“The horses go perfectly sound right up to the second they snap their leg off,” Mr. Clifton said. The following day he came back with a warning: “If we have one more horse break down, we are going to have a major problem on our hands.” That night, riding in the fifth race, Mr. Clifton heard a bone snap and saw another jockey, Ricky Frazier, vaulting off a horse named Laughing Moon. Mr. Clifton yanked his own mount, but they still went soaring over Laughing Moon. Within minutes, Mr. Frazier was in an ambulance and a veterinarian was administering a lethal injection to Laughing Moon, the ninth Gill horse to die racing in 10 months.

That is when the jockeys decided to take a stand: They would not ride in any race with a Gill-owned horse. Their boycott cast a harsh light on the Pennsylvania Racing Commission and Penn National Gaming, which owns the track.
“It wasn’t the commission or the racetrack or anyone with any responsibility for horses and riders who took action,” said George Strawbridge, a prominent breeder and owner. “It was the jockeys who feared for their life. That’s not a shame. That’s a disgrace.”

The fact that inspections of horses at the track before they race aren’t standard from state to state, giving owners like Michael Gill, the one described in those paragraphs, the ability to essentially go shopping for venues where they can race unhealthy horses, is deeply upsetting. I’m not saying horse racing needs to be federally regulated. But it’s hard to believe that track owners and racing commissions couldn’t come to relatively standard conclusions about the desirability of keeping horses from getting unrepairably injured on the track if only in the interests of keeping jockeys safe. And anyone who thinks watching animals hurt themselves dreadfully is part of the entertainment might want to take a careful look at themselves.

by Michael A. Livermore

Between 2007 and 2011, use of the phrase “job-killing regulations” in U.S. newspapers increased by 17,550%. Recently, committees of the 112^th U.S. House of Representatives convened twenty hearings in its first twenty days that explored the link between regulations and the country’s job numbers.  Protections for our public health and environment in particular have been on the receiving end of this barrage.

Claims that regulations have a significant impact on American employment call for careful scrutiny. Because they are repeated so often, the idea that regulations “kill jobs” can start to sound true, or at least “truthy.”  But when you scratch the surface of these claims, too often they are based more on ideology than sound methodology.

Some of the most heated rhetoric in this debate can give the impression that regulations are creating a widespread jobs crisis and that the economy would be thriving were it not for President Obama’s environmental protection agenda.  But what are all these claims linking negative job effects to regulation based on?  In the scrum of politics it is often not clear: sometimes no analysis is cited, no data is included, no supporting documents are attached.

In some cases, studies are cited in attempt to estimate the employment effects of environmental protection.  But their limitations are not communicated clearly enough or given enough attention.

In a recent study, we found it is very difficult to accurately assess how a regulation will affect an economy as large and dynamic as ours.  Employment impact models attempt to replicate how the job market will respond to some external change, like an environmental regulation. They are complex, data intensive exercises that are sensitive to the type of model used and the assumptions that are inputted.   They are certainly not the kinds of analyses that can be easily boiled down to a sound bite.

The problem is, starkly different pictures can emerge based on different factors chosen by the analyst.

In one case, when looking at the effects of two EPA regulations on employment, the Political Economy Research Institute forecasted that 1.46 million jobs would be gained over the next five years, while a test done on behalf of the American Counsel for Clean Coal Energy found that 1.44 million jobs would be lost over the next seven years.

That doesn’t mean these studies have nothing to tell us.  But it is important to remember when they are used in the political debate that these results cannot be communicated quickly or easily.  You can’t just load up a model, churn out an estimate and holler out a headline: “Regulation ‘X’ kills ‘Y’ number of jobs.”  To use the information responsibly, at a minimum, the assumptions and other modeling choices must be disclosed, as well as an analysis that determines how sensitive the results are to modeling choices. These caveats are hardly the stuff of juicy tidbits that lobbyists and politicians like to fling around, but are necessary to communicate an accurate picture of what these studies can tell us.

Conventional wisdom about jobs and environmental protection has taken on a life of its own. One side sees a clean environment as anathema to full-employment; the other sees regulation as a major driver of job growth. The reality is that employment levels in the economy are driven by macroeconomic factors (interest rates, credit markets, etc.) that have nothing to do with environmental protection. The employment effects of even major environmental rules are drowned out by the dynamics of the broader economy, and are also swamped by the non-employment costs and benefits of environmental protection.

