Cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency's budget are likely to hurt children the most, experts say https://t.co/MwrYwBSaYW pic.twitter.com/E66wkB2eFh
— CNN (@CNN) April 13, 2017
CNN tweeted out an article Thursday morning fretting that kids will suffer undue harm if Trump’s EPA budget cut is passed. The long-winded story written by a children's advocacy group and hosted on CNN’s website, is full of hyperbole and dire warnings backed up by left-wing environmental “experts” that argue the EPA is a life-giving organization crucial to our childrens’ very existence. This flies in the face of actual government watchdog organization findings that show the EPA actually is one of the most wasteful government agencies.
The CNN piece relies heavily on exaggeration and scare tactics. Environmental health experts and professors, warn children will get lead poisoning, go to jail, or get deadly diseases at young ages.
Studies have showed that kids with lead poisoning often have lower lifetime earnings and therefore pay less in taxes because of ensuing brain damage, Cox said.
They are also at higher risk for committing crimes and ending up in the criminal justice system, which is expensive in its own right.
Costs to health and human life are often ignored when considering the cost-benefits of different regulations, according to Nolen. With environmental hazards, it's not so easy to undo the damage.
"You're changing the way a child's lung functions while a child is growing up," she said. "That has lifelong implications. You're shortening a life because somebody develops a heart attack ... or dies of an asthma attack, and those are not reversible."
Of course CNN doesn’t mention that these “experts” own interests are served by having a more massive budget invested in the environmental sector in which they work.
The article also never addresses why the EPA budget is being cut to begin with. In trying to bring down the deficit, of course some cuts to government spending has to be made. The Trump Administration decided the EPA was one agency which could use less funding and less power to regulate. But it’s not just Trump who believes that; watchdog organizations agree that the EPA is one of the most wasteful of government agencies.
In fact, the agency itself has admitted they don’t always follow the rules. In their own 2016 report, the EPA confessed that they didn’t always report their own spending, as mandated to do. According to watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste, that meant hundreds of thousands of dollars of spending that went unreported.
Not only that but employees were found spending work hours looking at pornography, bringing in illicit drugs, being intoxicated and stealing funds from grants not given to the EPA. Over 100,000 in travel compensation was granted to employees who had stopped working at the EPA months before. And that was just the tip of the iceberg of fraud found in one year’s time.
In their 2015 report, CAGW found 2.95 million dollars of research equipment the EPA bought that went unused for up to 14 years. At the same time, the EPA requested thousands of dollars of grants to monitor and regulate how much water is used in hotel guest rooms’ showers and toilets.
And just this week, The Free Beacon found an EPA office charged taxpayers 15,000 dollars for their employees’ upscale gym memberships.
So yes, CNN, let’s continue to fund EPA employees’ porn and drug habits, gym memberships, and theft. Sounds exactly like the kind of agency that needs free reign and endless taxpayer money doing God’s work in saving childrens’ lives, right?
