White House, EPA ignore Small Business Admin’s report that new coal regulations will kill jobs, economy
The Daily Caller
President Barack Obama is ignoring heated concerns from within his own administration that new Environmental Protection Agency coal industry regulations will be economically devastating.
The EPA is plowing forward with new Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) mandates. The regulations would force coal energy plants to install giant scrubber-like materials inside smokestacks to capture and cleanse carbon particles before their atmospheric release.
The upgrade cost would fall on company employees and coal miners in the form of layoffs, as well as on businesses, which could expect to pay more for energy.
In a lengthy letter to EPA Director Lisa Jackson, Obama’s Small Business Administration advocacy office wrote the EPA “may have significantly understated” the economic “burden this rulemaking would impose on small entities.”
One Southern Indiana Chamber of Commerce vice president, Tonya Fischer, told The Daily Caller the entire state of Indiana would be “devastated” by these regulations. “We are definitely in opposition to [the MACT regulations] because it would be devastating for the state of Indiana.” She adds that local businesses, which are struggling with the tough economy already, would be forced to pick up the extra energy production costs Obama’s EPA is pushing. “We get 95 percent of our electricity from coal.”
“The cost to convert those facilities would be passed on to the small business owners, or basically shut them [the coal energy producing facilities] down altogether,” Fischer said. “It would become cost-prohibitive for them [local businesses] to continue paying their electricity bills.”
If the EPA regulations aren’t halted, Fischer expects unemployment numbers in Indiana to skyrocket. “This has got to affect tens of thousands of jobs in the area because, not only would you lose the employees from the coal facilities, the plants themselves would become more streamlined so you’d lose jobs there and, of course, the small and local businesses.”
Tom Borelli, the director of the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project, said the EPA’s issues with the FERC and the SBA are “huge.”
Borelli said that if Obama cared about fixing the economy and jobs, he would stop Jackson and the EPA from promulgating more regulations onto energy companies. But, he said, like how Obamacare was rushed into law, the Obama administration and the EPA is “going as fast as they can” to get these new politically motivated regulations in place. “Common sense would dictate that in a bad economy, you don’t want to add any more uncertainty to the business environment and you certainly don’t want to make energy prices go higher,” Borelli said. “But, that’s exactly what this agenda is doing.”
Wild Thing’s comment……..
The EPA is now a legislative body. No oversight and they do what they want to do. Obama gave them more power then ever before.
I remember the candidate Obama telling us before he was so ignorantly elected that electricity prices would have to skyrocket.
And they voted for him anyway.
It’s so sick, really.
Extreme environmentalism trumps jobs and family livelihoods.
Extreme environmentalism trumps lower cost vital electricity for consumers and businesses.
Extreme environmentalism trumps energy production and an expanding economy.
Extreme environmentalism trumps individual consumer’s freedom of choice in light bulbs.
It’s cap and trade by executive branch decree.
Indiana will not vote for him again. (I’m developing an electoral college count for 2012 which I will share soon.)
This is all part of moving the country closer and closer to Socialism/communism. That man exists only for the convenience of the state. His life is in there hands, as long as he is productive and obeys the state his life is safe. when he becomes old, or no longer can or will serve the state he will be eliminated. This is the essence of obama’s plan. Losing or credit rating is a huge step in that direction. The Cloward-Piven strategy to collapse the system. in the last two years, Welfare Rolls have increased by 30% percent. They keep increasing the number of weeks of unemployment insurance, so there is no incentive for the unemployed to try to find a job, hence they stay dependent on government. It is not compassion to keep people dependent on the government by tyranny. They advertise that if you are behind in your 750,000 dollar mortagage the government will help you pay for it. Why do these peoople even have a mortgage of that magnitude in the first place, Welfare receipts are not proof of employmnet or a credit reference. Its Individualism v. Collectivism. And they are winning.
We true conservatives are on the right side of history. We are on the right side of America, and we will prevail simply because we must prevail.