It is worth paying attention to the jobs impacts of environmental rules, but they must also be put in the proper context. Overheated political rhetoric based on shaky numbers does little inform the debate, and only serves to distract attention from the other important consequences of the choices that we face.

Michael A. Livermore is the executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity and an adjunct professor at NYU Law. He is the author, along with Richard L. Revesz, of Retaking Rationality: How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Better Protect the Environment and Our Health.

Kennedy’s remarks, delivered 50 years ago today, argued that protecting consumers was vital to the stability of the American economy and the country’s national interest:

If consumers are offered inferior products, if prices are exorbitant, if drugs are unsafe or worthless, if the consumer is unable to choose on an informed basis, then his dollar is wasted, his health and safety may be threatened, and the national interest suffers.

Kennedy’s four basic consumer rights led to the establishment of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and to the passing of anti-trust, patent, and price gouging laws, as well as the creation of non-governmental actors like the Better Business Bureau to protect consumer rights.

While Americans take many of these protections for granted, they are often under assault from business interests and lawmakers. Regulatory agencies from the Food and Drug Administration to the Securities and Exchange Commission have been subjected to drastic budget cuts, as well as repeated efforts to prevent them from passing new regulations or enforcing those that already exist.

Those same efforts are now focused on the newest consumer protection agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. President Obama appointed the CFPB’s first director in January, after more than a year of Republican promises that they would block his nominee. Despite those efforts, the CFPB is already helping consumers in numerous ways, primarily by taking steps to prevent and remedy the predatory, discriminatory, and potentially illegal financial practices that were prevalent during the housing crisis.

“The federal Government — by nature the highest spokesman for all the people — has a special obligation to be alert to the consumer’s needs and to advance the consumer’s interests,” Kennedy said. “Their voice is not always as loudly heard in Washington as the voices of smaller and better-organized groups–nor is their point of view always defined and presented. But under our economic as well as our political form of democracy, we share an obligation to protect the common interest in every decision we make.”

According to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, however, the “job-killing” part of the phrase “job-killing regulation” is built largely on myth. Last year, EPI released a report that found that several of the EPA’s proposed environmental regulations would actually create jobs. Now that the EPA has finalized a rule regulating toxic waste, EPI has used that rule to analyze whether such regulations are, indeed, job-killers. Once again, it found the opposite to be true, and said the new rule will actually create more jobs than it previously estimated:

Previous studies (such as Bivens 2011) that have estimated the jobs impact of specific proposed regulatory changes have probably understated the gains to employment spurred by the rule, likely by roughly 50%. But even given these understatements, the effects of some specific regulatory changes—such as the toxics rule, the largest single air-quality rule currently being proposed by the EPA—are surely positive for job creation. [...]

Even with multiplier effects, these estimates translate into job gains of roughly 117,000 to 135,000 in 2015, depending on whether one or both offsets to the job-depressing effects of price increases are used. … But what this reassessment does make clear is that it is near-inconceivable that adoption of the rule will cost any jobs at all in the near term. The effect will be unambiguously positive.

The study is hardly the first indication that the GOP’s “job-killing regulations” rhetoric is built on a myth. The EPA’s regulation of the coal industry helped boost industry employment to a 15-year high, and EPA regulations aimed at cleaning up Chesapeake Bay would create 35 times more jobs than the GOP’s favorite pet project, the Keystone XL pipeline. The GOP’s spiel has even fallen flat with business leaders large and small, with one CEO saying there was “no question” the new regulations would create jobs.

Lutz had tried for years to strip Thompson of his personal zoo, but the one animal-cruelty charge the department managed to make stick — concerning the fate of some starved cows and a buffalo — hadn’t had the desired effect. The truth was that Thompson was doing nothing illegal, at least not according to the laws of Ohio. So long as he wasn’t charging admission, he could have all the animals he wanted, virtually unregulated. But Thompson was less fortunate in his handling of another of his hoards, an arsenal of more than one hundred guns. With the assistance of the ATF, Lutz had seen Thompson charged with the possession of illegal firearms after a sting had found some with their serial numbers carefully filed off.

