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The West, Texas chemical and fertilizer plant where
at least 15 were killed and more than 200 injured a few weeks ago
hadn’t been fully inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration since 1985. (A partial inspection in 2011 had resulted in
$5,250 in fines.)
OSHA and its state partners have a total of 2,200
inspectors charged with ensuring the safety of over more than 8 million
workplaces employing 130 million workers. That comes to about one
inspector for every 59,000 American workers.
There’s no way it can do its job with so few
resources, but OSHA has been systematically hollowed out for the years
under Republican administrations and congresses that have despised the
agency since its inception.
In effect, much of our nation’s worker safety laws
and rules have been quietly repealed because there aren’t enough
inspectors to enforce them.
That’s been the Republican strategy in general:
When they can’t directly repeal laws they don’t like, they repeal them
indirectly by hollowing them out — denying funds to fully implement
them, and reducing funds to enforce them.
Consider taxes. Republicans have been unable to
round up enough votes to cut taxes on big corporations and the wealthy
as much as they’d like, so what do they do? They’re hollowing out the
IRS. As they cut its enforcement budget – presto! — tax collections
decline.
Despite an increasing number of billionaires and
multi-millionaires using every tax dodge imaginable – laundering their
money through phantom corporations and tax havens (Remember Mitt’s tax
returns?) — the IRS’s budget has been cut by 17 percent since 2002,
adjusted for inflation.
To manage the $594.5 million in additional cuts
required by the sequester, the agency has announced it will furlough
each of its more than 89,000 employees for at least five days this year.
This budget stinginess doesn’t save the government
money. Quite the opposite. Less IRS enforcement means less revenue. It’s
been estimated that every dollar invested in the IRS’s enforcement,
modernization and management system reduces the federal budget deficit
by $200, and that furloughing 1,800 IRS “policemen” will cost the
Treasury $4.5 billion in lost revenue.
But congressional Republicans aren’t interested in more revenue. Their goal is to cut taxes on big corporations and the wealthy.
Representative Charles Boustany, the Louisiana
Republican who heads the House subcommittee overseeing the IRS, says the
IRS sequester cuts should stay in force. He calls for an overhaul of
the tax code instead.
In a similar manner, congressional Republicans and
their patrons on Wall Street who opposed the Dodd-Frank financial reform
law have been hollowing out the law by making sure agencies charged
with implementing it don’t have the funds they need to do the job.
As a result, much of Dodd-Frank – including the
so-called “Volcker Rule” restrictions on the kind of derivatives trading
that got the Street into trouble in the first place – is still on the drawing boards.
Perhaps more than any other law, Republicans hate
the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Yet despite holding more than 33
votes to repeal it, they still haven’t succeeded.
So what do they do? Try to hollow it out.
Congressional Republicans have repeatedly denied funding requests to
implement Obamacare, leaving Health and Human Services (the agency
charged with designing the rules under the Act and enforcing them) so
shorthanded it has to delay much of it.
Even before the sequester, the agency was running
on the same budget it had before Obamacare was enacted. Now it’s lost
billions more.
A new insurance marketplace specifically for small
business, for example, was supposed to be up and running in January. But
officials now say it won’t be available until 2015 in the 33 states
where the federal government will be running insurance markets known as
exchanges.
This is a potentially large blow to Obamacare’s
political support. A major selling point for the legislation had been
providing affordable health insurance to small businesses and their
employees.
Yes, and eroding political support is exactly what
congressional Republicans want. They fear that Obamacare, once fully
implemented, will be too popular to dismantle. So they’re out to delay
it as long as possible while keeping up a drumbeat about its flaws.
Repealing laws by hollowing them out — failing to
fund their enforcement or implementation — works because the public
doesn’t know it’s happening. Enactment of a law attracts attention;
de-funding it doesn’t.
The strategy also seems to bolster the Republican
view that government is incompetent. If government can’t do what it’s
supposed to do – keep workplaces safe, ensure that the rich pay taxes
they owe, protect small investors, implement Obamacare – why give it any
additional responsibility?
The public doesn’t know the real reason why the government isn’t doing its job is it’s being hollowed out.
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