The Debate (originally aired November 6, 2005)
Matt Santos and Arnold Vinick have their first and only debate. Vinick proposes abandoning the rules negotiated by their respective campaigns, and the two have a heated discussion for the next hour on a wide variety of topics, including their general philosophies of government.
Footnotes re Immigration (last updated November 7, 2005) (back to top)
- Illegal Immigration Statistics. Various surveys have estimated that the number of illegal immigrants grew dramatically over the 1990s. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service estimated in 2003 that there were 7 million illegal immigrants in the United States in January 2000, almost doubling since 1990 (on-line as a PDF here). A more recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center (on-line as a PDF here) estimated that there were 10.3 million illegal aliens in the United States in March 2004.
As Santos referenced in the debate, the 1990s also saw more than a doubling of the number of border patrol agents situated along the southwest border. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service had 3,389 agents along the southwest border as of October 1993 and more than doubled that number by September 1998, when it had 7,357 along the southwest border (source: GAO Report 99-44). That number increased slightly to 7,705 as of February 2000 (source: Senate testimony). More recently, the Department of Homeland Security has increased the number of border control agents in Arizona as part of the Arizona Border Control Initiative (fact sheet on-line here).
- Guest Worker Program. Vinick's proposal for a guest worker program echoes a real-life one made by President George W. Bush. In January 2004, Bush proposed a temporary worker program that would allow illegal aliens currently in the United States to pay a fee and become legally eligible for jobs which U.S. employers cannot fill with U.S. workers. Such temporary workers would be able to stay in the United States for three years and would have to return to their home countries afterwards, but would get legal protections while in the United States, Bush said.
"This new system will be more compassionate. Decent, hard-working people will now be protected by labor laws, with the right to change jobs, earn fair wages, and enjoy the same working conditions that the law requires for American workers. Temporary workers will be able to establish their identities by obtaining the legal documents we all take for granted. And they will be able to talk openly to authorities, to report crimes when they are harmed, without the fear of being deported," Bush said on January 7, 2004 (transcript on-line here.
Bush's proposal did not get very far in 2004. A senior administration official said after the 2004 election that the Bush administration continued to view such a temporary worker program as a "high priority" and that it would be part of the 2005-06 legislative agenda (transcript on-line here.
- Central American Free Trade Agreement. The United States did enter into the Central American-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement in August 2005, when President George W. Bush signed the legislation implementing CAFTA-DR. Bush cited many factors in favor of the agreement, including economic growth within the United States and preventing illegal immigration. "This economic growth will raise working standards and will deliver hope and opportunity to people who have made the choice for freedom. The more opportunity that Central Americans have at home to provide for themselves and their families mean it's less likely that someone looking for a job will try to come to this country illegally," Bush said (transcript on-line here).
CAFTA-DR eliminates tariffs on goods going from the United States to six countries (Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua), opening up those countries to more US trade, while opening up some markets in those countries as well. It also requires enforcement of labor laws by the participating countries. A site on CAFTA-DR by the U.S. Trade Representative is on-line here.
The agreement received support from a mixture of Republicans and Democrats, with more support from Republicans. In the House, 202 Republicans and 15 Democrats supported the agreement, with 27 Republicans and 187 Democrats opposed. In the Senate, 43 Republicans, 11 Democrats and one independent supported the agreement, with 11 Republicans and 34 Democrats opposed. Notably, former President Jimmy Carter urged passage of CAFTA-DR in letters on-line here.
Footnotes re Education (last updated November 7, 2005) (back to top)
- Head Start. Vinick elicits gasps when he says that Head Start does not work. The Head Start program focuses on the development of young children from low-income families and getting them ready for school; more than 2.2 million children have been enrolled in Head Start since it began in 1965, and more than 900,000 children were enrolled in fiscal year 2004. As seen in the graph below (source: Administration for Children and Families), the cost per enrolled child has gone up in recent years.
