The Trump Administration Is Cooking Stats to Keep the Sick Sick and the Poor Poor

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

President Trump and his administration are masters of spinning information to sell an agenda to the public. But while bending opinion may be as easy as spouting a few false claims, it takes more than hollow bluster to subvert federal regulations in order to oppress the disadvantaged to a degree that satisfies the swamp creatures the president has brought into public service. Doing so often involves utilizing misleading analytical formulas. As it turns out, they’re pretty good at that, too.

The most recent example of the administration’s spurious statistic shuffling came last week, when the New York Times reported that the Environmental Protection Agency is planning to alter the way it calculates how many people could die from pollution in order to strip Obama-era environmental protections.

Last August, the Trump administration analyzed the cost of replacing the 2015 Clean Power Plan with a new plan that lightens restrictions on the coal industry. The administration found that doing so would increase fine particulate matter in the air — which causes respiratory issues and other health problems — and that the increase could result in up to 1,400 deaths per year by 2030. A full version of Trump’s new plan, the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, is due to be released in June. It will not include this death estimate, as the administration is using a “new analytical model” based on the false idea that there are no public health benefits to making the air any cleaner than what federal law requires, or 2.5 PM, a measure of fine particulate matter concentration. As the Times puts it:

“To put the matter in perspective, most scientists say particulate matter standards are like speed limits. On many highways, a limit of 65 miles per hour is considered reasonable to protect public safety. But that doesn’t mean the risk of an accident disappears at 55 m.p.h., or even 25.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/welfare-trump-administration-poverty-841006/

[Wellstone ruled]

1. You got it.

He even bragged about how he would only talk about the topside and nothing about the bottom side.