RE: Presidential Politics

[Michael Laprarie <mlaprarie@greatventure.com>]

I think that a leading factor should be common sense.  Before we spend billions or trillions on new environmental programs, we should ask ourselves if the cost of the programs is worth the benefits.

Recently, a study was published by Steven Milloy which showed that a single serving of Ben and Jerry's World's Best Vanilla Ice Cream contained approximately 80 picograms of dioxin; by contrast, the EPA allows only 0.14 picograms of dioxin per liter of effluent wastewater.

Is Ben and Jerry's ice cream a toxic time-bomb killer?  Probably not.  The lesson here is that we spend billions anually on environmental standards that, quite possibly, are way out of line with what is acutally necessary to insure good health.  Unfortunately, many "environmental oganizations" that demand these unnecessary standards are fringe groups whose efforts are based on political agendas and enforced with junk science.
  
When Republican congressmen tried to make this point four years ago, Vice President Gore countered by saying, "our drinking water would be dirtier; (it) would make more people sick, and would kill more people."  Translation: "Mess with our agenda, and we'll see that you're portrayed as murderers."

All I'm saying is that we have a certain amount of resources that we as a nation can expend on improving quality of life.  Before we decide to spend billions on a cleanup program so that a child can eat 500 cups of dirt instead of 50 cups of dirt before he gets sick, we should consider whether or not we could have used the money more wisely.  A billion dollars will buy a lot of coats, shoes, and hot meals.