Barrasso: Red Tape Increases Unemployment & Threatens Public Health “If we want to make Americans healthy, we need to get Americans back to work. We need to get the EPA out of the business of making folks unemployed across this country.”
BigNews.Biz - May 12,2012 - Barrasso: Red Tape Increases Unemployment & Threatens Public Health
“If we want to make Americans healthy, we need to get Americans back to work. We need to get the EPA out of the business of making folks unemployed across this country.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Ranking Member of the Senate Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety, spoke on the floor of the U.S. Senate about his Subcommittee report entitled “Red Tape Making Americans Sick” which details the health impacts of high unemployment. The report specifically cites several studies that show that extreme regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cost Americans their jobs and their health.
Excerpts of his remarks are below:
“This Administration, after nearly four years, has failed to get this country and our economy moving again. Even worse as I look at it, this Administration seems to be taking steps that appear to be and methodically and deliberately sabotaging certain parts of our nation’s economy.
“They are doing this in sectors of the economy that apparently to me, they just don’t like—and they’re doing it by issuing thousands and thousands of pages of red tape on the very people in this country that have in the past, successfully created jobs for Americans.
“This Administration has finalized 1,330 rules that have been deemed what’s called ‘economically significant.’ They’ve proposed over 1,300 additional economically significant rules.
“So what does this mean, this term ‘economically significant?’ Well, those are rules that will have an annual impact on the economy of $100 million or more.
“57 coal fired power plants have already announced their closure because of the ‘cumulative effect’ of these rules on just this one industry.
“The EPA is proposing regulations on whole sectors of the economy, whether it is issuing new storm water regulations for existing buildings to requiring costly Clean Water Act permits They’re doing this for ditches on family farms.
“Thousands of American jobs have already been lost, and others are on the chopping block, just due to these rules. Each time that the EPA claims that the benefits of their rules vastly outweigh the costs. The costs are always in real dollars to the economy and the benefits are unknown.
“The Administration claims the benefits are in so called ‘saved future health care costs.’
“The EPA and this Administration has a history of understating the costs and overstating in my opinion the benefits. The EPA’s math on the benefits and costs of their rules is not even close to being accurate.
“Now this has been verified in testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which I serve as a member.
“The EPA rules that set new burdensome limits on emissions of pollutants such as carbon dioxide, mercury or sulfur dioxide, well those can have serious costs to plants and factories that then have to upgrade their facilities with costly equipment or simply close to be under the new standards.
“Those reductions yield few quantifiable benefits to the economy,
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