Life Not Worth As Much As 5 Years Ago – WTF?

Your Government is at work.  It’s HARD WORK to put a value on an American life, but by gosh, Your Government is willing to do it.  Not only are they willing to do it, but in the past five years, Your Government has downgraded the WORTH of your life by $900,000.00.

Let’s take a peek into this piece of unsavory news.

From AP:

It’s not just the American dollar that’s losing value. A government agency has decided that an American life isn’t worth what it used to be.

The “value of a statistical life” is $6.9 million in today’s dollars, the Environmental Protection Agency reckoned in May – a drop of nearly $1 million from just five years ago.

The Associated Press discovered the change after a review of cost-benefit analyses over more than a dozen years.

Though it may seem like a harmless bureaucratic recalculation, the devaluation has real consequences.

When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule. The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation, such as tighter restrictions on pollution.

 

Life Not Worth As Much, Says Gov’t Agency

EPA Says Americans Worth $900,000 Less Than They Were 5 Years Ago

Somehow, in the last five years of the Bush Administration, Your Government has decided that they no longer need to create more regulation regarding life-saving environmental issues due to the fact that since You are worth less now, the cost effectiveness of regulating and overseeing some proposals just isn’t, um, COST EFFECTIVE!

How nice!

Consider, for example, a hypothetical regulation that costs $18 billion to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At $7.8 million per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at $6.9 million per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted.

Some environmentalists accuse the Bush administration of changing the value to avoid tougher rules – a charge the EPA denies.

“It appears that they’re cooking the books in regards to the value of life,” said S. William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, which represents state and local air pollution regulators. “Those decisions are literally a matter of life and death.”

Dan Esty, a senior EPA policy official in the administration of the first President Bush and now director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, said: “It’s hard to imagine that it has other than a political motivation.”

 My emphasis

Those old strawmen, “SOME environmentalists” think that the Bush administration may be playing with the numbers in order to keep regulation of things like, oh pollution, from coming into being.  I wonder what the corporate polluters think of this idea?  I’ll bet they are just TORN over the possible impact this could have on individual American lives, don’t you?  

Even with all of the finger pointing at the Bush Administration we see above regarding this issue, the real kicker in this article for me is here.

Agency officials say they were just following what the science told them.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…..deep breath…..HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!  Gulp…

EPA Agency officials…under the Bush administration…are just following what the (HAHAHAHAHA) SCIENCE told them!

Just to sum things up.  You, American Citizen, aren’t worth a bucket of warm spit.  The SCIENCE just told me so.

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    • brobin on July 11, 2008 at 17:03
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    Wingnut science can be so full of shit.

  1. may end up dropping due to the increased pollution in the air, groundwater and soil…the lack of food inspections by the FDA… the affects of global climate change… the genetically modified foods and chemicals in our foodchain that who knows WHAT is doing to us… the presence of foodborne illnesses like Mad Cow, Bird Flu, etcetera… and the lack of access to adequate healthcare by a majority of people in our country…

    it makes sense that our life expectancy will drop, and therefore the monetary value of our lives will drop.

    Oh, did I mention that all of those things in my first paragraph have been dramatically exacerbated during the Bush administration, thanks to the “science” his admin has decided to follow?

  2. said S. William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, which represents state and local air pollution regulators. “Those decisions are literally a matter of life and death.”

    Huh!  Imagine that…

    And in local news – Massachusetts just released a warning about eating fish caught from streams and ponds… unless those fish have been stocked!  Wonder if the stocked ones have little signs on their sides?  Something like, “Feel free to eat me – I was stocked in 2008”

  3. I want to know about the devaluation for folks who live in California.  The authorities are now saying the wildfires will probably not be out before Thanksgiving.

    We can’t see. We can’t breath.  Stay inside with your doors and windows closed is the mantra we get from TV pictures with no-visibility-screens!!

    Our great heroine, Diane the Fie Fie Foe, is now calling for multi millions of dollars to recruit and train vast numbers of firefighters.

    Maybe if she hadn’t voted for the war, all the Rreserves and National Guards would have been here to help before it got to be this hopeless.

    Sincerely,

    the pig, not the wabbit…!    

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