The Price of Life

Yglesias:
Obama-era regulatory agencies tend to value life more than did its Bush-era predecessors... The interesting thing is that the US government as a whole doesn’t have a consistent line on this:

The Environmental Protection Agency set the value of a life at $9.1 million last year in proposing tighter restrictions on air pollution. The agency used numbers as low as $6.8 million during the George W. Bush administration. The Food and Drug Administration declared that life was worth $7.9 million last year, up from $5 million in 2008, in proposing warning labels on cigarette packages featuring images of cancer victims. The Transportation Department has used values of around $6 million to justify several recent decisions to impose regulations that the Bush administration had rejected as too expensive, like requiring stronger roofs on cars.

The gap between the EPA and the DOT is downright gigantic. It amounts to running a buy two get one free sale on human life in transportation-related mishaps. Meanwhile, I would say the case that we’re overemphasizing terrorism as a problem is basically sealed by the fact that “A report last year financed by the Department of Homeland Security suggested that the value of preventing deaths from terrorism might be 100 percent higher than other deaths.” We should not let 1,000 people die in car accidents or of pollution-related illness in order to prevent a terrorism from killing ten people somewhere. Violent murder is awful, and we should try to stop it, but having your husband die in a construction mishap or your wife be killed a drunk driver is also awful.
Meanwhile note that while there certainly are misguided regulations in this country, it’s not like what the business community wants is to rescind a couple dumb rules and streamline things. They’re very upset about the higher valuation of human life, because their goal is to maximize profit by any means necessary up to and including getting people killed.

Social Security Funding and Pyramid Scheme

Yglesias » Home Page:

Erica Greider has a variety of gripes with Social Security and Jonathan Bernstein has a variety of gripes with her, including “Note too that Grieder calls Social Security a ‘pyramid scheme,’ which is also common usage and also totally wrong.”
I think perhaps the best way to describe what’s wrong with this is to observe that on an adequate level of generality everything is a pyramid scheme. Imagine a country with no Social Security. People would still presumably want to structure their lives such that for a while they produce more than they consume, and then later in life when they’re old they consume more than they produce. The only way for this to work is for them to save money in vehicles that earn a positive rate of return and the only way for that to happen on average is for the future economy to be larger than the present economy. That, in turn, relies on population growth and productivity growth. If population growth slows, you’re going to have a problem. In a pyramid scheme, everyone makes money until you run out of new people to bring into the scheme. Similarly, if you imagine a country with no children and no immigrants then clearly the economy is going to go bust once it starts running out of new workers. But the fact that it would go bankrupt if the country ran out of people doesn’t make Wal-Mart a “pyramid scheme” and Social Security’s no different from Wal-Mart in its implicit assumption that there will continue to be new people in the future.

The difference between a government program founded on an assumption about future population growth and a private investment founded on an assumption about future population growth is this. If your private investment turns out to be founded on a small but meaningful miscalculation, the adjustment happens automatically. If your government program turns out to be founded on a small but meaningful miscalculation, the adjustment requires an act of congress. But the facts about the quantity of real resources available aren’t affected by the existence or non-existence of a public program.

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Keep Your Government Hands Off My Government Programs! - NYTimes.com

Keep Your Government Hands Off My Government Programs! - NYTimes.com: "n a smart column today, Bruce Bartlett looks at why it will be so hard for politicians to cut government spending: because so many Americans who say they support cutting government programs don’t realize just how much they benefit from them.

Remember, for example, when a town hall attendee famously told his congressman to “keep your government hands off my Medicare”? Apparently that bewilderingly blinkered sentiment is hardly unique.

Mr. Bartlett produces the following chart, from a recent paper by the Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler, showing how many recipients of government benefits somehow don’t believe they’ve received any benefits:
Percentage of Program Beneficiaries Who Report They “Have Not Used a Government Social Program”
Program “No, Have Not Used a

Percentage of Program Beneficiaries Who Report They “Have Not Used a Government Social Program”
Program	“No, Have Not Used a Government Social Program”
529 or Coverdell	64.3
Home Mortgage Interest Deduction	60.0
Hope or Lifetime Learning Tax Credit	59.6
Student Loans	53.3
Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit	51.7
Earned Income Tax Credit	47.1
Social Security—Retirement & Survivors	44.1
Pell Grants	43.1
Unemployment Insurance	43.0
Veterans Benefits (other than G.I. Bill)	41.7
G.I. Bill	40.3
Medicare	39.8
Head Start	37.2
Social Security Disability	28.7
Supplemental Security Income	28.2
Medicaid	27.8
Welfare/Public Assistance	27.4
Government Subsidized Housing	27.4
Food Stamps	25.4
Source: Suzanne Mettler, “Reconstituting the Submerged State: The Challenge of Social Policy Reform in the Obama Era,” Perspectives on Politics (September 2010): 809.

Pretty amazing, right?