At GQ, Chris Heath goes into more detail on both the regulatory, cultural and ethical issues involved in what I think is a less action-movie-y but more comprehensive piece:

One of the surprising facts about owning animals like these in America right now is that while keeping them may not be cheap, buying them frequently is. Tom Stalf at the Columbus Zoo suggests to me that you can buy a lion for $300—cheaper than many pedigree dogs…Just as “good” private owners explain why they should exist and why “bad” private owners should not, sanctuaries may suggest that they should endure while private owners are phased out, and zoos can loftily assume there are clear reasons that they should be cherished while most kinds of non-zoo ownership should be frowned upon. I can see a logic in some kind of extreme libertarian position (people should be able to do what they want with animals unless they are clearly shown to be doing harm) and, conversely, in a hard-core animal-rights position (no animals should be used for any human purpose whatsoever), but the arguments for everything in between seem murky. Frequently these are based on a confident assessment of the animals’ happiness (a thorny notion), and on the pragmatic need to save animals from a place worse than where they are. (Everyone knows somewhere else worse.)

I’m not a wildlife expert, so I’m not the one to lay out a set of standards here. But I’m not clear what the argument should be for why the requirements for both animals’ and humans’ safety and well-being should be different depending on whether the animals’ owners are zoos or private individuals. In both cases, it seems like we should try to guarantee that the animals have adequate room to move around, a steady, healthy food source, and that the humans in proximity to them who are not their owners are guaranteed a level of safety. Such regulations seem like they’d end up imposing reasonable restrictions on the number of wild animals any one person could own and support. It’s one thing to say that someone has the right to take the risk that an animal who lives with them will rip them to pieces: it’s another entirely to say that their friends and neighbors have to accept being exposed to that risk.

The level of regulation in America, every the regulators, the government, come up with new regulations. And they send them out. The rate of regulatory burden has increased four-fold since Obama has become president. Four times the amount of regulation coming out per year as in the past. And so businesses say, ‘gosh, I’m not sure I want to invest in America.’

Watch it:

This statistic has absolutely no basis in reality. In fact, it isn’t true according to the Romney campaign. When Romney made the same claim during an interview with NPR in September, NPR asked the Romney campaign for verification, at which point the campaign was forced to admit that “the Governor misspoke.”

Instead, the Romney camp told NPR that new regulations under Obama are twice what they were under President George W. Bush. Trouble is, that’s not true either, as Bloomberg News pointed out:

Obama’s White House approved 613 federal rules during the first 33 months of his term, 4.7 percent fewer than the 643 cleared by President George W. Bush’s administration in the same time frame, according to an Office of Management and Budget statistical database reviewed by Bloomberg.

Later on during the event, Romney claimed that, according to an official government report, regulations costs the U.S. economy $1.7 trillion annually. That number, according to economists, also isn’t true. In fact, John Irons of the Economic Policy Institute found that the study Romney cited “contains basic conceptual mistakes and relies on extraordinarily poor data.” “Its results should neither be used as a valid measure of the economic costs of regulation nor as a guide for policy,” he said.

For Romney, using these outright falsehoods helps him paint the Obama administration as some sort of regulatory behemoth, smooshing small businesses beneath its heels. However, when actual small businesses are asked whether regulations are killing jobs, the answer is always a resounding no.

But even as America deals with high unemployment and a sluggish economic recovery, coal employment this year rose to its highest level since 1996, according to data from the Mine Safety and Health Administration. In 2011, there were more than 90,000 coal jobs, and the 59,059 Appalachian coal jobs are the most since 1997. According to the same data, the spike in employment correlates to the EPA’s crackdown on destructive mountaintop removal policies, the Charleston Gazette reports:

Matt Wasson, director of programs for the group Appalachian Voices, said his review of the MSHA data shows the number of coal jobs in the region has increased by 10 percent since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began a crackdown on mountaintop-removal mining in June 2009.

“In other words, the idea of a ‘permitorium’ on coal mine permitting that House Republicans are pushing out is completely and demonstrably false,” Wasson said Friday.

As Wasson said, the industry and the politicians it contributes to most have slammed the EPA’s regulatory policies as “job killing” and anti-coal. In reality, however, mechanized practices like mountaintop removal can reduce employment while boosting production and profits. Underground mining, a less destructive form of coal extraction, actually requires more workers than mountaintop removal or strip mining.

The coal industry spends millions each year in advertising and political contributions to disseminate the myth that regulating mining and opposing mountaintop removal is akin to killing jobs. Reality, however, shows that just as in other industries, the opposite is true, and regulations to boost worker safety and environmental protection can actually have a positive effect on job creation. As Appalachian Voices’ Matt Wasson told the Gazette, “The hysterical reaction of coal companies to any and all regulations to protect the safety of workers and communities near their mines is about profits, not jobs.”

