Opinion: In today’s pages: Cutting and spending. And retrieving and detaining.
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It’s all about budgets and spending programs today on the Times Opinion pages. Well, OK, there are pieces on North Korea and Gitmo, too, but work with me here.
The editorial board blasts Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for using his line-item veto power to make deeper cuts than the legislature enacted in its hard-fought budget revision -- a power grab that probably violates the state’s constitution:
California vests lawmaking power in the Legislature and properly limits the executive by allowing him to veto appropriations, line-by-line if he likes, but not to unilaterally alter those already on the books.
The board also calls on Congress to put more money into the Kash4Klunkers CARS program that subsidizes the purchase of more fuel-efficient vehicles, despite the grumbling from some economists, because it’s providing a much-needed boost to consumer confidence. But the money should come out of the unspent portion of the $787 billion stimulus package enacted in February, and there should be no more refills, the board says.
On the Op-Ed page ...
... Richard Bergman, a former top fundraiser for Pauley Pavilion, decries UCLA’s approach to renovating Pauley, which he says will hurt students and longtime season-ticket holders. The university should drop its expansive plans in favor of a renovation that’s better suited to tough economic times, Bergman writes.
Finally, former FDA official Henry I. Miller and Jeff Stier of the American Council on Science and Health contend that by promoting comparative effectiveness research, the healthcare overhaul favored by President Obama will inexorably lead to drug rationing:
Once the cheap blue pill has been anointed as the one eligible for federal reimbursement, there will be little incentive for companies to pour millions of dollars into developing a new generation of drugs that might in fact prove to be better -- but perhaps only for a small subset of patients.
In other words, drug manufacturers will stop seeking new profits if the federal government interferes with their efforts to foist costly new drugs on the consumers who don’t need them as well as the ones who do. Hmmmm....
Meanwhile, on topics not related to the economy, CBS News legal editor Andrew Cohen accuses Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) of playing ‘Chicken Little’ in response to the administration’s proposals to move Guantanamo Bay detainees to a new or renovated facility in Brownback’s home state:
If Gitmo detainees are transferred to Kansas, it will not become a battlefield for terrorists any more than Colorado has become a scene of carnage in the years since terror-convicts have been sent to the federal ‘supermax’ facility there. The prisoners incarcerated in Kansas, before or after trial, would be part of a system that is as safe as the world has ever known. I have toured the supermax facility, and I defy anyone who also has done so to suggest that it, or a new, similar prison, could not safely house the prisoners until they die, are transferred elsewhere or are released.
The editorial board also applauds former President Clinton’s retrieval of two California journalists from prison in North Korea, saying any benefit accrued by Kim Jong Il’s regime were small in comparison to the value of the women’s release and the insights Clinton will bring home about the reclusive Kim.
-- Jon Healey