January 2012

Today’s the Day

by Sam Kazman on June 4, 2010 · 10 comments

in Health and Illness, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation

Today is National Donut Day.

Ordinarily, this would be just another cute calendar event.  But nowadays we’re bombarded by government proposals on obesity and so-called nutritional reform.  The most recent manifestation of this is Michelle Obama’s White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity, which last month released a massive report with recommendations ranging from prenatal care programs to increased support for breastfeeding to soda taxes to community planning.

Like countless other government reports, it prominently portrays obesity as a crisis; only inside the report do you find the admission that childhood obesity rates have shown “no significant increase in recent years.” (Page 4)

So how should the conscientious citizen respond to this on National Donut Day?  I say, by eating two donuts—one for himself, and one as an act of civil disobedience.

Bon appétit.

Thank You CBD: Another Reason to Nix EPA Endangerment Finding

by Marlo Lewis on June 3, 2010 · 2 comments

in Global Warming

Twice during the past six months, the eco-litigators at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) have underscored the political necessity for Congress to overturn EPA’s endangerment finding.

Yes, that is very far from CBD’s intention. CBD is a fervent defender of the endangerment finding, the December 2009 rulemaking in which EPA concluded that greenhouse emissions endanger public health and welfare.

The endangerment finding compels EPA to establish greenhouse gas emission standards for new motor vehicles, which in turn makes carbon dioxide (CO2) a “regulated air pollutant”  under the Clean Air Act, which in turn makes ”major” stationary sources of CO2 ”subject to regulation” under the Act’s Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) pre-construction permitting program and Title V operating permits program. CBD must be thrilled by the endangerment finding and the regulatory cascade it has triggered.

CBD wants EPA to follow through on all the regulatory commitments logically entailed by the endangerment finding and CO2′s new status as a “regulated air pollutant.” But that’s where things get dicey for President Obama and his congressional allies. Once the regulatory genie is out of the bottle, Obama officials may not be able to control it.

Even EPA acknowledges that applying the Act’s permitting programs to CO2 leads to “absurd results.” For example, EPA and its state counterparts would have to process 41,000 PSD permit applications per year (instead of 280) and 6.1 million Title V permits per year (instead of 14,700). The resulting administrative quagmire would paralyze environmental enforcement, slam the brakes on development, and force millions of firms to operate in legal limbo. A more potent anti-stimulus package would be hard to imagine. 

To avoid this red ink nightmare, EPA has issued a Tailoring Rule that exempts small CO2 emitters from the Act’s permitting programs for six years. However, nothing in the statute authorizes EPA to suspend or modify the permitting requirements. In reality, EPA’s Tailoring Rule is an amending rule. It’s anybody’s guess whether courts will uphold this breach of the separation of powers.

Even if they do, the endangerment finding will still endanger the U.S. economy and our constitutional system of separated powers and democratic accountability. Thank you, CBD, for bringing this peril to light!

Last December, CBD petitioned EPA to establish national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for greenhouse gases set below current atmospheric levels. CBD is only acting on the obvious implication of EPA’s assertion that endangerment comes from the “elevated concentration” of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Why should Obama and congressional leaders worry? The Clean Air Act requires states to come into attainment with a primary (health-based) NAAQS within five or at most 10 years. Yet not even a global depression lasting several decades would suffice to lower CO2 concentrations from today’s level (390 parts per million) to the stabilization target (350 parts per million) demanded by CBD and its co-petitioners. Because EPA may not take compliance costs into account when establishing NAAQS, the endangerment finding sets the stage for eco-litigators to transform the Act into a de-industrialization mandate.  No elected official wants to take ownership of so crazy a policy. If CBD prevails, however, Obama and the Democrats — the Party of Endangerment — will be left holding the bag. 

Yesterday, CBD filed suit to overturn EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s reconsideration of her predecessor Stephen Johnson’s memorandum determining when a pollutant is “subject to regulation” under the PSD program. Jackson’s reconsideration held that a pollutant is subject to regulation not when EPA finalizes an emissions control rulemaking but when the rule takes effect. Since EPA’s greenhouse gas motor vehicle standards rule does not take effect until January 2011, Jackson concluded that EPA may not regulate greenhouse gases from stationary sources until then. CBD says EPA should have started already to regulate large emitters via PSD.

