EPA Gave Volkswagen a Free Pass On Emissions Ten Years Ago Due To Lack of Budget 203
An anonymous reader writes: A new report suggests that continuing cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency's budget contributed to Volkswagen being able to cheat on its emissions tests. When the test scripts were developed the department — which can still only conduct 'spot tests' on 20% of all qualifying vehicles — was forced to concentrate on heavy machinery and truck manufacturers, which at the time had a far higher incidence of attempting to cheat on vehicle standards tests. Discounting inflation the EPA's 2015 budget is on a par with its 2002 budget (PDF), and has been cut by 21% since 2010.
Endlessly Increasing Budgets (Score:2, Interesting)
Why do we assume that all government agencies need an endlessly increasing budget to do their job? Why do we accept endlessly increasing government budgets? We have a kneejerk belief that money fixes everything, but it seems only to bring more corruption, entitlement and fewer freedoms.
Re:Endlessly Increasing Budgets (Score:5, Informative)
To put it into human terms, it's like if you have a $100,000/year salary, but you are not allowed to spend more than $10,000/year on rent. You're probably not going to be very happy with that kind of income but being limited to a residence that costs $833/month or less.
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True enough. Although, to be honest, it can be difficult to make that work due to government regulations on things like investment and ownership of things.
The government makes it very difficult on itself to make money on anything that doesn't come from some sort of tax or fee.
Of course, on the other hand, do you want agencies having sources of cash outside what Congress gives them? While much more efficient, it would also make the agency effectively independent of Congressional control.
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I think that we're a little past the acceptable level of, "within the finely-nuanced letter of the law depending on a particular interpretation of some keywords," to where I'm starting to wonder if violating the intent of the law in some of these cases should be enough for heads to roll.
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Population is expanding?
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Why do we assume that all government agencies need an endlessly increasing budget to do their job? Why do we accept endlessly increasing government budgets? We have a kneejerk belief that money fixes everything, but it seems only to bring more corruption, entitlement and fewer freedoms.
There is this concept of inflation [wikipedia.org]. It works for the universe [wikipedia.org] and pretty much everything else except, apparently, intelligence.
Re:Endlessly Increasing Budgets (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Endlessly Increasing Budgets (Score:5, Insightful)
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Is the federal budget just growing at an inflationary rate? It is not.
Since about 2002, Federal outlays have been growing as a percentage of GDP pretty steadily. I'm not talking about the deficit or absolute dollar amounts. Percentage of GDP takes into account inflation automatically.
https://www.cbo.gov/publicatio... [cbo.gov]
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And how much of that increase is military spending?
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I could associate that sort of ignorance to a certain demographic, a certain political mind-set...
The ignorance and "black and white" worldview that clouds any sort of nuanced discussion about things like the Federal Budget process.
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Why do we assume that all government agencies need an endlessly increasing budget to do their job? Why do we accept endlessly increasing government budgets? We have a kneejerk belief that money fixes everything, but it seems only to bring more corruption, entitlement and fewer freedoms.
The population grows meaning more people to serve. Inflation causes costs to go up. It's true that just throwing money at a problem doesn't necessarily fix it but it's also true that spending too little money on a problem is a sure way to not fix it.
On par with 2002 budget (Score:2)
Why would they need more money now on an inflation adjusted basis then 2002?
Re:On par with 2002 budget (Score:4, Informative)
Because they didn't have enough money to test the cars properly in 2002...
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Lots of people and organizations don't have enough money for everything they want. They have to prioritize. Maybe test some more cars instead of bullying farmers [reason.com].
"DISCOUNTING" Inflation... (Score:3)
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Yes, but I'd prefer that we freeze budget increases as a percentage of GDP.
In other words, you can have more money, if that money is just inflationary increases. What the government cannot have is a bigger slice of the total pie.
If I am now making four times what I made last year, I don't care as much if the government still takes 25% of the total. I do care if they think they're permitted to now take and use 27% of it.
This is not the same thing as the progressive income tax. If everyone makes more, but
More like "lack of clue" instead? (Score:5, Interesting)
I bought a VW diesel in 2005, the last year of the "old" line. When VW came back with their "clean diesel" a little over a year later, it came with a huge advertising campaign, and, as posters have noted in other forums, other car manufacturers publicly and privately wondered "how did VW do a clean diesel" without seeming to have changed their technology.
