The New York Times today published a house editorial praising the Environmental Protection Agency for crippling American competitiveness. That’s not actually what the writers said, but the effect of their words are indistinguishable.

The EPA issued a regulation requiring power plants (coal fired) in 27 states to lower stack emissions of sulfur dioxide by more than half of 2005 levels before 2014.

The NYT states that rule supporters claim Americans will receive benefits of $180 to $200 billion annually in return for companies paying $800 million annually, on top of the $1.6 billion already expended in anticipation of the rules.

Here’s where the editorial falls apart.

1. No proponent of a government rule has ever been correct about the size of the benefits or the cost of the rule. This truism isn’t going to change now.

2. The NYT ascribes the benefits to fewer premature deaths from respiratory illness. Leaving aside the absolute lack of proffered supporting evidence, these people are all still going to die, and probably later. Horrible though it may sound, if we’re pricing out lives, might not it be cheaper for people to die sooner rather than later, on the public’s tab?

3. The NYT blithely ignores the fact that producing companies will pass every last cent of the increased costs through to the rate payer or the share holder. It’s not some nameless, faceless power company getting socked with higher costs. It’s you. It’s your pension. It’s your kids.

4. How clean is clean enough? The only answer for the EPA and its green hangers-on is perfectly clean. Consequences be damned. The only way to achieve zero smokestack emissions is to forgo any electricity source other than wind, hydro or nuclear. It’s a back-door subsidy to wind and hydro, already obscenely subsidized by you and me.

It’s this mentality that exacerbates our Grand Recession, the attitude that industry is bad and must be punished for ameliorating our existence. Oddly, the left holds at the same time the incompatible belief that this continued regulatory punishment will not cause industry to cease doing what got it punished in the first instance, providing cheap and plentiful electricity.

‘Puter’s betting the genii on the NYT’s editorial boards don’t care that peons in the hinterlands will have their electric rates jacked up, but ‘Puter’s betting even the most liberal among the land ocean dwellers are going to be pissed when they see their electric bills.

'Puter

Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.

’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.

The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.

His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.

He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.

Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.

‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.