available to Comment: Wayne Crews and Eli Lehrer on infrastructure weaknesses that could be bolstered by private sector efforts.
“There’s no magic bullet for making systems like subways, power grids, and airports more secure. Governments will always have a role to play in providing security. But the private sector can often do it better — not because it’s more powerful but because it’s more flexible.”
3. TRADE
Even though free trade is under attack by U.S. presidential candidates, it seems that most economists are still stalwart in their defense of the benefits of more open trade. Moisés Naím, writing in the September/October 2007 issue of Foreign Policy, is a good example. CEI Expert Available to Comment: Adjunct Fellow Fran Smith on how consumers get whacked by trade barriers, especially the Farm Bill up for reauthorization:
“The current U.S. sugar program is a complex system composed of three main parts — all designed to reward sugar producers at the expense of consumers and taxpayers.”
Blog feature: For more news and analysis, updated throughout the day, visit CEI’s blog, Open Market.
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