Vinick is arguably prejudging the program, especially given the Congressionally-mandated research going on right now as to the impact Head Start has on the children it serves. In 1998, Congress reauthorized the program but mandated that a study be conducted. Data collection for this study began in 2002 and is scheduled to continue through 2006. A preliminary report released in June 2005 (on-line here) found small to moderate significant positive impacts for some children in terms of some cognitive areas and on access to health care, and no significant impacts in terms of some other areas.
- Vouchers. The federal government already has begun a school voucher program for the District of Columbia, the first federally-funded school voucher program. Under the DC Choice Incentive program (on-line here), 1,366 scholarships were awarded to students from lower-income families to attend private schools in the 2004-05 school year. This Republican-backed program was approved in January 2004 and was backed by Mayor Anthony Williams (a Democrat), as well as by the chairman of the D.C. city council's education committee and the D.C. Board of Education's president.
The D.C. program is the latest effort in a national movement to help students who are either low-income or at low-performing schools are given state or private funds to subsidize their transfer to private schools or to supplement their public education. Proponents say that vouchers give poor students the same choices that wealthier students always had, and that the resulting competition will force moribund schools to improve. Critics say that vouchers simply undermine already-troubled public schools and are de facto ways of funding religious institutions that are most equipped to accept students with vouchers.
Vouchers are already available in a few areas besides D.C. Milwaukee and Cleveland have begun programs, and Cleveland's program was upheld as constitutional by the United States Supreme Court in June 2002. Some polls have shown growing support, especially among minorities, though Michigan and California voters did reject referenda allowing for vouchers 3-1 in November 2000.
Footnotes re Health Care (last updated November 7, 2005) (back to top)
- Health Insurance. Most people in the United States have health insurance, with most people under 65 years old having coverage through their employment, and with some covered by Medicaid. But about 40 million people under 65 years old (about 16-17 percent of the population) did not have any health insurance in 2001, according to the U.S. Department of Health's annual report on national health trends, and a political debate continues as to how the United States can address these people's health needs. Democratic candidates proposed plans typically involving (1) expanding the existing State Children's Health Insurance Plan (SCHIP) and (2) giving more Americans access to a plan equivalent to the health plan available to members of Congress and to federal workers.
Santos said in the debate that he ideally would allow all Americans access to Medicare, thus providing some measure of hospitalization coverage to all regardless of age. Medicare is the federal health insurance program for Americans over age 65 and for certain disabled Americans. Hospital insurance (Part A) is free, and supplementary medical insurance (Part B, which provides payments for doctors and related services and supplies) requires payment of a premium. With the enacting of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, Medicare will add a new Part that will cover some prescription drug costs.
Santos recognized that this proposal would increase Medicare costs, but said that savings would result in efficiencies, citing a statistic regarding Medicare's administrative expenses compared to those in the private sector. The Congressional Budget Office said in February 2005 that it estimated that gross Medicare outlays for 2005 would be $329 billion and that outlays for administrative expenses would be $4 billion, representing about 1.2 percent of gross outlays (source: CBO).
- Prescription Drugs. Many people have turned in recent years for their prescription-drug needs to Canada, where the price of many prescription drugs is controlled by the Canadian government's Patented Medicine Prices Review Board. About 12 million prescription-drug products with a value of about $700 million entered the United States from Canada in 2003 via Internet sales and trips to Canada, according to a December 2004 report by the Department of Health and Human Services' Task Force on Drug Importation (on-line here).
Many of these imports were in violation of U.S. federal law, specifically 21 USC 384, which currently allows only pharmacists and wholesalers to import prescription drugs, among other things, into the United States. Individuals are not allowed to import prescription drugs directly. Federal law also bans the importation of any prescription drug that is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
In the second 2004 presidential debate, Sen. John Kerry accused President George W. Bush of blocking legislation that would have allowed more importation of drugs from Canada and of preventing Medicare from negotiating lower prices on bulk purchases of drugs. Bush said that he had not blocked the importation of drugs and that greater importation might endanger consumers because imported drugs may not face the same kind of regulation as in the United States.
Several studies, including the federal task force's December 2004 report, have found that many top-selling brand-name products in the U.S. are cheaper in other countries such as Canada. However, studies have also found that consumers could save money by using more generic drugs whenever possible as generic drugs generally are available in the United States for lower cost than foreign drugs. The HHS task force recommended that consumers in the United States use more generic drugs instead of going for brand names.
