Second thoughts

Okay, so today I'm leaning back toward "nasty."

Crawford, Tex., Dec. 30 - The Bush administration's twin moves on Tuesday to ban the dietary supplement ephedra and the sale of meat from cows that appear to be sick on the way to the slaughterhouse underscores a simple White House maxim these days: with an election approaching, even a president who came to office assailing government regulation cannot do too much to protect consumers. ...

"As far as I can tell, he has not uttered the word 'deregulation' since 2001," said James L. Gattuso, a research fellow in regulatory policy at the Heritage Foundation, who recently completed a study of regulation in the Bush era. "This stuff about the antiregulation president is a Howard Dean myth," he argued.

First off, I have to say that while I doubt it was the intention, if I'm Howard Dean, I'm delighted that my name has become shorthand for opposition to Bush. More to the point, Gattuso comes to his conclusion by counting how many pages of federal regulations have been issued during Bush's term and noting it's pretty much the same as previous administrations.

Frankly, that's lame even for the Heritage Foundation. The issue is not the number of regulations but what they say. For example, the attempt to allow utilities to expand without installing pollution controls was a regulation. The attempt to open wetlands to development was based on a proposed regulation that redefined what constitutes a wetland. The FCC regulations that opened up more media concentration also added to the total. That's what the Bushites have been doing: Issuing regulations designed to undo the effects of previous regulations and laws and do it, if you will, on the QT, under the radar, whichever cliche you prefer.

But claiming that calling the Bush administration antiregulation is a "myth" is pure Bushit.

Footnote: On a related issue:

"The key to understanding this administration's approach to regulation comes in three words: cost-benefit analysis," said Robert Hahn, the director of the Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, run by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution. "This balancing approach will surely raise the hackles of some conservative and liberal ideologues. But it's the right approach to policy."

Actually, that statement is true if and only if the three words are immediately preceded by the word "political." Be that as it may, the whole concept of cost-benefit analysis has been so warped that it no longer resembles a useful tool. Rarely if ever has a supposedly objective approach to a problem been so suffused with subjective considerations.

Cost-benefit analysis can be useful in deciding among courses of action. That is, it can help you decide whether route A or route B is the better way to get to point C. It is not useful in deciding if it's worth getting to C. That is, it's good for choosing which but not for choosing if.

For example, suppose we say that X number of people are dying prematurely due to air pollution and we want to commit ourselves to cutting that number in half over the next five years. Cost-benefit analysis can help us decide which is the most efficient means of accomplishing that. However, these days it's more likely to be used to try to decide if it's worth saving those lives, a totally illegitimate use because it requires you to put a dollar value on a human life - and whether or not it's "worth it" will depend on the value you choose.

The bottom line is that using cost-benefit analysis to determine policy rather than procedure is illogical, fraught with difficulty, and positively invites manipulation for political purposes.

Which, after all, may be why the Bush administration likes it.