CBD’s lawsuit makes EPA regulation of greenhouse gases a real-time issue for this Congress, not just a post-election issue for the next Congress. It increases the pressure on Democrats to get the monkey off their back. If courts strike down Jackson’s reconsideration, they will be more likely to strike down the Tailoring Rule, which undeniably flouts statutory language. Courts will also be more likely to look favorably on CBD’s NAAQS petition, which simply demands that EPA, having made an endangerment finding, follow the letter of the law.   

Democratic Senators who don’t want to bet their political futures on EPA’s ability to control the cascading effects of greenhouse gas regulation under the Clean Air Act – or who simply believe that climate policy is too important to be made by non-elected bureaucrats, trial lawyers, and activist judges appointed for life – will soon get their opportunity.

On June 10, the Senate will vote on a resolution of disapproval (S.J.Res.26), sponsored by Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, to nullify the legal force and effect of EPA’s endangerment finding. If enacted, S.J.Res.26 will:

  1. Avert the threat of an administrative meltdown under the PSD and Title V programs.
  2. Avert the threat of sky-is-the-limit, money-is-no-object regulation of greenhouse gases via the NAAQS program.
  3. Avoid the need for EPA to play lawmaker and ’amend” a statute it is supposed merely to administer.

Most importantly, enacting Sen. Murkowski’s resolution will ensure that the big decisions about the content and direction of national policy are made by the people’s representatives, as the Constitution requires.

Obama exploits oil spill to boost support for climate bill

by Michael Fumento on June 3, 2010 · 1 comment

in Energy, Global Warming

“President Obama tried Wednesday to channel public outrage about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill into support for a climate-change bill, seeking to redefine an issue that threatens to tarnish his presidency,” according to the Washington Post.

I’ve written on how absolutely anything, and I do mean anything, can and has been used to show the ill impact of global warming, including:

Brain-eating amoebae, brothels struggle, cannibalism, circumcision in decline, Earth to explode, earth upside down, football team migration, Garden of Eden wilts, invasion of king crabs, Italy robbed of pasta, killer cornflakes, Loch Ness monster dead, mammoth dung melt, opera house to be destroyed, seals mating more, spiders invade Scotland, squid larger, squid tamed, UFO sightings, Vampire moths, violin decline, witchcraft executions.

Now it appears absolutely anything can be used as an excuse to pass climate change legislation. I think we should all help our president by coming up with even more reasons! I’ll start it off and you can send your contributions, which I can then post and subsequently hand deliver to our Chief Executive. The best will probably be those that relate in some way specifically to Obama.

  • The pet dog, Bo, piddled the carpet in the Oval office.
  • “Those idiot birthers just won’t quit!”
  • “30 Rock” last night was a rerun.
  • Obama saw a cloud formation that looked just like global warming.
  • His organic bread turned green overnight. (No, wait! That happened to me!)
  • “Those damned “v1agra” and “V!agra” emails are getting through the spam filter.
  • Michelle had “a headache” last night.
  • To honor veterans of the Seminole Indian War.
  • Obama had the strangest dream in which cute little bunnies became man-eating snails.
  • They’ve released another DVD edition of The Wizard of Oz.

Temperance Smokescreen and HR 5034

by Angela Logomasini on June 3, 2010

in Nanny State, Personal Liberty

Various parties—from distributors to retailers in states where supermarket sales are banned—claim that alcohol regulations safeguard public health and protect children by limiting access to these products.

A bill before Congress–H.R. 5034–supposedly would promote “temperance and orderly markets” by empowering states to increase regulations. “Easy and cheap access to alcohol isn’t the answer” noted Craig Wolf, president of the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America (WSWA) at congressional hearings earlier this year related to a draft of this bill. The WSWA apparently thinks that such access is a problem: [W]e know this from the many social ills that deregulation has brought on in the United Kingdom,” explained Wolf. In addition, government officials also make these arguments when fighting proposed privatization of government liquor stores.

