ChEPAning Life

Worth It? Well. Scarlett is anyway!


Here's some news for you folks who covet a bigger role for government in our lives:

The ”value of a statistical life“ is $6.9 million in today's dollars, the Environmental Protection Agency reckoned in May — a drop of nearly $1 million from five years ago .

By Seth Borenstein
Associated Press


Nice to know how much at least one bureaucratic agency figures we're worth. This amount is used by the EPA to calculate how many lives would have to be saved before it became cost-effective to adopt a new regulation or two. Put another way, if some new reg is going to cost 18 billion, and just 1,200 lives might be saved, then it's not worth it to the government. And what the hell? Isn't it enough we're aging, now we've gotta depreciate too?

Can we apply the same logic to deciding how much fuel to put in Air Force One? How about the rent on all the capitol buildings in DC? I don't know when it became all right to put a price tag on people, but I feel so used right now. I also want to know if I can borrow against my value? I could use a couple million.

What happens when someone dies? Does their net worth get factored back into the calculation? Or does some politician get a slice? I suppose we can feel good that we're worth as much as a celebrity. Oh, wait...I forgot their salaries. Well, we're getting closer anyway. Now I think of it, why not add the movie stars' earnings into the equation along with EPA dollars and save a few more lives from death by pollution? Although we could do that by just avoiding some of their movies.


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