>> Byron Bunker, director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s vehicle compliance program, says: “We can’t do a 100 percent check of every data point for every modelWe focus on new vehicles, new technologies or those where we have a concern.”
So...if that didn't raise a flag for "new vehicle or new technology" in the mid-2000's, one has to wonder what kind of dark place the EPA's head was in then.
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I bought a VW diesel in 2005, the last year of the "old" line. When VW came back with their "clean diesel" a little over a year later, it came with a huge advertising campaign, and, as posters have noted in other forums, other car manufacturers publicly and privately wondered "how did VW do a clean diesel" without seeming to have changed their technology.
If that's true, why didn't those other manufacturers test the VW engines themselves and report the high emissions to the EPA themselves? Surely they closely examined the engines to see why they were so clean and did their own emissions testing of the VW engines to compare with their own technology.
Re:More like "lack of clue" instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
Implicit collusion. They're likely all cheating, on something. So if they report VW, VW reports w/e they're cheating on. So no one tattles.
Re:More like "lack of clue" instead? (Score:4, Informative)
Implicit collusion. They're likely all cheating, on something. So if they report VW, VW reports w/e they're cheating on. So no one tattles.
Exactly. Mod parent up.
Re:More like "lack of clue" instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've wondered about this. Honda engineers publicly stated that they didn't understand how Volkswagen did it. Honda is a big company with huge engineering chops. They build all manner of one off things. They undoubtedly test all manner of technology. The smoking gun here was run by a consumer protection agency and a small university. Certainly the engineering might of the other carmakers could have managed this.
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So why didn't Honda buy one and test it themselves? You would think they would try to analyze and reverse-engineer it.
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Most likely because they didn't actually suspect real malfeasance. Their efforts were probably either taken up trying to *replicate* the VW results, or more likely, towards developing and operating their electric/hybrid car strategy.
Sure, they probably had the money lying around, but I know I don't spend my time proving that my competitor's system is shit, if there is room for improvement in mine, I always prefer to make the improvement. That way, if they end up not being shitty, I haven't fallen even far
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The most likely reason is they all have emission testing facilities that are to the exact EPA specification. This car was designed to pass this test so nobody noticed. But eventually this is how it was found out. A private group tested it with portable equipment on the road.
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Maybe they did - if they used similar testing conditions that the EPA uses, then the cheat mode would have kicked in for them as well.
Then their reverse engineers are lazy or don't have enough budget. I've done a lot of reverse engineering over the past 7 years (in a different industry). Sometimes this is for the purpose of manufacturing replacement parts, and sometimes it is to understand how the competitor's product works. In the latter case, the job isn't finished until I know the machine as well as, or better than, the original designer. I do calculations the designer probably didn't do, just to see how overbuilt or overspec'd a p
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Scale, son, scale matters. The EPA is charged with overseeing a lot of very different technologies, any one of which COULD be reverse engineered with enough time, money, and the right kind of people. To presume the EPA can do this across an entire industry much less over several industries is silly.
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Scale, son, scale matters. The EPA is charged with overseeing a lot of very different technologies, any one of which COULD be reverse engineered with enough time, money, and the right kind of people. To presume the EPA can do this across an entire industry much less over several industries is silly.
I was speaking about the other manufacturers.
1. VW makes a miraculous new engine. Other engine manufacturer's can understand how it burns so clean.
2. Other manufacturer's apparently didn't buy one and examine it to see how it works. Or they did, but failed to fully understand how it passed emissions
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What was the budget of the guy that originally broke the story?
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>> The solution is they need more budget, or the emissions requirements need to be reduced / changed so they can meet them within current budget.
Or...perhaps they could consider more options:
3) Reallocate resources away from other less-pressing issues to this one instead.
4) Replace existing staff with cheaper staff, spend less on salaries/pensions and more on stuff.
5) Outsource the testing to cheaper and more efficient third parties. (More tests, less costs.)
6) Start paying attention to industry tren
The Net / The Pelican Brief (Score:2)
ooh, ooh, I know how to fix this problem (Score:3, Funny)
CUT TAXES! CUT TAXES!
No, see, really. See. If you cut taxes, you know, step 3, profit!
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Well said.
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MORE GUNS, MORE GUNS!
This line has been added to defeat the lameness filter.
Re:ooh, ooh, I know how to fix this problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Property taxes depends on property value, not income. Typically around 2% of the value of the property. Sales and gasoline taxes are around 8% of what you spend, not what you earn. Add ALL your taxes and divide by ALL your income, to get your effective tax rate. Most likely under 20%
You will be surprised by how much goods and services you get from the Government, direct and indirect for the low taxes you are paying.
