In the News

The Institute for Policy Integrity, a non-partisan advocacy organization and policy cost-benefit analysis think tank sponsored by the New York University School of Law, is seeking expert contributors for a wiki recently launched to evaluate the actual cost of energy tax credits and how the credits impact applicable businesses.

“We can’t make smart tax policy with respect to energy development until we at least know what’s going on,” said Michael Livermore, executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity. As many in the ethanol industry have discovered during the past year’s energy subsidies debate, it is difficult to pinpoint the precise amount of tax credits that are being provided to one specific energy sector, and even more difficult to determine how the tax credit affects the industry’s performance.

So how does Exxon get away with paying such a relatively low rate? Along with other oil companies, it enjoys the rather generous tax breaks and subsidies the federal government—and the American taxpayer—sends its way. The Institute for Policy Integrity has set up a new Wiki that reveals information about many of these breaks, and how much money they help oil companies save.

President Obama’s state of the union address said a surprising amount about energy and the environment in a year where a sour economy is still his worst electoral enemy. That’s an encouraging sign, especially since opponents have been attacking him on some of his green-related decisions.

His speech was mostly focused, as expected, on job creation. The nation’s employment situation continues to be the biggest economic fallout from the economic crisis that began in 2008. For both political and policy reasons, the President is right to train his laser of attention onto getting people back to work.

In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Obama is likely to focus heavily on economic growth and job creation. But he should also make clear that economic progress need not come at the expense of the environment; to the contrary, the public-health efforts he’s made over the past year will generate billions of dollars in value for the American public.

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.