During the third quarter, reform ideas long advocated by the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) gained significant traction in Washington. The president signed legislation into law that will help American workers better prepare for retirement; the House moved toward expanding Health Savings Accounts (HSAs); Senators Frist and Kyl urged their colleagues to read estate tax study; and our new book on women and family issues was featured at the National Press Club.

Here is a brief summary of our third quarter accomplishments:

Protecting Retirement Savings. President Bush signed into law legislation that includes 401(k) reform ideas developed and proposed by the NCPA and the Brookings Institution. These reform ideas, certainly the most important aspects of that bill, give employers a safe harbor from lawsuits if they:

• Automatically enroll employees into 401(k) plans.
• Automatically increase contribution rates until they reach a desired level.
• Encourage diversified portfolios for 401(k) plans (per follow up on new Department of Labor regulations).

Fighting the Death Tax. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) sent our NCPA study, Wealth, Inheritance and the Estate Tax, to every other U.S. senator with a cover letter urging their colleagues to consider its findings. The findings completely undermine the main argument made by death tax defenders-that estate taxation prevents the concentration of wealth. In fact, even if we taxed away all the wealth due to inheritance of the top 5 percent of Americans, it would reduce their share of the country's wealth by only 7 percentage points. We continue to educate key policymakers, the news media and the American public about our study's significance as the estate tax debate goes on.

Reforming Health Care by Empowering Patients. I testified on Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and consumer-directed health care before the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Health Care at the end of September. Shortly thereafter, the House Ways and Means Committee passed new legislation expanding HSAs.

The legislation will allow people to roll over IRAs and HRAs into their HSAs and will increase the annual contribution level. Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-CA) called the changes incremental, but agrees people "have already begun to see the tremendous potential of consumer-driven health insurance."

Taking a Sensible Approach to the Environment. NCPA Senior Fellow H. Sterling Burnett provided written testimony for a July 19 hearing on climate change science by the House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations subcommittee. Burnett warned the subcommittee that it should be careful when using the so-called "hockey stick" theory (that claims a dramatic temperature rise in the past 100 years, after 900 years of relatively constant temperature) when deciding policy.

Burnett and other E-Team experts were cited 39 times in the national news media this quarter. Burnett discussed the Outer-Continental Shelf (OCS) drilling ban on CNBC's Street Signs, explained the folly of imposing a windfall profits tax on energy companies on CNBC's Power Lunch, and wrote commentaries for the Washington Times about drilling along the Outer-Continental Shelf and the congressional hearings on global warming. So far this year, the E-Team has reached more than 35 million people with NCPA's environmental and energy ideas.

Bringing Outdated Institutions into the 21^st Century. NCPA's latest book, Leaving Women Behind: Modern Families, Outdated Laws, was featured at a National Press Club "Newsmaker" forum. I moderated a discussion of the book with my co-author, The Wall Street Journal editorial writer Kim Strassel. The other participants were former Clinton White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers; Mommy Wars author and Washington Post columnist Leslie Morgan Steiner; Parade magazine columnist Lyric Wallwork Winik; and director of the 21^st Century Workforce at the U.S. Department of Labor Karen Czarnecki.

Reaching High School Students. Debate Central now has more than 1,500 links, and the NCPA is continually updating these to aid students in their research. Elizabeth Teisberg, Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virgina, spent a recent weekend chaperoning a national high school debate tournament in New York. She wrote to me, "The resolution was about health care and your work was cited and discussed all weekend!...Your work helped a lot of debaters win their rounds on the neg side [of the resolution "a just government should provide health care for its citizens."]...The debaters move to a new topic at the end of this month, but I thought you should know that every good high school debater in the country has been discussing your work with great interest for the past six weeks!"

These successes would not be possible without your help. Thank you for your continuing support.

Warm regards,

John Goodman
President

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