But the “temperance” argument appears to be little more than a smokescreen. A study soon to be published by the Virginia Public Policy Institute by Donald J. Boudreaux and Julia C. Williams found that increased consumer access to alcohol via private versus public stores has no relationship to binge drinking or alcohol-related deaths.

The study compares states where at least some kinds of alcohol (often simply spirits) are sold only in government stores (so-called “control states”) to states where all alcohol is sold in private establishments (so-called “license states”).

Their data strongly question the “temperance” arguments used to justify government controls. A summary appears in the Richmond Times Dispatch that is worth quoting here at length:

[W]e compared the 18 states that “control” alcohol distribution by directly running retail or wholesale establishments with the 32 states and the District of Columbia that simply license private retailers and wholesalers. Our goal is to see if the “control” states do in fact suffer fewer alcohol-related health and social problems than do the “license” states.

The answer is no.

In control states, for the years 2001-2005, an average of 33.79 persons per 100,000 population died each year from alcohol-related causes. In license states this figure is 34.64. The figure for the U.S. as a whole is 34.34.
Clearly, states that directly run alcohol-distribution operations suffer as many alcohol-related deaths as do states that do not run any such operations.

What about more narrowly defined alcohol-related problems, such as binge drinking? (Binge drinking is defined, rather vaguely, by the National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse as the consumption of five or more drinks for a male, or four or more drinks for a female, during a single “occasion.”) Even here, the data lend no support to those who assert that liberalizing alcohol distribution will cause more problems.

In control states, 9.95 percent of 12-17 year olds binge drink. In license states the figure is 10.17. The national average is 10.09 percent. For 18-25 year olds, binge-drinking rates average 42.77 percent in control states and 44.02 in license states. The national average for this age group is 43.58 percent.

As with total alcohol-related deaths, there is no statistically significant difference between the averages of these figures for control states and those for license states.

What about drunk-driving fatalities? Here, too, there is no difference between control states and license states. The average annual number of drunk-driving fatalities for control states was 31.06 per 100 driving fatalities in 2008; the average annual number of drunk-driving fatalities for license states in 2008 was 31.85. The national average was 31.57.

Boudreaux and Williams conclude that public health and safety are not valid grounds to deny privatization and liberalization of alcohol markets, actions that would benefit consumers and local economies. Indeed, nor do such arguments justify H.R. 5034, which could lead to regulations on direct shipping to consumers and possibly many other foolish laws. For more background on HR 5034, see StopHR5034.

States fold/double down on gambling in light of new regs

by Michelle Minton on June 3, 2010

in Odds & Ends

Many in the Internet gambling industry are skeptical about the impact that the new gambling laws, which went into full effect this Tuesday, will have on the industry. However, the compliance deadline seems to have prompted many states into taking major leaps on the issue of Internet gambling; some good, some bad, most mixed.

Internet gambling is still not illegal. It is perhaps the most ubiquitous myth about online play, that it was ever illegal or that the new UIGEA regulations make online gambling a crime. As I explained in my research paper The Truth About Online Gambling, Online gambling is not a criminal offense. That is, unless states explicitly make it a criminal offense. So far, only one state has gone to that extreme: Washington.

Washington State:

Last week, the Poker Players Alliance staged a rally outside of the Washington State Supreme Court which was hearing arguments to strike down a state law that makes Internet poker a class c felony. That could get a player up to five years behind bars and a $10,000 fine. Lee Rousso, the Poker Players Alliance Washington director filed a suit declaring the law unconstitutional under the commerce clause.

“This law is not about the legislature protecting the state’s citizens, but rather about protecting special interests and tribal casinos from competition.” The state has legal card rooms and casinos.” said PPA Chairman Alfonse D’Amato.

In a random poll of 400 Washington state voters, they found 79% oppose the law making criminals of online poker players. It could take 6-9 months for the court to issue a ruling.

Massachusetts:

Lawmakers in Massachusetts made an attempt in April to criminalize online poker in a bill that, not surprisingly, simultaneously licensed 2 new casinos in the state. Luckily the language in the bill criminalizing online poker was taken out.