When Pfizer cut its research budget this year and laid off 1,100 employees, it was not because the company needed to save money.

In fact, the drug maker had so much cash left over, it decided to buy back an additional $5 billion worth of stock on top of the $4 billion already earmarked for repurchases in 2011 and beyond. [...]

There has been a steady drumbeat of other companies laying off workers even as they have disclosed plans to buy back more stock. On June 23, Campbell Soup said it would buy back $1 billion in stock; five days later it announced plans to eliminate 770 jobs. Hewlett-Packard announced a $10 billion stock repurchase in July, and jettisoned 500 jobs in September after it discontinued its TouchPad and smartphone product lines.

“It’s an extraordinarily unimaginative way to use money,” said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. By buying back shares and lowering the number that are in circulation, executives can make their own “earnings per share” number look better, thus boosting their bonuses.

Part of the problem is that companies don’t see any demand in the economy, thanks to high unemployment, lack of consumer confidence, and austerity at the state budget level. But at the same time that they’re using billions to enrich themselves, corporate executives are whining that the problems in the economy have to do with regulation and taxes, and spend their time pushing for new tax giveaways that would boost their already high levels of cash even higher. But if the way that they’re employing their current stockpiles of money is any indication, corporations’ attempts to secure more through lower taxes should be met with extreme skepticism.

An investigation into enforcement in the nation’s largest oil and gas producing states finds that companies have “little to fear from the inspectors and agencies regulating” the industry.  This comes days after a panel of experts released a report warning that poor regulatory oversight of natural gas fracking could risk “serious environmental consequences and a loss of public confidence.”

The investigation of state-level data, conducted by Greenwire, shows that only a very small fraction of violations are enforced with fines. And when companies are fined, the penalties are “puny.”

In Texas, 96 percent of the 80,000 violations by oil and gas drillers in 2009 resulted in no enforcement action. West Virginia, a state with 56,000 wells, issued 19 penalties last year. And Wyoming, the center of Rocky Mountain energy, collected $15,500 in fines in 2010.

Pennsylvania, the most aggressive about fining violators, sought penalties for more than a quarter of the violations found last year. It levied fines for 4 percent of the violations, with the penalties totaling $3.7 million. The largest of those was a $900,000 fine against a drilling company that contaminated the water of 16 homes.

That was less than the profits the company makes in three hours.

Some states don’t even track key enforcement data, so regulators don’t know which companies have already been fined repeatedly.

This comes at a time of intense debate over how — or if — federal regulators should do more to monitor natural gas fracking. With the industry growing at around 50% a year, states are struggling to keep pace with the rate of expansion. A recent panel composed of industry professionals, put together by the Department of Energy, recently recommended that the Environmental Protection Agency finalize rules for regulating the practice:

We encourage EPA to complete its current rule making as it applies to shale gas production quickly, and explicitly include methane, a greenhouse gas, and controls from existing shale gas production sources. Additionally, some states have taken action in this area, and others could do so as well.

The Greenwire investigation also looked at oil production, another sector undergoing a substantial boom. Despite claims that Obama is blocking the oil industry, drillers are deploying more rigs today than they have since the mid-1980′s. That increase in activity is adding to the workload of state regulatory bodies, which have reportedly looked to these massive companies to fund investigations of their own violations:

Oil and gas companies are often national or international in scope, and when dealing with states, they start with the advantage of sheer size.

For example, Exxon Mobil’s 2010 revenues of $383 billion are several times the size of the state budget in California ($87 billion), the largest in the nation. Occidental Petroleum Corp. had 2010 revenues of $19 billion, larger than the budget of a midsized state such as Colorado, where it operates as Oxy USA.

At the level of state regulatory agencies, the numbers are much smaller, especially when it comes to fines.

One was, at the time, the largest fine in the history of the agency, $423,300 against Williams Production RMT Co. for poisoning the water supply of Ned Prather’s hunting cabin near DeBeque, Colo.

One day in May 2008, Prather arrived at his cabin and gulped down a cup of water from the kitchen sink. Right away, he told The Denver Post, his throat burned, his head throbbed and he felt like he was suffocating. His wife drove him to the hospital. Tests would later show the water had benzene and related chemicals at a concentration 20 times the safety limit.

State officials asked Williams to lead a group of local drillers with operations in the area to investigate whether drilling had contaminated Prather’s water.

