What is the dollar value of a healthy child or a safe workplace?
Regulatory accounters use a methodology that dramatically tilts the scale toward undercounting the benefits of government protections. They assume that the only benefit worth counting is the value of preventing future cancer deaths. In doing so, they ignore the enormous human and dollar costs of chronic illness and other preventable ailments and assume that quantifying and monetizing future cancer deaths avoided is a full and complete measure of the value of health and environmental protections. This is absurd on its face. – Federal standards and safeguards to protect workers from deadly poisons and clean up the air and water have been enacted to provide a variety of benefits such as preventing blindness, birth defects and sterility, asthma and emphysema, diseases of the neurological, endocrine, and gastrointestinal systems, severe headaches and skin conditions, and stunted growth or mental development in children. But regulatory accounting statements do not attempt to quantify how man