California:

Meanwhile, California lawmakers voted this week for a bill that legalizes online gambling in a very limited parameters, by allowing the state DOJ to award three licenses to California operators for 5 years each.

The effects of UIGEA have yet to be seen, but it is certainly forcing discussion of the issue. As always, players should be very careful not to jump at the first prospect of legalization on such a limited basis. Like the ugly girl at the prom who’ll dance with the first guy who asks, overly-eager online gamblers might end up getting their toes stepped on.

Regulation of the Day 139: Mailing Fake Grenades

by Ryan Young on June 3, 2010

in Personal Liberty, Regulation, Regulation of the Day

According to a new United States Postal Service regulation, all fake grenades and other “replica or inert explosive devices,” must be sent via Registered Mail.

You must also write ‘‘REPLICA EXPLOSIVE’’ on the package “using at least 20 point type or letters at least 1?4-inch high.”

Unlike most Regulations of the Day, this makes some sense. Many a post office has shut down because of false bomb scares. An uncle sending his nephew a birthday present could theoretically grind a major city’s mail service to a halt.

That isn’t the uncle’s fault; it’s the hyper-sensitive post-9/11 security mindset’s fault. Sadly, that mindset won’t be going away any time soon. This rule will hopefully prevent some false positives . Labeling the package lets postal workers know that they need not freak out. The Registered Mail requirement allows postal workers to verify that the grenades are, indeed, harmless.

Of course, the new rule treats the symptom, not the disease. It should hopefully reduce the amount of unnecessary bomb scares. But the real problem is the ingrained human habit of over-reacting to terrorism.

Terrorist attacks are extraordinarily rare, and need to be treated that way. Until common sense awakens from its post-9/11 slumber, this regulation may actually do some good.

Or the terrorists could start shipping grenades via UPS.

Obama Administration Pushes More Bailouts at Taxpayer Expense; America to Bail Out Corrupt Union Pension Funds

by Hans Bader on June 2, 2010 · 2 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Employment, International, Personal Liberty, Regulation, Stimulus to Nowhere

The Obama administration and its congressional allies are now pushing for billions more in bailouts for mismanaged union pension  funds, and teachers unions.

The union pension bailout bill “would transfer tens of billions of dollars worth of retiree liabilities” from unions “to taxpayers.”  It would bail out the massively underfunded pension fund of the SEIU, a corrupt left-wing union that uses mobs to intimidate, and occasionally beat up, its critics and creditors. (The SEIU serves as a security force for Obama allies and liberal Congressmen seeking to keep Tea Party protesters away from their events.)  The union pension funds are estimated to be underfunded by $165 billion.

The Obama administration is also proposing a multi-billion dollar teacher bailout sought by the teachers’ unions.  Although education spending per student has quadrupled, after inflation, since 1960, and teacher class sizes have shrunk considerably, the Obama administration wants to increase spending even further to prevent states from laying off any teachers.  Even the The Washington Post, which endorsed Obama and has endorsed every Democratic presidential candidate since 1952, considers this unwise and financially reckless “wasteful spending.”  (The SAT has been “recentered” in recent years to hide the fact that SAT scores have effectively gone down even as education spending has skyrocketed.  My 1986 SAT score of 1520 out of 1600 would be a perfect 1600 on the relevant portions of today’s SAT, thanks to “recentering.”)  Ironically, no additional spending would be needed to prevent layoffs if teachers would simply accept small pay cuts.  (The average school teacher in Montgomery County, Maryland, makes $76,483 in base pay–which hasn’t stopped school officials from threatening to sue the County for supposedly inadequate school funding.)

While pushing an unnecessary teacher bailout, the administration has shown little interest in the plight of the unemployed.  It deliberately removed from the $800 billion stimulus package billions in transportation spending that would have stimulated the economy, after feminist leaders complained that such projects would employ blue-collar men, many of whom are now unemployed (80 percent of those who have lost their jobs in the recession are men).   The transportation spending was replaced with wasteful welfare spending, and other provisions of the stimulus package largely repealed the limits on welfare passed in the reforms of 1996.