Prather’s lawyer, Richard Djokic, compared the practice to letting the suspects investigate a murder.

“Imagine you have a body on the ground here, and we’re all standing around holding guns,” Djkokic told the Post. “A cop comes and says, ‘Figure out amongst yourselves who did this and let me know.’”

Companies in the fossil energy sector would prefer to see state-by-state regulations rather than stronger federal regulations. But are states equipped to handle the continued surge in drilling activity?

Economists have debunked the myth that environment regulations stall job growth again and again. Even as Mitt Romney calls to “tear down the vast edifice of regulations the Obama administration has imposed,” data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show regulations haven’t hurt the economy. In 2010, only 0.3 percent of layoffs were due to higher costs from government regulations/intervention. By comparison, lower business demand caused 25 percent of layoffs.

Past studies also confirm that regulations have virtually no impact on jobs. Richard Morgenstern’s landmark study found that over a decade of regulations on heavily polluting industries didn’t cause “a significant change” in employment:

According to the study, when jobs were lost, they were often made up elsewhere in the same industry. For every $1 million companies spent, as many as 11 / 2 net jobs were added to the economy.

Overall, the research shows that the GOP field’s hyperbolic calls to eliminate regulation would have minimal impact on the unemployment rate.

The Senate GOP, instead, is offering its own “jobs bill.” The GOP’s legislation, in addition to providing some highway funding, would cut $40 billion in discretionary spending and implement a cockamamie House Republican proposal known as the REINS Act. As ThinkProgress Justice editor Ian Millhiser wrote, the REINS Act would cripple the government’s ability to regulate just about anything:

House Republicans claim that REINS will simply provide an additional layer of congressional oversight before a federal agency can improve vehicle safety standards or reduce greenhouse emissions or streamline the FDA’s process for approving new drugs, but the actual effect of REINS would be to completely freeze much of the federal regulatory structure in place — permanently.

For one thing, while REINS’ chief sponsor claims that it would prevent new regulations from being filibustered in the Senate, the bill does not account for a loophole in the Senate rules. As a result, all but the most insignificant new federal regulations would be shut down completely unless they could somehow earn supermajority support in the Senate.

While the GOP seems to be aiming this plan at preventing new regulations, it would also effectively make it impossible to get rid of old regulations. Sally Katzen, a former chief overseer of the federal regulatory process, pointed out that “agencies sometimes propose eliminating outdated rules. But even these efforts at regulatory streamlining would nonetheless get caught in the REINS Act net, as deregulatory rules are nevertheless still rules.”

Former Reagan administration economist Bruce Bartlett explained this week that the GOP’s belief in deregulation as a job creation measure is “nonsense.” “It’s just made up,” he said. McClatchy spoke with small business owners, and found “little evidence” that regulation is hurting job creation. So instead of passing the infrastructure bill and putting Americans back to work on projects vital to the country, the GOP is proposing a nonsense solution to a non-existent problem.

As with most GOP talking points, the facts tell a different story. A Bloomberg analysis of regulations reveals that Obama has approved fewer regulations than President George W. Bush “at this same point in their tenures, and the estimated costs of those rules haven’t reached the annual peak set in fiscal 1992 under Bush’s father.” Indeed, the record for the most expensive regulations still belongs to the GOP:

Obama’s White House approved 613 federal rules during the first 33 months of his term, 4.7 percent fewer than the 643 cleared by President George W. Bush’s administration in the same time frame, according to an Office of Management and Budget statistical database reviewed by Bloomberg. [...]

In the last 12 months through the end of September, the cost range of new regulations is estimated to be $8 billion to $9 billion, a decrease from 2010, according to non-partisan Government Accountability Office reports analyzed by Bloomberg…The record [cost of regulations] came in 1992 under George H.W. Bush when that total hit $20.9 billion in current dollars. In the last year of Ronald Reagan’s term it was $16 billion in today’s dollars.

We certainly don’t remember Republicans crying about the “excessive” Bush regulations.

More of Obama’s regulations may cost more than $100 million as compared to previous administrations. But many of them help prevent outcomes that would cost exponentially more. For instance, the Department of Interior’s new controls on deep-water oil drilling may cost the industry $180 million, but one oil spill like that caused by Deepwater Horizon could cost the industry $16.3 billion. Some of the administration’s rules, like those governing coal ash, will actually help create thousands of jobs.