South Floridian Allen West and Herman Cain of Georgia both of the Tea Party (who just happen to be African Americans) have both argued that seeing all of life through the prism of race as the left does is divisive, not healthy as citizens either, that we are all of us, simply all Americans.
I’ve always believed and taken to heart when Harper Lee wrote in To Kill A Mocking Bird, “trust in the innocent assurance that familiarity breeds understanding”.
This debt ceiling debate is legitimate as the public debt nearing $15 trillion has now exceeded GDP with our federal government borrowing 40 cents of every dollar it spends. Raising the debt ceiling is no longer routine as far too many on the left have argued that it be done.
It is contentious because this debate isn’t just about the debt ceiling. There are much, much larger issues here.
This is about the very nature of the society that we as Americans want to live under.
The policies of this President are but prologue and plenary.
It all has nothing to do with compassion and has everything to do with central planning, equality, and slow incremental control over time, many years.
Conservatives see Liberalism/Socialism with prescient apprehension.
It achieves its ends because it is a perversion of human compassion and idealism. And that’s the reason why Ronald Reagan defied the world and properly called socialism the focus of evil in the modern world.
It is no longer just a political orientation or a political opposition.
It is not progressive at all either, but clearly regressive by proven past failures of a life by government ration throughout history. A committee dominion of life where the state collective reigns supreme. You are not an individual but always seen down upon as part of a group, geographic, race or ethnic.
Conservatives see this is a collectivist frame of mind with an agenda that’s not only directly opposed to liberty, but has no other means of being realized except through incremental central planning under the guise of compassion, equality and environmentalism -all resulting in subsequent tyranny. History proves this time and again, time in memorial.
Liberty is just simply incompatible with the society that liberals tells us they want.
When the threat of August’s social security checks not going out was made by the President last month during the federal debt ceiling debate, he was using the existing apparatus to make a play for even more power and more money.
It was deplorable and beneath the high office that he holds to not rise to the occasion and show leadership by taking the high road, but to take the easy street of blame and stirring uncertainty, instill fear and incite class envy dividing the very people he is to lead and protect.
We have now created millions of lost and dependent people that cannot live without government. By his own admission there are now 70 million Americans and their dependents that rely on monthly checks from the federal government. Far too many liberals look upon that stat with pride. True conservatives are more prescient.
This creates a vicious cycle within the electorate and a clear and certain path to economic ruin and the loss of freedom.
In 1961, a prescient Reagan seeing half a century ahead warned us about adopting a national socialized medicine program as this President has:
“Behind it will come other government programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day as socialist Norman Thomas said, “the American people would never vote for socialism, but under the name of liberalism the American people would adopt every fragment of the socialist program” doctors will lose their liberty being told where they will live and we Americans will wake to find that we have socialism… to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”
So when a rationed national health care program gets fully implemented, and let’s say you have a child who has cancer and some future President long from now comes on television and says unless you pass my program I’m going to cut off cancer treatment.
Well then, at that point, everything has been lost.
That is how we true conservatives see it.
We are right because history proves us to be right in the right.
Here’s another incite through American literature:
It was C.S. Lewis who, in his unforgettable “Screwtape Letters,” wrote of dominion by committee rule:
“The greatest evil is not done now in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”
Carlos you are definitely on a roll here, as are you Mark.
I would like to add this to the discussion.
It is my observation that the pendulum has swung much farther to the left than at any time in the history of the United States of America.
We as concerned citizens cannot afford to wait, until November 2012, nor to allow someone else to do the job of turning this monstrosity around. It is our DUTY to do all we can to protect the individual rights and freedoms guaranteed us in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
We all need to bombard our Senators and Representatives with phone calls, e-mails and letters, and we need to do it on a continuing basis.
It will work. We did it,twice during the Bush Admininsitration when they tried to shove that Amnesty for the Illegals crap down our throat.
Time is of the essence!
Thank you so much Carlos, Mark and Sean. Thank your insight and input more then I can say. I learn so much from all of you.
((hug))