Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson let the cat out of the bag this morning during her first-ever testimony before a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee since voters returned Republicans to the majority.
Seems that Jackson cited a study by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) to justify her agency’s claim that regulating greenhouse gases will actually boost the economy by creating jobs.
The idea is that when the federal government creates more new regulations, the private businesses that have to comply with those regulations often have to hire compliance specialists, or others who can perform whatever duties are required to be in compliance and to report that compliance to the government, so that the new regulation doesn’t also create new work for the company’s lawyers, if the company indeed has lawyers, which of course it does due to the necessity of complying with the old federal regulations …
Let me just catch my breath here …
Okay, so Institute for Energy Research economist Robert Murphy heard Jackson’s claim and pointed out something absolutely amazing – we can make unemployment disappear in an instant merely by issuing enough new federal regulations that businesses will have to hire millions of new employees to comply!
Government. Regulations. Genius!
Okay, Murphy does a much job than I of explaining why the Jackson/PERI assertion ranks right up there with Henry George’s Single Tax obsession in logic and grounding in reality:
“To demonstrate the problem with this approach, we’ll do the folks at PERI one better. To repeat their argument: they are claiming that the EPA’s new pollution regulations will create 640,000 years of work directly flowing from the need to comply with the new rules.
“But if that’s supposed to be a good thing, then why not pass a further regulation specifying that anyone performing upgrades to power plants must work with one hand tied behind his back?
“We haven’t done a formal simulation as the PERI folks have done, but we bet our augmented regulations would easily require 2 million years of work directly in the generation sector.
“So the IER plan creates far more jobs than the modest EPA proposal, especially when you factor in the indirect benefits flowing to the massage therapists who have a surge in arm and hand cramps to deal with.”
For more from IER on PERI and related matters, go here.