The impact of these regulations on small businesses is incredibly minimal. In fact, of the 10,361 mass layoffs last year, only 61 were attributed to regulations. When McClatchy asked small business owners why they have been hesitant to hire, “none of the business owners complained about regulation in their particular industries, and most seemed to welcome it.”

Former Reagan and Bush economist Bruce Bartlett

One of congressional Republicans’ favorite explanations for sluggish job growth is supposed “regulatory uncertainty” being caused by the Obama administration. “It’s really pretty straight-forward,” Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) has said. “We need to reduce the regulatory burden and the regulatory uncertainty that’s coming out of Washington.” “By pursuing a steady repeal of job-destroying regulations, we can help lift the cloud of uncertainty hanging over small and large employers alike, empowering them to hire more workers,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA).

However, Bruce Bartlett — a conservative economist who worked for both the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations, as well as for former Rep. Jack Kemp (R-NY) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) — wrote today that this theory is just “a canard invented by Republicans“:

For some years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has had a program that tracks mass layoffs. In 2007, the program was expanded, and businesses were asked their reasons for laying off workers. Among the reasons offered was “government regulations/intervention.” There is only partial data for 2007, but we have data since then through the second quarter of this year.

The table below presents the bureau’s data. As one can see, the number of layoffs nationwide caused by government regulation is minuscule and shows no evidence of getting worse during the Obama administration. Lack of demand for business products and services is vastly more important. [...]

In my opinion, regulatory uncertainty is a canard invented by Republicans that allows them to use current economic problems to pursue an agenda supported by the business community year in and year out. In other words, it is a simple case of political opportunism, not a serious effort to deal with high unemployment.

As the Economic Policy Institute found, “a simple review of investment and employment trends — what businesses are actually doing — reveals that employers are not behaving according to the narrative described in the uncertainty story: Employment and investment trends are what one would expect (or better) given the trends in the overall growth of the economy.” As Bloomberg News put it in an editorial, “the charge of ‘creating uncertainty’ is a way to blame Obama for the U.S.’s economic trials without having to explain the connection.”

The GOP is almost certainly not going to stop using the “regulatory uncertainty” talking point. But, as the research shows, the public and media should not take it seriously.

Listeria rarely shows up in produce, but federal health officials say they’ve gotten better at detecting the germs that cause food poisoning, so they are seeing them in produce more often. [...]

The finding of listeria in romaine lettuce at the Salinas farm was a result of an FDA research program to understand the prevalence of the pathogen in fresh produce, especially in lettuce and leafy greens, [FDA spokeswoman Stephanie] Yao said. [...]

The FDA has isolated listeria in leafy green produce three times so far this year, Yao said.

Listeria is the same bacteria that caused the deadliest food outbreak in a decade last month when at least 16 died who had eaten tainted melons. Fortunately, thanks to the FDA’s food inspectors, the lettuce contamination won’t have the same deadly effect.

But as ThinkProgress has noted, even as these food outbreaks occur, Republican lawmakers are trying to gut food safety laws in the name of spending cuts and less regulation on businesses. In June, House Republicans attempted to kill the first significant upgrade in the nation’s food safety regime in more than 70 years, saying the private food industry sufficiently self-polices. Their plan would have imperiled the jobs of 3,000 food inspectors. Last month, presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) called for an end to food safety laws that she claimed were stifling job creation. One in six Americans is sickened by food-borne illness each year, and more than 3,000 die.

In the weeks following Bachmann’s statement, an outbreak of listeria tied to some Colorado cantaloupes has killed sixteen people — making it the deadliest foodborne illness outbreak in the U.S. in more than a decade — while four children in the district of Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) were stricken with E. Coli from tainted meat. Today, in the Minnesapolis Star-Tribune, a mother from Bachmann’s home state of Minnesota whose daughter had a stroke due to E. Coli poisoning appealed to Bachmann to change her position:

I caught it on the news that you visited a meatpacking plant in Iowa last week and promised to reduce restrictions that ensure food safety, so that small businesses could create more jobs.

I am adamantly opposed to this idea.

According to CNN, the European outbreak of E. coli has killed 16 people; the New York Times reports an even higher number. To loosen rules for the meatpacking industry invites danger to innocent victims — like my 4-year-old daughter, Rachel.

Thanks to E. coli, my daughter has lived in a hospital since June 11. Thanks to E. coli, she experienced acute kidney failure.

Thanks to E. coli, she has also suffered a stroke, resulting in a brain injury on both hemispheres. She has lost her ability to walk, talk and move in a normal way.