The Obama administration earlier lifted a $400 billion limit on bailouts for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two mortgage giants known as the Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs). It was just the beginning: “Late last year, the Obama administration pledged to cover unlimited losses through 2012 for Freddie and Fannie,” reports The New York Times.

At the direction of the Obama administration, Freddie Mac ran up more than $30 billion in losses to bail out mortgage borrowers, some of whom have high incomes. Federal regulators sought to make Freddie Mac hide the resulting losses from the SEC and the public.

Fannie and Freddie helped spawn the mortgage crisis by buying up risky mortgages and repackaging them as prime mortgages, thus creating an artificial market for junk. ”From the time Fannie and Freddie began buying risky loans as early as 1993, they routinely misrepresented the mortgages they were acquiring, reporting them as prime when they had characteristics that made them clearly subprime.” They paid their CEOs millions, and engaged in massive accounting fraud–$6.3 billion at Fannie Mae alone–to increase the size of their managers’ bonuses. As Government-Sponsored Enterprises, they were exempt from the capital requirements that apply to private banks, so they did not have enough reserves to cover their losses when their mortgages started defaulting.

The Obama administration refuses to reform these mortgage giants, saying it is “too hard” to do. Earlier, Senate Democrats blocked reform of the mortgage giants in a party-line vote.

(Obama received $125,000 in contributions from these mortgage giants as a Senator, second only to the corrupt Senator Chris Dodd, who is retiring this year due to his financial scandals. Dodd is the chief drafter of the financial “reform” bill.)

The financial “reform” bills recently passed by the House and Senate do nothing to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But they will increase pressure on banks to make risky loans in depressed neighborhoods, and increase credit card costs.

The Obama administration also recently provided billions for the international bailout of Greece, which came close to bankruptcy thanks to its socialist policies and pensions for people who retire as early as age 50 (in many ordinary occupations, like hairdressers).

Regulation of the Day 138: Dwile Flonking

by Ryan Young on June 2, 2010

in Culture, Nanny State, Regulation, Regulation of the Day

Britons sure do seem to have a lot of time on their hands. Take, for example, the colorfully-named pastime of dwile flonking. Players soak a rag in beer and put it on top of a pole. Then they use the pole to hurl the rag at other players.

A player who misses twice in a row is called a “flonker.” Flonkers are required to drink a beer before the opposing team can pass the errant rag all the way around him in a circle.

This year’s dwile flonking world championship was to be held in Norfolk. Then regulators got involved. As one can tell by the rules, dwile flonking is a drinking game. And drinking games are forbidden now. Legislation passed earlier this year banning them.

The American journalist H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism as “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” He may as well have been talking about regulators.

And thanks to the new Puritanism, the world may never know who the world’s top dwile flonkers are.

BP: A “Serial Environmental Criminal” With Close Ties To The Obama Administration

by Hans Bader on June 2, 2010

in Agriculture, Economy, Energy, Environment, Ethanol, Global Warming, Health and Illness, International, Natural Resources, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere, Trade, Zeitgeist

BP, which is responsible for the terrible oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, has a safety record infinitely worse than other oil companies, which make safety a priority in drilling for oil.  ABC News reports that “BP ran up 760 ‘egregious, willful’ safety violations, while Sunoco and Conoco-Phillips each had eight, Citgo had two and Exxon had one comparable citation.”  Exxon, the oil company most critical of global warming hysteria, had the best safety record.  BP’s record is so bad that it has been described as a “serial environmental criminal.”

While other companies have invested money in safety, BP has “invested heavily” in an environmentally-conscious advertising campaign that brands the company as “Beyond Petroleum,” and until recently spent money lobbying for the global-warming bill backed by the Obama administration, a bill full of  corporate welfare dressed up as “green energy.”   The company’s advertising campaign successfully duped consumers into viewing it as “the greenest oil company.”

Earlier, the Obama administration ignored the pleas of Louisiana’s governor to allow Louisiana to build barrier islands to contain the damage from the oil spill, insisting that any such islands should be built, if at all, only after a slow and complicated regulatory process that could take years.

