We have long contended that, for all his “qualities” of inspirational leadership and unassailable honesty, President Obama’s most endearing and impactful characteristic is his remarkably uncanny ability to seek out and recruit talent to serve in his administration.
To us, it is an almost cosmic ability on the president’s part, when a vacancy in a key post develops, he is able to find a more ideologically radical, more incredibly incompetent, more villainous (or blindly naive) successor than the person being replaced.
We’ve cited before such talent pool triumphs as SecDef : Gates to Panetta to the hapless ‘Chuck’ Hagel to the even more hapless “Ash” Carter. Or the deterioration of CIA leadership: Petraeus to Brennan. And of course, Sec. of State, Hillary to Kerry (arguably a transition to an incompetence status quo).
EPA Chief Gina McCarthy is one of the latest to illustrate this. Many thought that Mr. Obama had outdone himself for picking outstanding losers with Lisa Jackson as his replacement for acting administrator,Mike Shapiro, a mere partisan hack.
But no! He has gone beyond terrestrial capability with his appointment of Ms. McCarthy. In addition to her endearing Brooklyn accent, Ms. McCarthy has already raised the bar for incompetence and total obliviousness to reality.
She has presided over the creation of the “River of Gold”, the catastrophe her agency created by its historic lack of expertise and arrogant refusal to seek it in the case of the Gold King mine in Colorado.
And now, Ms. McCarthy has demonstrated her monumental ignorance of simple math.
Her aggressively touted new “smog rules”, which she has estimated to cost the US economy a ‘mere’ $1.4 billion a year, is likely to cost more like $56 billion a year…a bit more than a “rounding error, even for Obama-style government.
But what the heck, it’ll save the planet…how do you estimate what that’s worth?
Let’s just hope Gina stays in the job until Obama leaves office. We can not imagine what he’d replace her with.
Michael Bastasch of The Daily Caller News Foundation writes:
EPA’s Smog Regulation Will Cost 40x More Than It Predicted (excerpts)
The Environmental Protection Agency estimated its stricter smog limits would only cost Americans $1.4 billion a year, but a new report argues the total cost to the economy is likely 40 times higher than agency estimates.
The right-leaning American Action Forum says EPA’s updated smog, or ground-level ozone, rule could cost $56.5 billion in lost wages based on economic losses from counties that couldn’t comply with the agency’s 2008 rule.
“Observed nonattainment counties experienced losses of $56.5 billion in total wage earnings, $690 in pay per worker, and 242,000 jobs between 2008 and 2013,” according to AAf policy experts.
EPA finalized stricter ozone standards earlier this year, forcing states to lower ambient levels from 75 parts per billion to 70 parts per billion. The problem is that compliance with previous ozone standards has proven difficult, especially for counties with heavy manufacturing centers. Counties that find themselves in noncompliance may be forced to curtail manufacturing or oil and gas extraction. . . .
Critics argue the number of counties out of compliance with EPA’s ozone rule would be much higher than the agency estimates. In fact, there are about 100 state and national parks that wouldn’t be in compliance with ozone rules.
“Hardly transportation corridors and centers of heavy pollution, many observers would be surprised to know that Death Valley National Park, Sequoia National Park, and Cape Cod National Seashore have ozone readings of 71 to 87 [parts per billion],” according to an AAF report from last year.
Jazz Shaw at Hot Air writes:
Perhaps the better question is how the EPA managed to arrive at one number when people experienced in the nuts and bolts of the science could come up with something so vastly different. Of course, given their history of shopping for deals on furniture and their knack forblowing millions on guns and heavy armor, math probably isn’t their strong suit to begin with and calculating the cost of things really isn’t up their alley either.
DLH
Images from moonbattery.com and Free Republic