Remember the onus is on the Government to protect ALL your property rights and all other rights too. If you were forced to protect your own property using your own dollars, you would find the taxes to municipality cheap for the policing you get. FBI chasing down all violent criminals everywhere is the reason why the crime is low in your neighborhood.
Of course you are not likely to be convinced your taxes are actually low, and you will benefit if tax rates are increased for incomes of the top 0.5% of the incomes. You will benefit a lot if capital gains rate is made equal to earned income rates. You need to have income over 1 million dollars a year to shuffle your income to rename it. You create shell companies owning shell companies and funnel the income through them and you can call your income anything you want, earned income, interest income, capital gains, dividend, qualified dividend, distribution etc etc. They can game the system. You can't.
But you will not worry about all these things. You will continue to claim in every forum that you pay 60% of your income. You will know it is a lie, but you will continue to say it. Probably because it allows you to entertain the fantasy that the high tax rates are the only reason you are in 25% tax bracket being subjected to the indignity of being schooled a liberal in 36.9% tax bracket on taxes.
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Corporations use so many different tax dodges, having a post office box in a tax friendly state declared as the HQ, creating shell corporations to funnel profits through so many different countries and tax regimes, eventually they pay nothing. Companies as big as Apple, Google, Microsoft and GE pay no taxes.
But I really admire you for sticking up for these downtrodden and exploited mega billionaires. Without selfless sacrifice
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From every American I've spoken with, ...
It shows what a narrow cross section of America you are mingling with. Sample bias, them statisticians call it. And all it would take is one minor accident or illness they would really see how much it really costs them. 66% of personal bankruptcies in America are due to medical bills.
When you are smugly feeling superior about your employer provided healthcare, think about it: Guaranteed company pensions, defined benefit, not defined contribution, $xx per month, used to be as prevalent as employer provided
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You also pay 6.2% Social security tax + 1.45% Medicare tax. And your employer matches that -- money your employer pays for your work that you never get and never even see in your gross pay. That's 14.9% total.
You also pay extra for every service and every product you buy because the people who produce them have to charge you extra to pay their tax bill.
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Translation: "I don't like people who are different from me, and they're scary! All our problems are Their Fault(tm)!"
More like inability to prioritize or be efficient (Score:4, Insightful)
Every time I've been exposed to the operational aspects of a government agency (and, unfortunately, most large non-profits and even some large corporations) I see things being done in a way that costs around five times as much as we would do it in small- to mid-scale private industry, and even at that expense level the quality of work is outright appalling. When you start working with the management of these organizations, they simply don't care about setting appropriate standards for what they can achieve on a certain budget and then squeezing things to make do with what they have. Quite the contrary, their incentives are structured around having as much budget as possible. So bloat is everywhere, and the response to any additional "needs" is to demand more money. This is an endless cycle - giving them more money will never achieve their goals, because that would harm management's careers.
Privatizing these functions is its own can of worms - it's often far cheaper (see: SpaceX vs. NASA), but still a long way away from excellent, and rife with corruption and politics (see: Military-Industrial Complex, Prison-Industrail Complex, etc).
If I really wanted to have the EPA catch these things the best method I can think of would be to offer bounties paid on caught cheaters. This creates incentives to check everything everywhere, and retains the incentives to maximize efficiency.
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I see things being done in a way that costs around five times as much as we would do it in small- to mid-scale private industry, and even at that expense level the quality of work is outright appalling.
I recall a story [paulcraigroberts.org] that conveys this rather poignantly.
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I heard the story in Economics class. Expect our Prof added on... "Now let me show you show the private contracting business works. A congressman sees that this Scrap yard watchman project is $900k over budget (or whatever the figure in the story was) and recommends that the private sector be brought in to manage it. His largest donor bids only $700k for the project and both congressman and business get to play the saving-the-taxpayers-money card to the press. But have they actually saved anything at all?"
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I see things being done in a way that costs around five times as much as we would do it in small- to mid-scale private industry, and even at that expense level the quality of work is outright appalling.
