Turns out, folks who work at and live near the Honda engine plant in Anna, Ohio don’t think the auto industry should get a bailout.  Local waitress September Quinn is quoted in the story as saying:

I don’t think they should bail them out because … obviously something’s not right in the way they’re running their business, and why should the American people have to bail them out if they can’t figure out how to do it right?

Quinn also had some insights into the problems that big labor unions have caused for the big three automakers.  As the CNN story reports:

“People agree with the unions because the workers want to be backed on everything, but then again, there aren’t people striving to do their job better,” said Quinn, whose father works at the nonunion Honda plant. “They’ve just got Papa Bear to back them up in any instance, and they keep their job. And you can do that, but I don’t know at the cost of what.”

That sort of common sense is a refreshing break from the doomsday rhetoric being spouted by domestic automakers and members of Congress.  Optimism is also present in the final quote of the story offered by John Lenhart, an officer with the Sidney-Shelby County Chamber of Commerce and a consultant with Plastipak Packaging in Jackson Center, Ohio:

The country’s got some ills, but we’ll heal up [ . . . ] We’ll be all right.

Check out the full story at CNN.com.

The tobacco “Master Settlement Agreement” was signed ten years ago this month by 46 state attorneys general and major tobacco companies.

This video is a dramatization of how the deal was hatched.

And now the video has been featured in Legal Newsline! More on CEI’s tobacco work here.

Anyway, the big news is that Rep Henry Waxman challenged John Dingell for Energy and Commerce Committee chairmanship, and won. E&C has jurisdiction over, well, everything.

Waxman has been a member of Congress since 1975, reminding us of the saliency of term limits. What matters, one might argue, is not that constituents have a right to continue electing a member to the House if they want to; but that the rest of the nation for whom he makes binding law never gets the opportunity to kick the guy to the curb. Nothing personal, but–33 years?

Anyway that’s irrelevant now:  Waxman’s focus will be health care, most assuredly, and energy policy also (have a look at President-elect Barack Obama’s platform for reassurance about this). Keeping Michigan’s Dingell in the E&C chairmanship would have meant that the Democrat’s favorite energy-and-renewable-mandate policies would have been blocked by the leading Michigan Democrat. So he obviously had to go. The auto industry is tough and can take a dose of Waxman, I guess is what they figure. Never mind all that business over the past couple weeks about a Detroit bailout; it’s Thursday, all that stuff was the other day.

But on tech policy: since the committee has jurisdiction over the Federal Communications Commission and the Chairman represents Hollywood, he is newly influential over copyright issues and broadcast concerns like “airtime” for candidates and obsure stuff like net neutrality (which is the idea that internet infrastructure belongs to everybody except those who built it). Watch for the “Fairness Doctrine” issue to re-emerge. If memory serves, this is the notion championed by Democrats who are upset that Oprah gave such an infusion of support to Barack Obama, so I think they’ll be trying to make her showcase some Republicans on her show. Pretty noble of the Congressman and the party.

Waxman has embraced forced openness for privately-owned networks, even threatening to cut off USF funding for telecom companies unwilling to open up their networks for device roaming. Though the USF itself is unneeded, and in some cases even counter-productive (as Cord argues), any government subsidies of rural telecommunications services should strive to minimize costs rather than reshape markets to suit political whims. Because mandatory access is often at odds with the bottom line, demanding that carriers grant access to any device often leads to a reduction in infrastructure investment. America’s rural areas would be better served by a competitive marketplace in which companies are free to experiment with all kinds of pricing plans and service offerings to suit evolving consumer demands.

Other aspects of Waxman’s record on tech issues are similarly troubling. In 2003, Waxman voted for the Unlawful Internet Gambling Funding Prohibition Act, which aimed to prevent financial institutions from processing transactions involving Internet gambling. But as CEI’s Eli Lehrer argued in a recent essay, attempts to curb Internet gambling through financial regulations are costly to enforce and pose a threat to consumers’ financial privacy.

Network neutrality has also enjoyed Waxman’s support in the past, as Cord noted. In 2006, Waxman voted for an amendment proposed by Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) which would have denied Internet Service Providers the freedom to decide how to manage their networks. Like Waxman’s stance on USF funding, legislating network neutrality would stifle investment in newer, smarter networks, and entrench the inadequacies of the Internet as it exists today.

Given that the next President is a supporter of both net neutrality and universal broadband access, it is quite possible that will preside over several important tech policy battles during the next two year. Let’s hope that Waxman remembers that the same freedoms which he defends for individuals must also exist for private companies, which themselves are merely collections of individuals.