Democratic strategist James Carville, who was raised in Louisiana, called Obama’s handling of the oil spill “lackadaisical” and “unbelievable” in its “stupidity.”

The Obama administration granted BP a waiver from environmental regulations in April 2009.  Obama received lots of campaign contributions from BP.  ABC News reports that the “top recipient of BP-related donations during the 2008 cycle was President Barack Obama himself, who collected $71,000.”

The $800 billion stimulus package is using taxpayer subsidies to replace U.S. jobs with foreign green jobs. Its regulations are destroying jobs in America’s export sector.

The global warming legislation backed by President Obama would also drive jobs overseas, since it would impose a costly cap-and-trade carbon rationing scheme on American industry, while leaving foreign plants operated by multinational corporations unregulated.  That’s one reason why many big companies with plants overseas are lobbying for the global-warming legislation, which would give them an advantage over competitors that make their products largely in America.

Although Obama and other backers of this “cap-and-trade” concept claim it will cut greenhouse gas emissions, it may perversely increase them by driving industry overseas to places with fewer environmental regulations, resulting in dirtier air, and damage to forests and water supplies.   It would enrich politically-connected corporations, and result in massive destruction of the world’s forests.

By expanding ethanol subsidies and mandates, it would cause enormous “damage to water supplies, soil health and air quality.” Ethanol subsidies have already resulted in forests being destroyed in the Third World.

The Washington Examiner earlier explained how the global warming bill would cause deforestation by expanding ethanol subsidies, and thus increase greenhouse gas emissions in the long run.  Obama’s so-called “cap-and-trade” bill is full of pay-offs for special interests.

Did Congress Intend for EPA to Regulate CO2 through the Clean Air Act?

by Marlo Lewis on June 1, 2010 · 1 comment

in Global Warming

On June 10, the Senate will debate and vote on S.J.Res.26, a resolution of disapproval sponsored by Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to stop EPA from ‘enacting’ controversial global warming policies through the regulatory back door.

S.J.Res.26 would overturn the legal force and effect of EPA’s endangerment finding, a December 2009 rulemaking in which the agency concluded that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. The endangerment finding is both trigger and precedent for sweeping policy changes Congress never approved. America could end up with a bundle of greenhouse gas regulations more costly and intrusive than any climate bill or treaty the Senate has declined to pass or ratify, yet without the people’s representatives ever voting on it.

Of course, not everbody sees it that way. In a recent letter urging Senators to vote against the Murkowski resolution, former EPA Administrator Russell Train contends that Congress did intend for EPA to regulate greenhouse gases through the Clean Air Act. His argument may be summarized as follows: 

  1. Congress enacted the Clean Air Act.
  2. The Act requires EPA to regulate air pollutants which in its judgment endanger public health or welfare.
  3. EPA has determined that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare.
  4. Therefore, Congress intended for EPA to regulate greenhouse gases.
  5. Hence, S.J.Res.26 would “roll back” and “undermine” the Clean Air Act.

A moment’s reflection, however, reveals that this argument is an empty suit. All it proves is that EPA has jumped through the requisite procedural hoops, which nobody disputes. It in no way demonstrate that Congress intended for EPA to regulate greenhouse gases.

As I explain today on MasterResource.Org, the free-market energy blog, Train ignores the obvious:

  1. Congress did not design the Clean Air Act to be a framework for climate policy.
  2. Congress has never voted for the Act to be used as such a framework.
  3. Applying the Clean Air Act to carbon dioxide leads to “absurd results” — regulatory consequences that conflict with and undermine congressional intent, as even EPA admits.
  4. Unless stopped, EPA will be in a position to determine the stringency of fuel economy standards for the auto industry, set climate policy for the nation, and even ‘amend’ portions of the Clean Air Act (to avoid some, but not all, absurd results). These are powers Congress never delegated to EPA.

The importance of the vote on S.J.Res.26 is hard to exaggerate. Nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional system of separated powers and democratic accountability hangs in the balance.

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