WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 (UPI) -- The UPI think tank wrap-up is a daily digest covering opinion pieces, reactions to recent news events and position statements released by various think tanks. His is the first of two wrap-ups for Feb. 13.
The National Center for Public Policy Research
(NCPPR is a communications and research foundation dedicated to providing free market solutions to today's public policy problems, based on the principles of a free market, individual liberty and personal responsibility. NCPPR was founded to provide the conservative movement with a versatile and energetic organization capable of responding quickly and decisively to late-breaking issues, based on thorough research.)
CHICAGO -- Sierra Club calls on IRS to audit SUV owners
by Amy Ridenour
-- Background: The Sierra Club on Feb. 11 issued a press release beginning: "The Sierra Club today urged the Internal Revenue Service to aggressively audit the returns of taxpayers who take advantage of a tax loophole subsidizing their purchases of gas-guzzling SUVs (sport utility vehicles). In a letter to the IRS, the group stressed the need for the IRS to ensure that these vehicles are in fact being used for business purposes at least 50 percent of the time, as the tax code requires. Already, many individuals have taken advantage of the loophole to drive off the lot with a luxury SUV, often for personal use, assured that they will be able to pass on to taxpayers up to $25,000 of the cost of the vehicle."
The release continues, in part: "A long-standing provision of the tax code lets small business owners write off a portion of certain business expenses. Vehicles weighing over 6,000 pounds are eligible, so that small business owners who need work trucks and delivery vans can take advantage of the provision. But many SUVs weigh over 6,000 pounds, and since that loophole -- which (the Sierra Club's Daniel) Becker described as 'a loophole big enough to drive a Hummer through' -- came to light last year, a growing number of individuals are using it to buy SUVs for what may be personal -- not business -- use. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, the SUV tax loophole costs the federal government $1 billion for every 100,000 vehicles that exploit the deduction."
-- Ten Second Response: The demonization of SUV owners continues with the allegation that SUV owners are likely to cheat on their taxes.
-- Thirty Second Response: Businesses with 100 employees or less already spend $2,500 per employee complying with federal regulations. Auditing them because they take business deductions for the purchase of delivery vans and similar vehicles would simply add to these already staggering costs. All businesses and individuals should comply with tax laws, but no group should be singled out for costly tax audits simply because it uses vehicles that are not politically correct.
-- Discussion: Environmental organizations convinced the government in 1975 to place mileage limits on vehicles, with higher limits for vehicles built on truck beds. It was entirely predictable that the result of such a rule would be the use of truck beds for larger passenger vehicles -- hence, the invention of the SUV. Now that SUVs exist, the purchase price of a small percentage of them (those over 6,000 pounds) qualifies for tax deductions IF the SUV is used for business use at least 50 percent of the time.
Readers of the Sierra Club's press release and its Web site could be forgiven for supposing that this longstanding tax deduction is leading to a deluge of tax cheating and SUV purchasing. In fact, only the very largest SUVs weigh over 6,000 pounds, most SUV owners don't claim to use them primarily for business and the Sierra Club presents no evidence of widespread tax cheating relating to SUVs.
Ironically, as this tax deduction is rather obscure, the Sierra Club's publicity campaign may cause more people to take advantage of it.
A careful reading of the Sierra Club's press release and Web site on SUVs reveals a generous use of over-the-top prose.
For instance, the first paragraph of their Web page entitled "Driving Up the Heat: SUVs and Global Warming" begins: "When it comes to wasting energy, SUVs are unrivaled. Built with outdated, gas-guzzling technology, many SUVs get just 13 miles per gallon."
Of course, the energy use of SUVs can't possibly be "unrivaled" (the Sierra Club's word, "waste," is impossible to quantify) and the phrase "many SUVs" is essentially meaningless.
To be precise, of 269 year-2003 SUV models examined by the Environmental Protection Agency, only 34 (12.6 percent) get 13 mpg or less in city driving and only 10 (3.7 percent) get 13 mpg or less on highways.
Of the 34, more than half, 19, were versions of the Chevrolet Suburban or Tahoe or the GMC Yukon. All 10 of the SUVs rated by the EPA as receiving 13 mpg or less during highway driving were Suburbans, Tahoes or Yukons.
The Sierra Club Web page goes on to tell one side of the SUV safety debate -- the cons only.
Another Sierra Club Web page, "Driving Up the Heat: SUVs and Global Warming: Worsening the Threat of Global Warming," makes one inflated claim after another. Readers are led to believe that SUVs are significantly responsible for sea level rises (ongoing for approximately 14,985 years before the first SUV was invented), the melting of ice sheets formed during the last ice age and melting ever since (expected to continue for another 6,000 years, SUVs or not) and even for "infectious-disease outbreaks linked to global warming (that) shut down Disney World."
