Tuesday, June 5, 2018

The report you were supposed to miss

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) just released its annual report in March.
Until Trump’s administration makes a case that its own OMB and agencies are wrong — not just by a little, but by tens of billions of dollars — the presumption of every journalist and politico in Washington should be that there is no coherent policy rationale for Trump’s deregulatory agenda.

It is, like his health, tax, and infrastructure initiatives, simply the polar opposite of populism: the targeted transfer of wealth to the already wealthy, at the public’s expense.

[...]

[The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB)] gathered data and analysis on “major” federal regulations (those with $100 million or more in economic impact) between 2006 and 2016, a period that includes all of Obama’s administration, stopping just short of Trump’s. The final tally, reported in 2001 dollars:
*Aggregate benefits: $219 to $695 billion
*Aggregate costs: $59 to $88 billion
By even the most conservative estimate, the benefits of Obama’s regulations wildly outweighed the costs.

According to OMB — and to the federal agencies upon whose data OMB mostly relied — the core of the Trumpian case against Obama regulations, arguably the organizing principle of Trump’s administration, is false.

  Vox
Imagine that.
At least since Reagan, conservatives have had particular and growing hostility toward environmental regulations. This has proven a source of great anguish to (older) environmentalists, who lament that such regulations used to be bipartisan.

But the right-wing turn against environmental rules is no great mystery. The OMB report reveals the core reason:

[...]

Air quality regulations serve as a downward redistribution of wealth, out of the pockets of industrialists and into the pockets of ordinary Americans, particularly the poor and vulnerable Americans (African Americans and Hispanics in particular) who tend to live closest to pollution sources. They shift costs, from the much higher health and social costs of pollution remediation to the comparatively smaller costs of pollution abatement.

And therein lies the source of industry and GOP rage toward EPA. It’s why EPA delayed and delayed air rules under Bush. It’s why the GOP Congress worked so furiously to block air rules under Obama. And it’s why EPA is weakening or repealing air rules as fast as possible under Trump.

The GOP is opposed to downward redistribution of wealth. If one policy goal has unified the right above all else, it is upward redistribution. Even as its base drifts further into a fog of xenophobic, reactionary ressentiment, its moneyed interests and policy leaders remain laser-focused on reducing taxes and regulatory burdens on the wealthy. Upward redistribution is what unites GOP health care policy, tax policy, financial sector policy, and environmental policy.
Yeah, I think we knew that, too.
[Environmental regulations] don’t “kill jobs.” From the perspective of the overall economy, they don’t do much of anything to jobs, other than shift them from certain regions/industries to others. As it happens, those shifts are often unfavorable to GOP constituencies, but that’s not a license to, you know, lie about them.

[...]

GOP lawmakers shouldn’t be allowed to simply burp up the words “burdensome” and “job-killing” and move on. The OMB finds no evidence that federal regulations have any noticeable impact on aggregate national employment or economic growth. There is evidence that they produce public benefits well in excess of their costs.

If EPA head Scott Pruitt wants to say that defending children from toxics or rural communities from coal ash pollution is burdensome, he ought to offer some numbers, or evidence, or ... something. Goofy homilies are not enough. (His latest claim is that the Bible recommends the deregulatory agenda.)
Dear God.

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