Welfare - Corporate Style

[VoodooAce]

What's the deal with the Superfund? Why is Duhbya removing these large corporations from their responsibility to pay to clean up their own messes and making US pay for it instead? I'll tell you right now, Standard Oil can afford it a lot more than I can.

I just don't see what the problem is making people responsible for their actions. Why shouldn't corporations, when they make a mess, have to pay to clean it up.

Or, more accurately, why should I have to pay to clean it up?

If they don't have to pay to clean it up, what's the incentive to not make a bigger mess. None.

To me, its obvious that if its no longer a concern for them, they will, in the interest of increasing profits (so they can pay their employees better salaries hahahaha, yeah, right) be far less diligent in keeping the mess to a minimum.

What are the Republican arguments against this logic? They are always the ones talking about personal responsibility and accountability. Well, this is a good chance for them to show that they believe what they preach.

 

[amadeus]

Care to elaborate on what kind of "messes" you're talking about?

 

[VoodooAce]

Uhm, toxic wastes, oil related pollution, etc...

Here's the Superfund site link.....

Basically an arm of the EPA that was supposed to be funded by those that do the polluting....has been in existence since 1980. And, I believe, it worked as planned until the mid 90's when Republicans gained control of Congress.

Now, though, so he can pay back his big-business pals, Duhbya has decided that the tax payer should foot the bill.

Fact is, though, even when it was actually in place, it seemed to spawn more law suits than clean-ups.

I know G.E. has spent millions upon millions to avoid having to shell out $40 million, iirc, to clean up the Hudson River.

But this kind of lawsuit is ok, I suppose.....as opposed to the 'frivolous' ones....

 

[amadeus]

Hmm...someone could make a lot of money by setting up a kind of corporate waste management/environmental consulting company. Seems to me, you'd save the taxpayer enough money, and the EPA wouldn't be getting so many lawsuits.

Ideally, the EPA just says to get that stuff cleaned up, or they're going to slap a fine on them for violating some thing or other, and instead of taking on the task themselves, they can contract an environmental consulting firm to take care of it...

Save lots of legal fees and taxpayer money.

 

[VoodooAce]

Yeah, but you'd still have to get the polluters to pay for it, one way or another. Would just create a middle man to drive the cost up.

Of course, and maybe this is what you meant in the first place, if there were competition amongst these 'consulting' companies, they would probably come up with cheaper ways to dispose and clean up the waste/pollution.

I really don't care who does it, and if we gotta pay for it, then we gotta pay for it, but the most important thing is that it gets cleaned up by somebody.

 

[Greadius]

Originally posted by VoodooAce
I really don't care who does it, and if we gotta pay for it, then we gotta pay for it, but the most important thing is that it gets cleaned up by somebody.

And its not going to happen for a few years... thank Nader if you see him.

I'm usually an economic conservative but enviromental protection is one of those places where government intervention doesn't bother me; Superfund may not have been efficient but it was the only way. Bush's people may say there is better way, but unless they actually fight for the better way (I'll see a token sign of that happening a week before the election) it was just a quiet time to kill the program.

 

[knowltok2]

I don't know enough about this to get in any arguements on who has actually done what, but based on what I have read in the above posts, wouldn't a fund that all companies that are prone to pollute have to contribute to actually decrease personal responsibility? I am talking theory here, and I full well realize that a workable plan should exist before getting rid of a half working one, but in theory, if this is just a government run insurance policy, isn't it possible that the same kind of controls are not in place that a private insurance company would have?

Perhaps the system needs further explaining to me, I didn't see the link, so I couldn't get to the site.