In late 2005, Daschle became one of the first Democrats to criticize the 2002 law, rushed through Congress in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom falures, for its unintended consequences on entrepreneurs. In doing so he helped make the cause of Sarbox relief and reform biparisan. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Daschle co-wrote with former Senate Republican Leader Bob Dole, the authors told readers of “small and mid-sized capitalization companies who say that their access to capital from publicly-traded stock markets has been made prohibitively expensive.” They pointed out that “studies have shown that the additional cost per company for compliance averages $1.4 million to $4.4 million,” and explained that “although increased auditing fees amount to a small burden for Fortune 500 companies as a percentage of revenue, the doubling or tripling of auditor bills, accompanied by additional accounting and legal fees, can be the difference between a profit and a loss for emerging businesses.”

Daschle and Dole also wrote critically of the accounting standad that forced companies the expense the value of stock options — even though there is no cash outflow. They argued, correctly, that the rule was causing smaller public companies to “have difficulty attracting and keeping top talken without option-based compensation.”

For a while, many other Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, began publicly talking about Sarbox relief, particularly for smaller companies. But much of this has fallen by the wayside with the financial implosions and Wall Street bailout. But Sarbox reform is needed precisely for those small entrepreneurs not receiving taxpayer dollars, but who still need “bailing out” from overregulation that could keep them from becoming the next Microsoft, eBay, or producer of lifesaving drugs.

Unforunately, Daschle will not be at the Securites and Exchange Commission, where he can directly affect changes to these rules. But hopefully, he will still make his voice heard in reforming these regulations. He could talk, for instance, of Sarbox’s burdens on pharmaceutical startups that might create the next breakthrough drug. And hopefully, the Sarbox experience will lead him to have a greater skepticism of regulation and an eye for possible unintended consequences of grand government schemes in the medical area.

Waxman has been an outspoken proponent of the Universal Service Fund, a program riddled with waste and fraud. Though Waxman has tried to hold companies more accountable for the use of money from the fund—intended to help supply telephone service to people in rural areas—a better policy would be to eliminate it altogether. The notion that rural areas need to be wired with copper lines is outdated. Congress should be pursuing larger reforms that would enable efficient wireless broadband deployment–a much better solution for connectivity in America’s rural areas.

The same applies to network neutrality.Waxman has stated he supports network neutrality, but that he also believes there should be more competition in the ISP market. The latter is a much better policy to pursue than the former.

Neutrality proponents would have us believe that the best network is a dumb one—one that isn’t managed by the ISP—but this runs counter to much of the common wisdom on network management. But eliminating network management as an option for ISPs leaves them with fewer business models for charging for broadband access.

Waxman will likely be pivotal in helping President-elect Obama pursue a network neutrality policy, but rather than amending bad regulation with new regulation, Congress should seek to reform franchising laws and move toward a market system in wireless spectrum.

Ryan Radia, CEI Information Policy Analyst, will have more on what to expect from Chairman Waxman on technology policy in a forthcoming post.

Good Ideas: Daschle believes that individuals, mostly, should have to pay for their own health care and opposes the current mixed-economy health-care system that costs a ton but doesn’t provide good care for most Americans.

The current U.S. health care system–which isn’t a free market in any sense of the term or “freer” than most other developed countries’ health care systems–seems largely devoted to cost-shifting rather than actually providing health care. Every party involved–consumers, insurers, the government, hospitals, doctors–tries to get somebody else to pay its bills. The pendulum swings back and forth a bit but nothing really changes in a fundamental way.

Like Daschle, I’d prefer a mostly private system where hospitals remain private, most people pick their own health insurance, and pay for it themselves in a free or mostly free market. Netherlands, Switzerland, and, to some extent, France, have systems like this. (Germany has an employer-based system that’s basically the same as ours with a few more subsidies, mandates, and price controls.) All these systems are far from perfect but have less government involvement than ours (France is about the same) and give individuals more choices than ours. None are a free market but they all move closer to that ideal than what now exists in the United States.

Obama has also advocated this type of system. Like everyone who thinks about health-care, Daschle also favors some nice-but-difficult goals like electronic medical records and evidence-based medicine. These can make a difference but none are likely to change things absent other changes. Daschle seems smart enough to know this.

The Wrong Idea: Daschle loves to repeat the frequent piece of folk wisdom that the United States is alone in the industrial world in not providing health care to everyone.

Not true. Only one G-7 country, the United Kingdom, truly covers everyone. Basically, the British system operates almost all hospitals and contracts with nearly all doctors via a single enormous national health care superstructure. There’s no billing system for many types of procedures so, by default, everyone is “covered.” The system is cheap relative to that in other countries but isn’t very good by many measures and saves money mostly by pushing down wages for everyone in the medical field.