Medicare changes enacted in December 2003 also do help Medicare beneficiaries save money on their annual prescription-drug costs, but do not ensure lower prices overall or allow more importation from countries with lower drug costs.
Footnotes re Energy (last updated November 7, 2005) (back to top)
- Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is a 19-million acre area on the northeast corner of Alaska, bordering Canada on its east and the Arctic Ocean on its north. While much of the ANWR was designated protected wilderness in 1980, the status of a 1.5-million-acre coastal plain area (known as the "1002 Area") was specifically left open pending geological studies, and its status remains under dispute. Republicans such as President George W. Bush have supported opening up some of the area to oil production, though Democrats generally have opposed this.
A 1998 geological study by the U.S. Geological Survey of the Interior Department estimated that the refuge's 1002 Area contains somewhere between 5.7 and 10.6 billion barrels of oil. Of this oil, about 75 percent is believed to be extractable (estimates also indicate that it would take seven to ten years for any of that oil to get to market), and such oil would be enough to meet the United States' current oil consumption entirely by itself for about 0.6 to 1.6 years (the United States consumes about 20 million barrels a day). Opening up the ANWR might thus might help increase domestic oil production and decrease US dependence on oil imports; the United States has imported more oil than it has produced since the early 1990s.
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service manages the refuge and has information about it on-line here. According to the service, about 1,000 people visit a year.
- Oil Imports. Vinick is correct when he says that the United States imported the most oil from Canada rather than from Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is one of the top sources of oil in the United States, but the United States has imported more from Canada since the mid-1990s. The top five sources of oil imports as of 2004 were: Canada (2.138 million barrels a day over the year), Mexico (1.665 million barrels a day), Saudi Arabia (1.558 million barrels a day), Venezuela (1.554 million barrels a day), and Nigeria (1.140 million barrels a day), with Iraq rising to a far sixth with 656,000 thousand barrels a day.
The following graph was based on statistics from the Energy Information Administration here.
- Nuclear Safety, Waste. President George W. Bush has called for the development of more nuclear power plants. In a June 22, 2005 speech (on-line here), he called nuclear power "one of America's safest sources of energy" and said that people were beginning to recognize that the safety problems of the 1970s had been dealt with.
Santos apparently wants to delay development of nuclear power until more is done about permanent storage of radioactive nuclear waste, which is now stored across the country in about 130 temporary storage sites. Plans for a permanent facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada's Death Valley region have been underway since the 1980s; President George W. Bush signed into law a resolution in 2002 designating Yucca Mountain as a permanent repository, and the federal government is now in the process of getting a license to build the facility. Information about the Yucca Mountain Project is on-line here.
Footnotes re Crime (last updated November 7, 2005) (back to top)
- Death Penalty. Santos said in the debate that he supported a moratorium on the federal death penalty, presumably over concerns over its application. Vinick said in the debate that he did not support a moratorium on the federal death penalty.
In real life, Illinois Governor Jim Ryan, a Republican, called a moratorium on January 31, 2000 in the wake of several highly publicized cases in which 13 people were found over a 10-year period to be innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted and sentenced to death; this moratorium has remained in place under Ryan's successor, Democrat Rod Blagojevich, though reforms have been enacted and some have called for lifting the moratorium.
The federal government's use of the death penalty represents a small part of the death penalty system used nationwide. The federal government had 23 people sentenced to death as of the end of 2003 and had executed one person that year; by contrast, Texas had 453 people on death row as of the end of 2003 and had executed 24 people that year (source: Bureau of Justice Statistics).
- Ammunition Licensing. Santos said that he would not support gun control but would support a national program requiring the registering and licensing of all ammunition before sold. This seems similar to some proposals to require that all new firearms undergo ballistic testing before they are sold in order to assist in identifying firearms used in crimes. Ballistic testing involves analysis of fired bullets and cartridge casings via the unique markings imprinted by a firearm when shot. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has supported legislation supporting ballistic testing, but other groups have opposed it.
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