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June 1, 2006 | By Nathaniel Ward
One last chance for Iran
The Bush administration has proposed negotiations with Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on condition that Iran give up nuclear weapons research.
Yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced a new strategy for dealing with Iran. Under the new plan, the United States and its European partners will agree to negotiate directly with Iran if the radical Islamic regime forgoes its nuclear weapons program.
Iran “must verifiably suspend any programs” to make a nuclear weapon, President Bush said, “at which point we will come to the negotiating table to work on a way forward.” In a statement Thursday, Iran refused these conditions, saying the country “won’t give up our (nuclear) rights.”
This is a risky new strategy, Heritage’s Jim Phillips reports. “Tehran may interpret the diplomatic offer as a weakening of U.S. resolve to block Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons. Or it may seek to exploit diplomatic talks to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its allies and to buy time to continue its nuclear efforts.”
Iran has a long history of using negotiations to its own advantage, buying time and seeking increasingly generous diplomatic “carrots,” he explains. Furthermore, because much of Iran’s nuclear research and production is conducted in secret, verifying that all weapons work had stopped would be extremely difficult. “It is unclear how or why new Iranian promises to rule out nuclear weapons could be treated as any more credible than its past promises, which all stand broken,” Phillips writes.
As a result, “Rice’s diplomatic strategy could work only if the United States has ironclad commitments from its European allies and Japan to impose strong sanctions,” Phillips concludes. “Only if the U.S., Europe, Japan, and other allies present a determined and united front in support of strong economic sanctions will they have a chance of dissuading Iran from continuing its nuclear efforts, short of war.”
Killing the death tax
I mentioned yesterday that Congress is considering a proposal to make the death tax repeal permanent. Under current law, the death tax would be completely phased out in 2010—and then spring back to life in 2011.
This immoral tax which penalizes families, Heritage’s Bill Beach reports, “costs the U.S. between 170,000 and 250,000 potential jobs each year” since “the investments that would have resulted in higher employment are not made.”
Many who object to repealing the death tax are very wealthy Americans who want to preserve donations to their favorite charities. The tax, they say, encourages donations to these social and cultural organizations. But this logic is confused, Beach explains. History shows that increases in charitable contributions correspond with economic growth, not with death tax policy changes—and since cutting the death tax results in economic growth, repealing the tax is the way to go. “In fact,” he writes, “trimming the death tax has actually increased the amount of money given to charities. The Congressional Joint Economic Committee found that last year, with inheritance taxes coming down, charitable bequests reached a record $21.6 billion — a 25 percent increase from 1999.”
How to balance the budget
In an editorial today (subscribers only), The Wall Street Journal takes a hard look at a proposal to automatically cancel various federal spending programs “that have outlived their usefulness.”
In the private sector, worker productivity growth in 2005 hit its highest level in 50 years. What a contrast with government, where agency performance audits by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) have found enormous waste and financial mismanagement in every operation from the Pentagon to Medicare.
For good measure, The Journal cites Heritage’s Brian Riedl, whose work concludes that the federal budget can be balanced in just a few years so long as spending increases only at the inflation rate.
Amnesty already encouraging lawbreaking
One of the many faults of an amnesty is that it encourages people to break the law in the belief that their transgressions will be forgiven.
As it turns out, even the rumor that Congress might approve an amnesty for illegal aliens is already having this effect. The Washington Post reports that many legal immigrants are allowing their visas to expire because they recognize that an amnesty would allow them to stay even if they fail to follow the rules.
Tens of thousands of Honduran and Nicaraguan immigrants nationwide risk losing their legal status in the United States today because they have not renewed their temporary work permits under a program to help victims of natural disasters, some in the mistaken belief that they will soon be on the path to becoming U.S. citizens. …
Many Hondurans and Nicaraguans have not yet renewed because they think they will soon benefit from immigration reforms, including a guest worker program and other measures that could pave the way for citizenship, immigrant advocates said. Many are reluctant to spend the $250 TPS renewal fee, preferring to save their money for future citizenship applications.
What’s more, as I noted last time, amnesty is unfair to those who do follow the rules.
In other news
Coming up at Heritage
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Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.
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