A New Solution for Unemployment

Republicans now have three knee-jerk responses to anything President Obama says: cut spending, cut taxes, cut regulations. The problem the nation is facing, though, is unemployment.

Cutting government spending means cutting the government workforce, which puts more people out there looking for jobs. Those furloughed government workers compete with unemployed private sector employees, creating more unemployment and a glut of labor, which drives down wages, reduces our standard of living and damages the retail sector, which is the engine of our economy.

Cutting taxes has been tried, and it doesn't work. Taxes are at their lowest in 50 years, and corporations are still sending jobs overseas rather than hire Americans. Why would they build factories in the United States when they can pay Chinese workers $12 a day? Companies preferentially hire immigrants for jobs in the United States (especially in programming and engineering) because these legal immigrants will work for less. And that's not even counting the millions of illegal immigrants that thousands of companies are still employing.

Cutting regulations is the latest mantra. But what effect does it have on employment? One study examined this, and found that it's minimal. Regulations create jobs in addition to destroying them -- regulators are needed and people are needed to perform the pollution abatement. Regulations that require mining operations to clean up and restore the area create jobs in forest and landscape management and toxic waste disposal.

One thing that Republicans don't mention is that companies are always involved in writing the regulations for their industries, especially during the Bush years. Many regulations are put in place to entrench the existing players and make it more difficult for new startups to compete.

What the study didn't examine is the other savings that the regulations have. Environmental regulations, in particular, are imposed specifically to reduce the number of deaths due to cancer, respiratory disease, heart disease, as well as birth defects. Since medical costs these days are so high, and Medicare and Medicaid wind up paying the bills for the sickest people, the health consequences of environmental regulations should be explicitly considered.

EPA did exactly that for the ozone rule that Obama recently deferred:

The EPA also noted that while compliance with the new rule would cost polluters between $19 billion and $90 billion a year by 2020, the benefits to human health will be worth between $13 billion and $100 billion every year.

In other words, EPA proposed regulations that would save thousands of lives and improve the quality of life for all Americans -- breathing cleaner air -- with an additional net impact of costing between $6 billion or saving $10 billion. Now I'm going to make a Republican assumption: given the nature of health care and the fact that so much of it is under the purview of government (Medicare, Medicaid and the VA), it's a good bet that good old American ingenuity will find cheaper ways to cut ozone emissions than the EPA assumed, and that health care costs will continue to increase unabated. So emissions cuts would likely save us more money across the economy than they would cost.

I was at this point in this line of reasoning when I finally saw the light: the true genius of the Republican stance against regulation. Regulation saves lives. Living people need jobs. Eliminate all regulation and more people die. Bingo! Unemployment problem solved!

Follow the logic: premature deaths from pollution-induced disease, workplace injuries, poorly designed products, and tainted food are actually a three-fold blessing:

1) Dead people reduce the unemployment problem in the most direct fashion possible.

2) Sick people need medical care, increasing the number of jobs needed in health care -- the fastest growing sector of the economy. Injured people sue, providing more jobs in the legal and private eye fields.

3) Dead people increase the number of jobs required in the burgeoning fields of mortuary science, gravedigging and cemetery maintenance.

It's not all that far-fetched an argument. It's the same one Philip Morris made when they said that smoking was a net benefit for the government of the Czech Republic. Cigarettes provide immediate tobacco tax revenue and kill smokers before they can retire, allowing the government to collect payroll taxes from young smokers who would never use that money.

It's ironic that the same people who were screaming about death panels two years ago are now blithely demanding the elimination of environmental regulations that have saved literally millions of lives over the last forty years.