The EPA has figured out that the best way to justify its existence is to create absurdly burdensome regulations.  Not only will these regulations justify its existence but it will justify its expansion!  After all, it is going to need to hire more workers to enforce these regulations.  And the cycle continues … do you see how government grows like a cancer?  Its goal is to spread, to survive.  It can do this because it is surviving on an endless supply of taxpayer dollars.  I say endless because government can force you to hand over more dollars at the point of a gun, in order to fund itself.  Or it can just spend money that it doesn’t have and tell your grandchildren that they will be stuck with the bill.  There is no skin in the game for the people spending the money when they can pass the buck along to later generations.

But back to the EPA … we’ve talked about newly proposed EPA regulations on greenhouse gas emissions.  This would require millions of businesses to file for EPA permits, fill out burdensome paperwork and prove that you are complying with emissions regulations.  This is time, labor, that is being taken away from the private marketplace to produce goods and services and forced to be used to comply with government regulations.

Whether these regulations actually end up going into effect remains to be seen, but even the EPA itself acknowledges that these regulations are “absurd” and would require a tremendous amount of new government bureaucrats.  In an EPA court briefing it states, “While EPA acknowledges that come 2016, the administrative burdens may still be so great that compliance … may still be absurd or impossible to administer at that time, that does not mean that the Agency is not moving toward the statutory thresholds.”

How many government hacks would it take to enforce this one regulation?  Up to 230,000 new government workers would be needed to process all of the new paperwork!  This is estimated to cost the taxpayers $21 billion, and that doesn’t even include the compliance costs associated with the economic loss for these businesses forced to comply with the regulation.

And how much will the new EPA regulations cost in private sector jobs?  The estimate is 1.4 million. 

Now .. here’s something else you need to remember about the EPA.  By law – (please not the seriousness of those words, “by law”) – the EPA cannot consider the cost of a new regulation.  If the EPA decides that this or that gas or particle needs to be controlled then it must move forward to institute regulations to control that gas or particle, and CANNOT consider the cost of those regulations to our economy.  If they have to hire a quarter-million additional government hacks to administer the new regulation; so what?  And if the new regulation costs a million and a-half jobs in the private sector; again, so what?  The EPA cannot even consider those factors. 

It is any wonder that businesses in this country are sitting tight, hesitant to invest or expand with regulations like this coming down the pipeline?

Remember that when asked if you were forced to eliminate one department from the federal government, which one would you eliminate and why … Herman Cain said the EPA.