In fact, according to testimony by one of the world's leading climate scientists, Dr. S. Fred Singer, in testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in 2000, satellite data show no appreciable warming of the global atmosphere since 1979. Data from balloons released regularly around the world confirm the satellite data. Reliable thermometer records of surface temperatures for the continental United States show no appreciable warming since about 1940. Tree-ring records for Siberia and Alaska and published ice-core records show no warming since 1940.
If the planet were to experience global warming, the naturally occurring sea level rise might slow, due to increased snow accumulation at the poles.
For reasons likely related to its own biases, the Sierra Club seems to place more credibility in relatively crude computer models predicting future global warming than in actual temperature measurements. It is free to do so. This does not mean, however, that SUV owners are more likely than other taxpayers to cheat on their taxes.
(Amy Ridenour is the president of the National Center for Public Policy Research.)
The Reason Foundation
LOS ANGELES -- We aren't the world: American culture is not dominating the globe
by Charles Paul Freund
In the mid-1990s, the well-known French filmmaker Claude Berri warned that without protection from American cultural exports, "European culture is finished." He had plenty of pessimistic company.
In that era, French Culture Minister Jack Lang spoke in terms of America's irrepressible "cultural imperialism." The popularity of a work like Jurassic Park was identified as a "threat" to others' "national identity." Strict programming quotas were enacted to prevent U.S.-made TV shows from overwhelming foreign prime time.
Meanwhile, scholars such as Herbert Schiller had worked out theories explaining how the American political empire was founded on its expanding communications empire, and critics such as Ariel Dorfman were busy publicizing the poisonous imperialistic messages buried in the adventures of such despoilers as Donald Duck.
Today, similar jeremiads are blowing as strong as ever: The leading prophet of cultural doom these days is Benjamin R. Barber, an academic growing hoarse as he warns against the dull global "monoculture" he thinks is being imposed by American capitalism. But mounting evidence suggests that all this fulmination has been entirely pointless, and that cultural pessimists have been as clueless about the processes shaping the world as were their social, economic, and political forebears.
In January, for example, The New York Times ran a front-page story reporting that exported American TV programs had largely lost their appeal for overseas audiences. According to the Times, these shows "increasingly occupy fringe time slots on foreign networks," leaving the prime-time hours to locally made shows.
"Given the choice," wrote London-based reporter Suzanne Kapner, "foreign viewers often prefer homegrown shows that better reflect local tastes, cultures and historical events." The problem, it turns out, is that many foreign broadcasters had not been giving their viewers much choice.
Why not? Many foreign networks had been created in a wave of 1980s privatization and lacked the financial and creative resources to produce their own programming. For a while, the most effective way to fill their schedules was by purchasing shows, especially American-made series. But as U.S. producers continued to drive up the price of their products, the now more-experienced broadcasters opted to make their own programs.
In brief, the foreign broadcasters chose neither to whine about nor to spin theories about American culture but rather to compete with it. As of 2001, more than 70 percent of the most popular shows in 60 different countries were produced locally. There are still popular American shows on foreign TV sets (especially movies), but as one European broadcaster told the Times, "You cannot win a prime-time slot with an American show anymore."
An even more dramatic shift may be going on with theatrical films. In 2001 "business for American films overseas fell by 16 percent against local product," according to Indian filmmaker Shekhar Kapur. Writing last August in the British newspaper The Guardian, Kapur noted: "The biggest success in Japan last year was not an American film, it was a Japanese film. The biggest success in Germany was not an American film, it was a German film. The biggest success in Spain was not an American film, but a Spanish film. The same in France. In India, of course, it's always been like that."
Kapur believes that "American culture has been able to dominate the world because it has had the biggest home market." But the growing commercial importance of Asia -- China, India, Japan -- along with the larger markets of the Mideast and North Africa will change that, he argues. In other words, cultural globalization is far from a recipe for American dominance; it is an opportunity for other cultures and markets to assert themselves.
Kapur suggests this is already happening in such low-prestige areas as beauty contests, where the Miss USAs have been giving way in the finals to the Miss Indias. But Kapur also expects it to happen in such high-prestige venues as international journalism, because much of the ad revenue and investment will come from Asia.
"In 15 years from now," he writes, "we won't be discussing the domination of the Western media but the domination of the Chinese media, or the Asian media. Soon we will find that in order to make a hugely successful film, you have to match Tom Cruise with an Indian or a Chinese actor."
