In the News

Naturally, most waterfront dwellings aren’t owned by the poor. If you don’t count 2005, the year of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, in the years from 1998 to 2008, the wealthiest counties in the country filed 3 1/2 times more claims and received more than a billion dollars in claim payments than the poorest counties, reported the Institute for Policy Integrity.

Imagine you’re the CEO of a major national corporation with two million employees and 312 million customers. Now imagine having no consistent plan to revisit past decisions to determine what worked and what didn’t.

That’s how our government behaved until a year ago when President Obama put new rules in place to require review of past regulations — a process with the potential to make the government smarter. Businesses should be pleased since, in practice, this process has mostly meant the snipping away of red tape.

At least some trucking industry analysts said they expect the latest version of the hours-of-service rule to land back in federal court because the rule seems to satisfy no one.

“I think the industry’s going to challenge it, and I think there’s a good chance that the public interest groups are going to challenge it,” said Michael Livermore, executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity in the New York University School of Law.

The EPA may be underestimating the benefits of the new rules. As Michael Livermore points out, mercury is a dangerous neurotoxin for small children, and the EPA’s analysis of that danger is limited to quantifying lost future earnings due to lower IQ. But even a grinch wouldn’t pretend that the cost of this kind of neurological damage is limited to lower wages.

Much of this is due to reductions in particulate matter, not mercury, which suggests that, if anything, the EPA may be underestimating the benefits of the new rules. As Michael Livermore points out, mercury is a dangerous neurotoxin for small children, and the EPA’s analysis of that danger is limited to quantifying lost future earnings due to lower IQ. But even a grinch wouldn’t pretend that the cost of this kind of neurological damage is limited to lower wages. “There are,” says Livermore, “also risks of cognitive and social defects, negative autoimmune effects, genetic effects, and heart attacks that are not quantified.”

Now, that doesn’t mean the EPA isn’t cleaning up mercury, or that the mercury benefits are worthless. What it means is that it’s easier to put a hard number on the benefits from cleaning up particulate pollution — by totaling up the dollar value of lives saved — than it is to calculate the full value of, say, avoiding cognitive damage in young children. Scientists are still struggling to quantify the damage wreaked by mercury. And, as Michael Livermore writes, the EPA didn’t put a dollar value on various benefits from the regulation, like reducing mercury in store-bought fish, because it was too murky. The benefits may be there, but they’re not factored in.

“Power plants that are old and dirty should’ve ended their useful life already and gone out of commission,” added Michael Livermore, executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity and adjunct professor at New York University. “We live in the 21st century. We shouldn’t be using plants from 1950s.”

“The benefits of this rule outweigh the costs by a huge factor,” he said. “In fact, given the huge ratio of benefits to costs, we could make the rule even more strict and still generate even greater net benefits.”

“This is going to be have very important public health benefits for years to come,” said Michael A. Livermore, the executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, a think tank affiliated with New York University School of Law. And from an economic perspective the rule was a “slam dunk,” he said. “The benefits swamped the costs.”

Environmentalists and public health advocates have a reason to stand up and cheer: Finalized rules to cut down on mercury air pollution are set to be announced today by the EPA.

But economists can also feel good about this holiday-season gift of clean air: Two decades of agency analysis have found the EPA’s new mercury standards for power plants to be overwhelmingly cost-benefit justified. With annual compliance costs around $11 billion, and health benefits estimated to be up to $140 billion per year, even the most hard-nosed bean counter should be feeling festive.

Some folks seem to imagine that there’s a small, semi-secret team of economist-bureaucrats in the White House toiling away to scuttle environmental regulations. Others think this office of experts has unleashed a regulatory tsunami on businesses, drowning profits and washing away jobs.

There is, in fact, such a group—though it’s not doing either of those things, at least not intentionally. It’s the unsexy but important Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), charged with weighing the economics of any regulation worth more than $100 million. Carefully reviewing the cost-benefit analyses agencies perform for each major rule, these (mostly) economists look to see if the experts have accurately examined whether, say, a rule requiring new scrubbers on smokestacks is worth the price of implementation.