More Job-Killing Rules from EPA
Having already done yeoman’s work stifling economic growth and job
creation, President Obama and his Environmental Protection Agency are
doubling down again.The United States created a measly 38,000 new jobs in May: one for every 8,000 Americans. Its labor force participation rate is a horrid 63% – meaning 93 million Americans are not working, while 6.4 million more are trying to feed their families on involuntary part-time positions and a fraction of their previous salaries. Manufacturing lost another 20,000 jobs in May, as the economy grew at an almost stagnant 0.8% the first quarter of 2016. Middle class family incomes and net worth continue to slide.
Meanwhile, well-paid federal bureaucrats increasingly regulate our lives, hand down fines and jail terms for some 5,000 federal crimes and 300,000 criminal offenses, and inflict $1.9 trillion in annual regulatory compliance costs on families and businesses, on top of $1.8 trillion in taxes.
EPA’s war on coal has already cost thousands of jobs in mines, power plants and dependent businesses. Low oil prices amid a tepid, over-regulated, climate-fixated, crony-corporatist American, European and international economy have already killed thousands of US oil patch jobs.
On June 3 EPA issued a bundle of new rules: methane emission standards for new and modified oil and natural gas drilling, fracking, pipeline and other operations. Under steady environmentalist pressure, it may be only a matter of time before the agency expands the rules to cover older operations – and maybe even livestock, rice growing, landfills, sewage treatment plants and other methane-emitting activities.