Having worked on both sides of the fence, most of the cost saving I have seen so far in the small-to-mid-scale industry comes from cutting corners on things seen as "uncool" (to be honest, that also applies to large industry). Like, for example, compliance with the laws and regulations. I have worked in education, in the automotive industry, in the banking industry, in the risk management industry, in investment banks, in the cloud hosting industry and in local/national/international administrations. I hone
They didn't give a free pass (Score:2)
Let industry self-regulate! (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is actually a perfect example on self regulation. The EPA didn't find this but a private clean air organization. In a free market you don't expect a company to self report every bad thing but you sure can count on their competition or private interest groups.
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I think that you have a strange notion of the concept of "self". As you point out, it wasn't a motor manufacturer who discovered the problem.
Since this went on for several years without being discovered, VW was just unlucky to not get away with the cheat. How many other cheats have happened and not been discovered.
So, yes, this is a perfect example of how self-regulation doesn't work.
Conspiracy (Score:2, Insightful)
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There followers are so stupid ...
Their
Charge the manufacturers? (Score:2)
Could they not simply charge the auto manufacturers for the testing? Also, are there any ways to automate the testing process,to increase throughput, or is there a market for consumer operated testing equipment?
Not a "free pass" (Score:2)
I admit I didn't RTFA, but the headline is even inconsistent with the summary.
Even if the EPA did *NO* testing/verification, that doesn't mean that any company, including VW, had a "free pass". It didn't have a right to violate the rules.
In other words (Score:2)
Brought to you by GOP and self-fulfilling prophecies - if we don't like something we can always cut their funding and 'prove' they can't do the job.
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But what if I put my buddy in charge of FEMA. He's really good at looking at pretty horses, and organizing events where people do the same.
but does that excuse VW and others from cheating? (Score:4, Interesting)
HOWEVER, that does not give VW, Audi, Mercedes, Samsung, etc license to cheat at will.
I prefer that we block these companies from selling in the states, but next up, would be fines so large that they can fund these groups.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
To be fair, the EPA has been very busy cleaning up rivers in Colorado.
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And libertarians don't like any of your policies.
What policies do you think I represent?
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Informative)
Nixon was very much conservative. However the definitions change over time. The meanings today are almost the reverse of what they were a century ago. Reagan would not be considered conservative enough by today's Tea Party for example.
Nixon was also very practical. And being practical is anathema to idealogues who think that compromising is traitorous. Lowering the voting age should not have been a conservative vs liberal issue, it's just plain fair and practical to extend voting age to those we were drafting to fight and die for us. Negotiating with China may not have been the Goldwater approach, but to accuse Nixon of being pro-communist is ridiculous, the negotiation was practical and good for the country and the president's FIRST job is to govern. He created the EPA but the environment at that time was an utter shambles and the EPA was needed. Some of the most conservative people I know are very staunch environmentalists, though they'd never use that word - they hate garbage on the side of the road, they don't want pollution runoff onto their lands, the love national parks, and to use a Christian idea they want to be good stewards of the land. Back when Nixon was president, the environment was not a conversative vs liberal litmus test like it is today. Ballistic missile treaties is about wanting peace and safety, and any good liberal or conservative should want those.
Remember, Nixon helped to get the segregationist southern Democrats to switch ranks and become Republicans, which caused a strongly conservative change of direction in the party. Nixon was the ultimate authoritarian figure to the younger free speech movement and anti Vietnam war protesters, more so than any of the Democratic leadership. Nixon was for the New Federalism to give more power to local governments, an idea embraced by conservatives.
It will however be impossible to convince some people of that, especially those who think John Boehner was not conservative and secretly a democrat in disguise. Those people are a hopeless cause because they'd rather rant than think.
It's because they're not conservtives (Score:2)
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Except the current congress is very much pro-pollution. Having independent agencies can be a good thing as you don't get politicians mucking with them.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
you're commenting under a story in which the EPA is underfunded and as a result is unable to do it's job, and so a corporation got away with polluting on a massive scale
and your response is: disband them, and only *clean up* messes, instead of *prevent* them
seriously? you're not trolling or making a sarcastic joke?
profoundly, amazingly stupid
i always wondered at the source of this form of idiocy: "government isn't doing it's job, so destroy it" rather than gee, i dunno, fix the fucking problem preventing them from doing their fucking job?
because if no one does the job government is supposed to do, the world will be better? how does that work? no need to regulate markets. no need to prevent pollution, no need to police the food or drug supply? because as history clearly shows, nevermind current fucking events like bp oil spill, this volkswagen story, the peanut salmonella case x1,000,000 other examples: when corporations can get away with crime, *they do*
why are there so many morons like you in this world who see government as the problem, and not the corporations doing all the actual, criminal wrong?
