In a column she posted at the Huffington Post, USEPA Administrator Lisa Jackson continued in her attempts to rebrand the Agency into something it never has been nor was intended to be: a creator of wealth. Jackson surely recognizes that the tired, old “sky is falling” message that has traditionally driven environmental agendas has less traction than ever given the economic realities of 2010. So, while she isn’t ready to abandon the fear-mongering tactics that are ingrained in the green movement, Jackson is working hard to create a parallel reality, one in which there is an absolutely phenomenal return on investment whenever the government imposes a new round of environmental regulations.
In a draw-dropping example of the old saw that “correlation does not equate to causation” the administrator told America that the Clean Air Act has created a venerable cornucopia of riches:
“…as air pollution has dropped over the last 40 years, our national GDP has risen by 207 percent. The total benefits of the Clean Air Act amount to more than 40 times the costs of regulation. For every one dollar we have spent, we have received more than $40 of benefits in return, making the Clean Air Act one of the most cost-effective things the American people have done for themselves in the last half century.”
How does one calculate a whopping 4,000% return on Clean Air Act investments? If you’re the EPA, you point to increased productivity that you happily attribute to less lost time due to illness in the workplace, as well as avoided medical costs. Not that you actually have to prove that any of those results actually occur. All you need is a few pointy-headed academics with calculators who can punch the right numbers, attach a certain value to sick days and medical condition and – voila – you too can create trillions in phantom economic benefits.
That’s the method that has been used to justify just about every major piece of Clean Air regulation and Jackson’s EPA has shifted this technique into hyper-drive. If the numbers that she uses to justify the sweeping, radical environmental initiatives her Agency is pushing are to be believed, nobody will ever miss work again and the health care industry will have to close its doors for a lack of business. And yes, I’m exaggerating, but not by much.
The America that the rest of us have lived in over the last forty years since the first Clean Air Act was passed is quite a bit different than Jackson’s fantasyland. While the GDP has risen by 207 per cent in that time, it did so in spite of, not because of, the excesses of the Clean Air Act. That is not to say that clean air legislation was not needed in 1970, but the bureaucrats charged with achieving clean air goals long ago crossed the line from protecting human health and the environment into the land of protecting their jobs and radical environmentalist agendas.
Jackson acknowledges all of that progress and the massive improvements in air quality that have been made, but she concludes that it’s not nearly enough and, besides, just look at all the money we’ll make if we put the screws to industry one more time.
Did American productivity increase over two decades of the Clean Air Act? It did, but that was clearly because of new manufacturing techniques and the increased use of robotics. Productivity sure didn’t increase because workers put in more time. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American worker put in 37.1 hours of work per week in 1970. By 2009, that number had dropped to 33.9 hours per week.
How about health care savings then? It’s ludicrous that anyone, much less a high-ranking government official like Jackson, could even try to claim that anything has reduced heath care costs, but let’s compare those numbers too. In 1970, per capita health care expenditures ran at about 7 per cent of GDP. Today, that number has risen to 17 per cent.
Jackson employs the kind of statistical sleight of hand that is the highlight of the green magic show throughout her post. She claims, for example, that Clean Air Act regulations have avoided “843,000 asthma attacks.” Yet, according to the Center for Disease Control, the number of Americans suffering from asthma has increased from 6.7 million in 1980 to over 20 million today. In this case, Jackson doesn’t even have correlation, much less causation.
But then the administrator’s goal here is to further the green jobs myth, not to accurately describe either the state of the environment or the economic effect of environmental regulations. The fact is that many sectors of the economy, like the iron and steel industry, the printing industries and many parts of the chemical production sector, suffered greatly as a direct result of the Clean Air Act and other regulations that started out well-intentioned but soon grew into counter-productive job killers.
The fact is that the bureaucratic monster that the EPA has become moves so slowly, so cautiously and distrusts industry so much that it stifles the kind of innovation and creativity that the President claims he longs to embrace. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost because of regulatory excesses in the environmental arena, whether Lisa Jackson is smart enough to realize it or honest enough to admit it. And, with crippling regulation on the way unlike anything America has seen before thanks to her, this administrator is bound and determined to rip the very heart of our beleaguered and essential industrial sector.
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