Kapur may be oversimplifying, but he is right about the effects of competition. It is the smart cultures who are competing with the United States. Indeed, it is American producers who have lately been borrowing cultural ideas, just to stay competitive. "Reality TV," surely the most reviled -- if popular -- format now on American screens, comes from Europe.
(Charles Paul Freund is a senior editor at Reason magazine.)
The Nixon Center/The National Interest
(The Nixon Center is a public policy institution that is a substantively and programmatically independent division of The Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace Foundation in Yorba Linda, Calif. The National Interest magazine is published quarterly by The National Interest Inc., a non-profit partnership of Hollinger International Inc. and The Nixon Center.)
WASHINGTON -- In the National Interest: Colin Powell and the gangs of Europe
by Geoffrey Kemp
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's determination to internationalize the crisis with Iraq began in earnest in August 2002 when he persuaded President George W. Bush to go to the Unite Nations to urge for a new Security Council resolution to disarm Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. It is a measure of his success that in the wake of his dramatic and persuasive U.N. speech on Feb. 5 about Iraqi non-compliance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, 10 of the new European democracies -- the "Gang of 10" -- came out with a statement supporting U.S. policy and the need to consider the use of force against Iraq.
All 10 countries -- Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia -- until recently lived under the tyranny of communism and appreciate their new freedoms.
Their statement followed a remarkable opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal and other newspapers on Jan. 30 by a "Gang of Eight" -- Britain, Spain, Italy, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Denmark and Portugal. Seven prime ministers and the president of the Czech Republic endorsed the U.S. approach to Iraq arguing that it was vital to preserve the unity of the trans-Atlantic relationship and stand up to Saddam.
Their statement was a direct challenge to the "Gang of Three" -- Germany, France and Belgium -- who have resisted efforts to consider force against Saddam and have continued to obstruct NATO contingency plans for support of Turkey in event of a war. None of these three countries, nor the European Union leadership, were consulted prior to the publication of the article. These intra-European confrontations reflect the complex and dynamic state of relations on the continent.
The fact that 18 European democracies have essentially "ganged up" against Germany and France says a great deal about current European politics. Europe is changing as both NATO and the EU expand eastward. These developments should put to rest some of the more sneering criticisms of "Europe" by a number of American commentators who frequently lump the continent together into one amorphous, wimpish mass, with the exception of Prime Minister Tony Blair's Britain.
Anti-Americanism in Europe remains restricted to a few governments and elite opinion makers. While opinion polls show a majority of West Europeans are opposed to a war on Iraq, the majority still feel warmly towards America. Fortunately, the "Gang of 18" understand that although a war with Iraq is fraught with risks and dangers and the aftermath poses daunting challenges, a fundamental split between Europe and the United States would be an even worse outcome.
The behavior of the French and German governments over the past six months has been enough to turn any American's stomach inside out. But the attitudes of both countries reflect very different political realities. Chancellor Schroeder used anti-Americanism to save his political neck in the closely fought German national elections in September.
It does not seem to have done him any good since his party and his policies are plagued by economic problems and he is weak and discredited. In addition, for solid reasons, most Germans have an instinctive dislike for war and military intervention.
French President Jacques Chirac represents a country that is anything but pacifist when it comes to the use of force for national interests. He began to reassert traditional Gaullist anti-Americanism in the wake of his own victory in the French presidential elections earlier in the year. Of the two countries, France presents the most difficult problem for the United States because it has considerable influence with other U.N. members and has Security Council veto power.
As the schisms within Europe and across the Atlantic grow wide, it is fitting that Powell has emerged as the most important player in the Bush administration's foreign policy team. His role has never been more significant. Yet, from the moment he was nominated to be secretary of state, he has been under attack from a number of neo-conservatives who believe he is too much of a dove on foreign policy. (Mainstream conservatives also fault him for his liberal views on domestic issues such as affirmative action and abortion.) Some of the language used against Powell by his critics could have been taken from the speeches of the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, replete with its fatwas.
However, today his national and international poll ratings are sky high. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are regarded with suspicion by our closest allies, whereas Powell's reputation is pristine and reassuring. Powell is now in a good position to use U.S. leverage to assure that if another U.N. resolution to authorize force against Iraq is submitted to the Security Council, it will probably pass.
France will either have to abstain or veto the resolution. If France were to exercise its veto it will be isolated and its international role would be greatly diminished. Germany is likely to restore good relations with the United States once its leadership changes. Both France and Germany have to realize that the majority of European countries support the robust multilateralism advocated by Powell and, now, Bush. This is good news for all supporters of the trans-Atlantic alliance.
(Geoffrey Kemp is the director of regional strategic programs at the Nixon Center. During the first Reagan administration, he served as a special assistant to the president for national security affairs and as senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs on the National Security Council staff.)
