Thursday, December 8, 2016

The EPA and Department of Labor

If you dislike the minimum wage and regulations on business generally, you should be all for Andrew Puzder, the CEO of the company that owns Hardees and Carl's Jr.: 

Mr. Puzder will arguably have less experience in government than any labor secretary since the early 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan appointed a longtime construction executive named Raymond J. Donovan. Mr. Donovan’s tenure was marked by an easing of numerous regulations.

The Reagan era was a lousy time for labor.

Mr. Puzder is also hostile to minimum wage increases and Obamacare.  Many argue that minimum wage increases will hurt the economy and that kicking people off of welfare will force them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.  Many others argue that's a bunch of bullshit

Meanwhile, Scott Pruitt will be the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency.  Mr. Pruitt does not write his own letters:

As Mr. Pruitt has sought to use legal tools to fight environmental regulations on the oil and gas companies that are a major part of his state’s economy, he has also worked with those companies. A 2014 investigation by The Times found that energy lobbyists drafted letters for Mr. Pruitt to send, on state stationery, to the E.P.A., the Interior Department, the Office of Management and Budget and even President Obama, outlining the economic hardship of the environmental rules.

The close ties have paid off for Mr. Pruitt politically: Harold G. Hamm, the chief executive of Continental Energy, an Oklahoma oil and gas company, was a co-chairman of Mr. Pruitt’s 2013 re-election campaign.

(emphasis added mine)

If you think that global warming is a Chinese hoax, or just a naturally occurring phenomenon we can't do anything about, then you want a man like Mr. Pruitt at the helm.  Hey, I mean, global temperatures do just rise naturally with time, right?  It's not as though the rise of temperatures in the past 100 years is completely unprecedented and directly linked to CO2 emissions.




No comments:

Post a Comment