A Tale Of Two Reports

Ed Morrisey over at Hot Air claims to have gotten as exclusive look at a new report from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that is, according to his death knell rhetoric, sounding an alarm that means virtually all industries are in danger because of proposed new EPA regulations.

The new standard for boilers, titled “National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants for Major Sources: Industrial, Commercial, and Institutional Boilers and Process Heaters” and called the Boiler MACT, creates a standard that literally no producer in the US meets at the moment. The industry group Industrial Energy Consumers of America (IECA) represents end-user firms that employ 750,000 in various industries, and they concur.

What happens when the installed boilers don’t meet the new standard? Factories and other facilities will have to close, putting jobs in danger and firms already hammered by the recession will lose production days — which will destroy jobs. That’s why the United Steel Workers have sounded the alarm, insisting that the EPA’s proposal will mean disaster.

Morrissey then goes on to talk about cement producers in the United States and how they would see their production output decreased by up to 15% if these regulations were put into effect.

But here's where his hysteria is misplaced. Regulations of this nature are always given time to take effect, thereby allowing various sections of industry to come into compliance. Morrissey is literally framing this in a way that gives the very misleading perception that when and if these new EPA rules take effect that the next day, virtually all factories and plants will shut down with no time given to come into compliance.

But not only are Morrissey's claims laughable, so is the study done by CIBO ( Council of Industrial Boiler Owners ) as it misleads and misrepresents the information with a junk economic model.

There's another proposal that Ed Morrissey should look into - the GOP's Two Step Job Creation Plan. The "plan" focuses on two areas: cutting spending and fully extending the Bush ear tax cuts for the top earners in the US.

According to the study, this will have just as chilling effect on jobs as Morrissey falsely believes that new EPA regulations will:

• Relative to the president’s budget request, the plan would reduce funding for domestic programs—which include
investments in infrastructure, education, and research—by 22.7%, while extending the Bush tax cuts for top earners.

• The Boehner plan would reduce the deficit by less than 5.5% in 2011.

• Because reductions in spending are larger than the tax cuts, and because tax cuts for upper-income taxpayers are poor
stimulus, the net job impact of the Boehner plan would be an estimated employment reduction of over 1 million jobs.

One would think that a body like that GOP, who is allegedly concerned about unemployment in this country, would take these factors into consideration the same as they did in their report on new EPA regulations. Apparently not.