Let not your hearts be troubled, my friends; I'm sure this is meant to "aid the middle class".
Somehow:
The Obama administration on Wednesday proposed stricter curbs on ground-level ozone, a pollutant linked to several serious health conditions, in a move industry groups said would place a heavy burden on the U.S. economy.
The Environmental Protection Agency said it would set National Ambient Air Quality Standard between 65 and 70 parts per billion concentration of ozone and consider public comments on standards within a 60 to 75 ppb range.
The EPA must finalize the rule by October. It will replace the current standard of 75 ppb set in 2008. [emphases added]
First off, ozone is a "pollutant" like carbon dioxide is a "pollutant". Which is to say, ozone is not a "pollutant".
Secondly, seventy-five parts per billion isn't low enough? Even EPA admits that attempting to lower the standard to sixty parts per billion at insane, totally counterproductive cost (an estimated additional $270 billion a year, which private industry can't just have Janet Yellen print up) will only improve air quality - which is already plenty clean, thank you very much - "slightly". Which is to say, negligible at best, and most likely, not at all. So why not eliminate "ground-level ozone" altogether? Why do things in half-measures?
The same way it will destroy still more real-as-roast-beef jobs, assuming any remain:
House Speaker John Boehner quickly ripped the "massive new regulation" as a job killer and the "most expensive rule ever proposed by the EPA."
"If implemented, it would also undercut our ability to use America’s energy boom to reset our country’s economic foundation, revitalize manufacturing, and put more Americans back to work," he said.
"Americans have made clear to the president that his priorities are not theirs, and this is precisely the kind of misguided policy they rejected earlier this month," Boehner added in a statement. "The new American Congress will continue listening to the American people, and take action to protect middle-class families, and our economy, from the Obama administration’s regulatory onslaught.”
Speaking on Newsmax TV's "America's Forum" former Pennsylvania-16 Representative Robert Walker said the Obama administration’s stricter ozone regulations is further proof that the White House is more concerned with expanding government and power than they are with creating jobs.
"The fact is these regulations will choke off a large portion of our economy," Walker said. "They will, at the very least, create huge expenses of business to invest in meeting the terms of the regulations and those costs will be at the expense of American jobs."
Just so. And the best part is, it's not as visible as killing Keystone XL was, and will further, inexorably indenture the moribund middle class to welfare dependency beyond any capability of the equally moribund U.S. economy to save them. And a lot of them, who voted for Barack Obama twice, after all, will never even realize the tyrannical injustice that's been done to them, as they step outside the door of their public housing project, dodge the whizzing bullets, and take an appreciative whiff of the clean(er) air.
And still, economics has its "nature red of tooth and claw" aspects as well. Everything has a cost, and some commodities - like "clean(er)" air - come at such a ludicrously prohibitive cost for whatever miniscule gains are made for it as to be clearly economically insane. Which is why the Regime keeps the cost invisible, and vilifies the voices - "Big Business" - who do see it and speak up.
The EPA has no legal or constitutional right to exist in any case. But it's the insufferable moral supremacy coupled with the spirit of piracy that at least as much makes EPA deserving of being stamped out for good - which would be worth doing even with two lungsful of "ground-based ozone".
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