Planting Shrubs in Kalamazoo
Later today the President is going to give a speech about 100 yards from my office here in Kalamazoo, the main effect of which is I won’t get to work out because they’ve decided to have him speak from the Recreation Center here.
The security here is amazing — they shut down most of the Recreation Center four days ago, and the Secret Service has been everywhere.
I wonder if Bush will give the same paramount consideration to safety of civilians the next time he decides to bomb Iraq?
Anyway, on a related topic, although I try not to be an elitist sometimes I have the feeling that I am the last conscious person left in Michigan. The hot topic with my liberal friends lately has been Bush’s gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed standards on arsenic.
For those not following that debate, an independent report a few years ago concluded that the current standard, 50 parts per billion, is probably too high, but they didn’t offer any guidance on what would be an acceptable standard because there isn’t a lot of conclusive research on such low levels, except in animal models.
So the EPA went ahead and put forth a 5 parts per billion standard which Bush killed. My liberal friends have been going on about how this is just for the evil corporations who want to dump arsenic in our water. Amazingly, not a single person who has brought this up to me as an example of a good regulation killed by corporate greed was aware that the major problem with the standard was that arsenic occurs naturally in large quantities in many Western states and the cost of complying with the new standard would have been extremely expensive — far in excess of even the most optimistic estimates of benefits.
If you look at a state like New Mexico, for example, it is not inconceivable that it could cost literally billions of dollars to bring their water treatment systems in compliance with a 5 parts per billion standard. Promulgating such expensive regulations without a clearer idea of the benefits is the worst sort of government intervention.
Tags: Brian Carnell, George W. Bush, Secret Service
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Mar 27th, 2001
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