Just about every other country has some gaps somewhere. And, of course, in some countries (Canada, Germany, the UK) there are long waiting lists for certain types of care. What good is insurance if you can’t get care? (Waiting lists, contrary to many conservative claims, are not a necessary consequence of what Obama and Daschle want. Countries like Switzerland, France, and Netherlands manage with no more waits than exist in the United States.)

Generally, the gaps in the U.S. are a bigger than those in other developed countries–although not significantly so in every case. Daschle knows enough about international health care markets to know all of this but insists on repeating it.

The Terrible Idea: Daschle’s big idea–which he’s written a whole book about–is that the United States should create a national health board accountable to nobody but itself. The board, taking the Federal Reserve as a model, would basically control all health care decision making in the country.

This is a crazy idea. Why? Because any board, no matter how well chosen, will make mistakes. And, if only one board has control over the whole health care system, then any mistake it makes will impact everyone. Although some of the things he imagines the board doing do make sense, there’s simply no reason to concentrate so much power in the hands of a few mandarins.

And the Board, frankly, scares me.

Despite my inconspicuous consumption, I have an enormous carbon footprint. Indeed my carbon footprint is so big that it rivals that of a mega-consumer like Leonardo de Caprio, or even a super-mega consumer like Al Gore.

How is that possible? My ex-wife and I buy ten thousand pounds of coal every fall for the Kyrgyz family with whom we lived while we served in the Peace Corps. Burning a ton of coal emits about 3 tons of carbon into the atmosphere, so we are responsible for 30 tons of green greenhouse gases! For environmentalists in rich countries, that’s a cause for alarm. For the Kamchibekova clan in Talas, Kyrgyzstan, it’s a reason to cheer.

Before, the Kamchibekova clan would burn dried sheep dung to stay warm during the brutal Kyrgyz winter. As you might have guessed, dehydrated sheep poo makes for a poor fuel. Global warming alarmists call coal “dirty,” but dung is the dirtiest. Besides being cleaner, coal also contains much more energy than an equivalent amount of dung, so it’s more efficient.

Environmentalists in rich countries excoriate coal as an evil. At this very moment, Greenpeace-niks are assembling a giant model of the earth in rural Poland, as a focal point for opposition to the expansion of coal in Poland and the world.

For hundreds of millions of the world’s poor, however, coal is cleaner and more energy efficient than the alternative. This is one of the many inconvenient truths that environmentalists ignore in their dogged pursuit of a static global ecosystem.

The enviros say they want to save the planet. But what about the people that live on the planet now?

Bismarck once said that the whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of one Pomeranian grenadier. I riff on that when I say that the rainforests, or blue whales or any other green grail isn’t worth the bones of a single human being. Humans first.

In reality, the risks associated with trace levels of BPA from food containers are slim to none, according to the Food and Drug Administration and several scientific panels. In fact, trace levels BPA found in containers pose a much lower risk of “endocrine disruption” than does a tablespoon of soy milk—i.e., not much at all. In any case, single serving plastic water bottles are made from plastics that do not contain BPA, so claims suggesting exposure through those products are really off the mark.

A school in Madison, Connecticut is learning the hard way. It has recently been revealed that the water coming from one school’s water fountains has contained excess levels of uranium for a couple years. While the public health impacts are probably pretty low, people don’t want their children drinking that water. The unfortunate problem with drinking water fountains in Madison schools offers yet another example of the importance of bottled water. Tap water is generally very safe. But there are times when people would rather drink bottled water, such as in this case.

But soon many schools will deny that option! Currently, in Ontario Canada, many schools are looking into total bans on bottled water and maybe even other drinks in plastic bottles. I sure hope they are making sure their tap water is a good quality. Many school officials there complain that it comes out a rusty brown.

This week there are stories in the press regarding efforts in Missouri’s Washington University to remove bottled water as an option for students. Ironically, much of the increase in bottled water in the past several years has simply replaced drinking of caffeine and/or sugar-containing drinks. Denying the option to buy bottled water is likely to increase consumption other bottled drinks, which may add onto extra pounds that students gain during college. It will also make it more difficult for students engaged in sports to stay hydrated.

Similar university bans on bottled water are being pushed or implemented at Brandeis University; Cornell University; Brown University (RI); University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Oklahoma State University; Southwestern; Clark University (AR); the University of Texas-Southwestern; the State University of New York in Buffalo; University of California, San Diego; University of New Mexico and many more!

Denying consumers the opportunity to choose a healthy beverage on campuses or anywhere else is simply foolish and a bit frightening. After all if they continue to succeed in banning water, what will they go after next?