look at the comments under this story
1. industry cheated na dpolluted
2. government is underfunded so it fucked up
and what do we have... criticisms of govt, no criticisms of industry, and calls to disband the very agency tasked with policing the scumbags in industry fucking up
how... the... fuck
"corporation {xyz} did horrible thing dumping pollution... but that's not the problem, the epa screwed up the clean up, that's the real problem!"
really?
seriously, how can people be so fucking stupid on this point?
how can this incredible blindness about the repeated malfeasance and ineptitude in business escape your attention or derision, but only government, which you fucking need to prevent and control and punish these corporate assholes, is always the culprit?
this guy:
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
he's real
he exists. he'll poison your children, he'll kill you, he'll render vast areas uninhabitable. all to make $10 more
time and time and time again throughout history, there's millions of examples of this
but no, he's not the problem: government screwed up the investigation, the cleanup, the prevention. therefore, let's focus all our rage there and ignore the criminals out there screwing up your lives and your communities
WTF?
why are you morons and assholes so blind to this?
you rage at government and give industry a pass: why???
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That seems to be a large goal of some far right conservatives - utterly destroy all government. Neo-anarchists. They think local government will work better, but then they revoke local rights if the state government ends up being more conservative than the locals. They're stuck in a fantasy world where everything can go back to the good old days as long as the government stops doing stuff to screw it up. We can be the 50s nuclear family and watch Father Knows Best forever and ever, the kids never grow u
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it is, it's insanity and low intelligence
we live in a democracy, but what is the defense against beliefs which are based on fantasy rather than simple reality?
why must society continue to suffer with corruption and crime because a number of loud ignorants continue to obstruct the simple and obvious based on ridiculous moronic crap?
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"totalitarian statist"
it's like talking to social retards who think socialism is the same as gulags and toilet paper lines communism
even though actual socialist countries: canada, denmark, norway, etc., are richer, healthier, happier, and *freer* than the usa: no financial parasites funneling money out of their society via cozy relationships paid for by corrupt elections, for nothing in return, because regulating corporations and plutocrats is "against freedom". aw, those poor abused corporations and rich p
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Nice flamebait from a kid who still hasn't mastered the "Shift" key, but you present no actual argument as to why we couldn't replace the EPA with a new agency more focused on it's actual mission, and less on power-for-the-sake-of-power.
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rather than fix the problems, burn the whole thing down and replace it with something that is exactly the same but with the tiny problems fixed
ok, got it retard
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They should be allowed to prevent people from putting their land into productive use IF this harms other people, or the land of other people, or the land of neighboring public lands, or causes multigenerational destruction of the land, etc. There is no ingrained natural or moral right to destroy land that you "own". The only reason people own the land is because at some point in history someone stole it from someone else and the government defended this stealing. Thus the landowners should acknowledge th
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Yes, yes, I get it, "property is theft" and all that. It's an old song. Funny thing is, any productive use of land can be construed as damaging to someone else, if you try hard enough. If the goal is to prevent economic growth, there's always a way to succeed.
How about instead we form an agency to enable you to do anything reasonable with your land, by providing you a reasonable way to go about it? Its no wonder we've had economic stagnation for so long, with a generation or two raised to believe that "
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No, we've had generations and generations who've been taught to believe that profit is the only virtue and it's your land so you can do whatever you want. Maybe it's time to realize that there may be things other than economic growth to consider when deciding what to do with land. Sure, you maximize profits by strip mining an entire mountain but it's also probably that it is more beneficial for everyone as a whole, now and in the future, to leave the mountain standing.
The EPA didn't just start as a hippie
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it wouldn't the first time. Nor the first hundredth time. This is one of Congress's favorite tricks. Can't get rid of an agency outright? Papercut it to death.
NASA, EPA, NRC and pretty much anything that doesn't blow things up or walk around in the dark....
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That's the essence of the Republican "shrink [government] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" strategy.
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Except that they want to grow the portion of the government that consumes the largest amount of the federal budget, the military.
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I'm sorry but EPA not having enough money is bullshit. They "only" have enough money to test 20% of new cars, therefore Volkswagon was able to cheat, so give us more money?
IRS tests (audits) less than one percent of income tax returns. Yet tax compliance is quite high in the United States, relatively to other countries. Why is that? Because IRS has teeth and people know if you get caught flagrantly cheating on your taxes, they can seize your bank accounts and your house and put you in jail.