Before E. coli, she was a perfectly healthy, active little girl.

The woman, Melissa Castino Reid, closed her letter by saying, “from one mother to another, I’m asking you to reverse your campaign promise and err on the side of safety. For my child. For your children. For everyone’s children. It’s just that simple.”

Every year, 3,000 people die from foodborne illness, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, while Georgetown University’s Produce Safety Project has found that foodborne illness costs the U.S. $152 billion annually. This month, the Agriculture Department announced that it “will ban the sale of ground beef tainted with six toxic strains of E. coli bacteria that are increasingly showing up as the cause of severe illness from food.” It’d be nice if Bachmann could see through her deregulatory zeal for just a moment to support these common-sense rules that protect families from going through the situation with which the Reids are struggling.

(HT: @JenniferJJacobs)

Lost in the well-deserved focus on the listeria outbreak is the fact that another giant food-producer, Tyson Fresh Meats, was forced this week to recall more than 130,000 pounds of ground beef due to E. Coli contamination. And this particular breakdown in food safety should earn the attention of the man leading the GOP in its slash-and-burn approach to the budget, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), as four children in his district were sickened by the meat:

The recall of 65 tons of ground beef that might be contaminated with E. coli has hit close to home for House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio.

The meat, recalled today by Tyson Fresh Meats, was shipped to 16 states…WCPO, ABC’s affiliate in Cincinnati, reported today, “four children became ill after eating the meat with their family in Butler County, Ohio, in the second week of September.” “A 9-year-old child was hospitalized for about 10 days with severe diarrhea,” the station reported.

As we’ve pointed out time and time again, one in six Americans is sickened by food-borne illness each year, and more than 3,000 die. The annual cost to the country of food-borne illnesses is $152 billion, according to Georgetown University’s Produce Safety Project. However, the GOP has not only refused to fund the implementation of a landmark food safety law passed last year, but has said that the current rules on the books are too onerous, because the food industry “self-polices.” But as the current slew of recalls shows, that it clearly not the case.

The outbreak follows recalls of other tainted food products, including the third largest food recall in American history, when Cargill was forced to recall 36 million pounds of turkey due to a salmonella outbreak that killed one and sickened 80 others.

Even as these outbreaks occur, however, the Republican Party is continuing its efforts to gut food safety laws aimed at protecting Americans from these types of food-borne illnesses. In June, House Republicans attempted to kill the first significant upgrade in the nation’s food safety laws in more than 70 years, saying the private food industry sufficiently self-policed itself. Last week, presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) called for an end to food safety laws that she claimed were stifling job creation:

“That’s part of the problem, the overkill,” Bachmann told reporters during an appearance in which she posed with huge slabs of beef. “And when they make it complicated, they make it expensive and so then you can no longer stay in business.”

As Pat Garofalo has noted, one in six Americans is sickened by food-borne illness each year, and more than 3,000 die. And while the GOP cites the cost of new regulations, the annual cost of food illnesses is $152 billion, according to Georgetown University’s Produce Safety Project, and the cost of not overhauling outdated food safety laws far exceeds the cost of implementing the new policies the GOP opposes. House Republicans, however, refuse to approve the funding necessary to put those policies in place, all but ensuring that deadly and costly food outbreaks will continue to occur all too frequently.

Ailes raises a Fox initiative that he cooked up: “Are our producers on board on this ‘Regulation Nation’ stuff? Are they ginned up and ready to go?” Ailes, who claims to be “hands off” in developing the series, later boasts that “no other network will cover that subject … I think regulations are totally out of control,” he adds, with bureaucrats hiring Ph.D.s to “sit in the basement and draw up regulations to try to ruin your life.” It is a message his troops cannot miss.

The point of the series is supposedly to “expose how excessive laws are drowning American businesses.” So far, Fox has used the campaign to bash everything from financial regulation and environmental protections to labor law. In one segment, Fox framed a new law in Seattle requiring businesses provide workers with paid sick days as something that will inevitably lead to job loss. Watch it:

Here’s a screenshot from the top of the segment:

Of course, study after study has shown that requiring paid sick days, far from killing jobs, is a good deal for both workers and employers. In the same vein, new research last week showed that environmental regulations are not the boogey-man that the right makes them out to be, but can actually boost the economy. But at the same time that the GOP has decided that regulations are one of the key things holding back job creation, Ailes decided that the time was ripe for Fox to launch a series based on the same exact premise.