I was surprised to read this morning that the Environmental Protection Agency has decided that over 150 million Americans--more than half the population--breathe air that is below federal air quality standards. You’d think that if over half the country was coughing and wheezing it up on its way to work each day there would be a national outcry.
But I wasn’t too surprised. The same agency that lied about air quality in New York City directly following 9/11 has ulterior motives in this case too. By claiming counties in violation of federal air quality requirements, the EPA can claim control over the spending of federal highway money. As Nathan Hart and Paul Cleveland point out, this is one of the primary reasons why federal highway dollars are spent on anything but more highways, thus contributing to increased traffic congestion across the country, not to mention more dangerous roads and traffic deaths.
This is the type of thing that Republicans used to argue would end whenever they ever had a chance to control the government. Today they control both houses of Congress and the White House, and yet Richard Nixon’s Frankenstein environmental agency lives on, not to mention the rest of Big Government.