Testing 20% is mo
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Even so, the IRS' budget should be expanded:
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Who signs off on the budget?
The 535 members of Congress who voted for or against the 12 appropriation bills that make up the budget before sending it to the president for his signatures. AFAIK, the House Republicans haven't written a single appropriation bill that was due at the end of the fiscal year two days ago. This is why the Congress voted on a Continuing Resolution to maintain government funding at existing levels and the president signed to keep the government open until mid-December. If blaming Obama makes you feel good, by all means blame Obama.
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Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
The question is, did they have enough money to fulfill their charter or did they just say screw it and do nothing because they didn't get what they asked for?
It can get even more complicated. Consider that there are always static costs - it takes a certain amount of money to just keep the lights on, the management staff paid and kept in offices, etc...
In short, if you cut a department's budget by 20%, without implementing additional measures to control FWA and/or otherwise reduce expenses, you should expect to see more than a 20% drop in performance.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Informative)
It can get even more complicated. Consider that there are always static costs - it takes a certain amount of money to just keep the lights on, the management staff paid and kept in offices, etc...
In short, if you cut a department's budget by 20%, without implementing additional measures to control FWA and/or otherwise reduce expenses, you should expect to see more than a 20% drop in performance.
To be fair, the 2010 budget was higher because of specific requests that year for the clean water state revolving fund, drinking water state revolving fund, and the great lakes restoration initiative). Comparing against that year is not apples-to-apples, since that wasn't supposed to set a new baseline.
On average, the budget has increased over the years. Picking those two as comparisons is great for a headline, though!
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Considering we've seen this with the government shutdown, reduced DMV hours, and now the EPA, is there a term for this? Something combining 'budget cuts' and (perhaps deservedly) 'passive aggression'?
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I'm thinking "neo-con antics" might suffice.
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A neo-con [wikipedia.org] is, in modern times, a conservative who believes in a strong US presence in the Middle-East to defend Israel. "Many early neoconservative thinkers were Zionist and published articles in Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee"
The term, while sometimes used legitimately, has become a way to be openly anti-Semitic while slipping that past the censors. People have picked up it being associated with criticisms of Bush and used it as a pejorative without realizing the implications.
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But this is the kind of thing where someone in Congress will stand up and say "This is why we need to get rid of the EPA."
Re: Hmm... (Score:2)
I'd go with "this is why we need to get rid of Congress"....
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The air was perfectly clear around them, but you could see very dark (as in dense, not black) clouds from the chimneys making a 'V' starting at the chimney and opening up 50 miles west into the Phoenix valley
Re:Sound decision from Risk management perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
and where are "private independent companies" going to get their funding? You do realize that the "free market" doesn't just print more money, right?
Its really strange that you go from "don't bash the EPA for congress not funding them" to "EPA has proved that they are useless" with an even more extraneous "yet again" (as you don't mention any previous EPA failures).
I'm just trying to understand your jump from facts to fiction.
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Yea, he had you with the "don't bash" bit. Then he took the mask off.
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1. EPA is trying to ban wood burning stoves. With that type of trend, in thirty years you will end-up in jail for having a barbecue in your backyard.
2. EPA actually polluted rivers by letting industrial waste/poison to them. 1 million gallons... http://www.denverpost.com/envi... [denverpost.com]
3. EPA is a money stealing organization, waste of taxpayer's funds. http://www2.epa.gov/sites/prod... [epa.gov]
4. And lastly, EPA is cool with fracking. I am not. But because EPA is cool, you are also ok.
EPA is completely incompetent agency, 1
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Cut the budget to zero and we can all be free of government organizations ran but unelected bureaucrats interfering with the noble purpose of free enterprise. *cough,cough*.
Cough, cough is right.
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I don't know the people you know but some links for references.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://mises.org/library/libe... [mises.org]
https://www.lp.org/issues/envi... [lp.org]
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The problem with that libertarian idea is that many harms, especially environmental harms are only obvious in the compilations of statistics and it's difficult if not impossible for an individual to show the harms apply to them directly and it's difficult in many cases to assign the harm to a specific cause. The only way to address those sorts of problems is collectively whether you like it or not.
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If only there was some sort of lawsuit that a large class of people could use to take action in such circumstances.
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(Oh, to be young and idealistic again.)
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And all that pollution vomited into the air thanks to the far right's love of cutting an oversight agency's funding until it can't do its job properly.
Think about it