Your papers, please

0 Comments | Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Apr 9, 2005

Uncle Sam wants you -- to show him your passport. The U.S. State Department and the Department of Homeland Security announced Tuesday that by 2008, Americans returning home from Mexico, Canada, Panama and Bermuda must have a passport to get back in. Currently, U.S. citizens returning from these countries don't need this document.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told The Associated Press that the United States had to take every precaution to screen out "people who want to come in to hurt us." This requirement won't do anything to prevent terrorists from getting into the country; instead, it will inconvenience Americans who otherwise have no need to obtain passports.

Do government officials really think this requirement would stop terrorists and prevent another Sept. 11? Guess what. All the Sept. 11 hijackers entered this country legally. Passport requirements would not have kept them out. Does anyone actually believe such a directive will put a dent in illegal immigration? Along the Mexican border, thousands of undocumented immigrants cross over each day. Passport requirements will not keep them out.

But the change will impose noticeable inconvenience and expense on the 16.8 million U.S. tourists who make short trips to Mexico and the 16.2 million who make trips to Canada each year. The cost of a passport -- $97, $82 for people under 16 -- is not overwhelming, but it is not insignificant either. For a large family -- the Homeland Security proposal will require children to have passports, too -- it could be quite expensive.

The additional, unnecessary hassles involved in crossing legally will likely hurt the border economies of the United States, Mexico and Canada, and they run contrary to the freetrade aims this country has been promoting. This will affect not just border states but the entire country.

But the matter goes beyond economics to impinge on our liberties as Americans. There are millions of Americans along the borders who have no need of or desire to get a passport. Requiring that they do so is yet another attempt by the federal government to create the equivalent of a national I.D. card.

The Bush administration should drop this onerous demand. And Congress would do well to tell Homeland Security bureaucrats that the passport requirement looks more like a classic case of using a generalized threat to impose more government mandates, costs and inconvenience on innocent citizens.

The 'lock-box' in a filing cabinet

The news networks largely ignored the president's photoop during this week's trip to Parkersburg, W. Va., home of the nation's Bureau of Public Debt. And that's a shame. President Bush stood beside a filing cabinet at the bureau containing papers representing $1.7 trillion in special Treasury bonds -- the so-called Social Security trust fund. Said the president: "There is no trust fund, just IOUs that I saw firsthand, that future generations will pay. Imagine, the retirement security for future generations is sitting in a filing cabinet."

As photo-ops go, this was a good one, since it made a point that lies at the heart of the debate: There is no money set aside to pay for future retirees. "Payroll taxes collected from workers have exceeded benefits paid to retirees every year since 1984," reported the Miami Herald. "Instead of socking the surplus away, the government spent it on other programs and promised to repay it later, with interest. The IOUs are in the form of special-issue Treasury bonds that are stored in an offwhite, four-drawer filing cabinet in West Virginia."

Some insist this doesn't matter. In an editorial deriding the trip as a "publicity move," the St. Paul Pioneer Press noted: "The fact that our nation has never reneged on such promises means U.S. Treasury bonds are the safest investment in the world. That there are no physical assets for bondholders to claim is irrelevant. No one worries that the nation would default on promised bond payments."

That may be true, but it entirely misses the point about Social Security's liabilities. The issue is not whether the government will renege on the IOUs, but what it will cost taxpayers and beneficiaries to make good on the promises. There is broad agreement that when the baby boomers begin to retire in about 12 years the system will be paying more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes. The system will be upside down, and the liabilities will continue to mount.

The question the president rightly raises is what can be done to ensure the continuing solvency of the system without sinking the Treasury or imposing new burdens on working Americans?

Another shining example of nanny-statism

Abill pending in the Maryland legislature would set forth a uniform statewide policy on the use of sunscreen by public school students. Why is such a policy necessary? Because schools in Montgomery County -- a suburb of Washington, D.C., not surprisingly - - require a doctor's note for children to use sunscreen, and the apparently almostcontraband lotion must be stored in the nurse's office. Four school systems require a doctor's note and 11 require written permission from the parents. The attitude seems to be that sunscreen is a medication and should be treated as such. In other Maryland school systems kids can slather on the stuff with no bureaucratic interference at all.