Confronting Washington’s Job-Killers
Federal Regulations Stymie Economic Growth and Industry
The news that the Environmental Protection Agency prevented early clean-up of floating oil in the Gulf by refusing to waive its “clean water” limit of 15 parts per million should make us all focus on the job killing structure in Washington, D.C. Just three days after the BP spill, the Dutch government offered their oil-skimming ships and ocean oil-cleansing technology, but were rejected because the cleaned ocean water would not reach the EPA’s limits of being 99.9985 percent pure. Imagine if even half the oil had been skimmed off; the rest probably would not have even reached shore because oil degrades quickly in warm ocean water. But because oil did reach the shore, Washington ordered a moratorium on all deep water drilling over 500 feet in the Gulf, and a moratorium on all offshore drilling in Alaska and off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. In Louisiana, the order is causing an estimated loss of tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of oil production over the next two years. Blue-collar jobs on Gulf oil rigs earn an average of $60,000 per year.
An economic crisis with high unemployment is the best time to confront and even possibly reform Washington’s job-killing laws. Most Americans are either uninformed about the quantity and consequences of these laws or they regard them as normal. So now is the time to recognize, enumerate, and challenge the worst of them. But to reform bad laws, first you need to get them debated in public.
And now… the rest of the story. …..
Harold
