The House continues
moving forward with bills to gut the government's ability to adopt new regulations on environmental, workplace and other hazards. Like every other bullshit move Republicans make to hand over more power to corporations, this one is branded as being about jobs: If corporations didn't have to spend money keeping pollutants out of the air and workers from being pulled into machinery and killed, they'd use that money to create jobs. (Pay no attention to the huge piles of cash corporations are already sitting on without using it to create jobs.)
The Economic Policy Institute reminds us how wrong those claims are. First off,
- Government data show that the benefits of regulations over time have significantly and consistently exceeded their costs [...] OMB’s latest such estimate...finds that the combined benefits of the major regulations reviewed by OMB between fiscal 2001 and fiscal 2010 amounted to $132 billion to $655 billion a year, far exceeding their estimated costs of $44 billion to $62 billion a year. [...]
- A favorite talking point of regulatory opponents this year has been that the total cost of federal regulations amounts to $1.75 trillion a year. This figure comes from The Impact of Regulatory Costs on Small Firms, a September 2010 study for the Small Business Administration by Nicole V. Crain and W. Mark Crain. But the estimate is a gross exaggeration. It has been debunked by multiple sources, including the Congressional Research Service[.]
Additionally, as we've heard before, regulations don't cause a loss of jobs. If anything, regulations create jobs. No amount of evidence on this will stop House Republicans from saying regulations kill jobs. But the more evidence mounts up, the more obvious their ploy is.