~'Safety isn't worth the cost.' - Ted Cruz *- TX

[Jimmy Higgins]

So, a train carrying vinyl chloride, among other things, crash in Ohio near the border with Pennsylvania. Nearly elected, and hardly liberal[/quote, Senator JD Vance has decided to take a local populist route and care all of a sudden about rail safety. He led a bipartisan effort (mostly Democrats) to put in place protocols to try and reduce the risk of derailments in America, particularly the ones that involve hazardous chemicals. Hard to tell if it can pass the Senate, other than it is allegedly close to 60 votes.

Sen. Ted Cruz, however, is angry over the price of this safety.

Nonetheless, Cruz doubted the bill would pass the Senate with 60 votes, let alone the House.

"If the proponents of the bill want something more than a press release, if they actually want legislation in the United States Code," he told Insider, "they are going to need to work in a bipartisan way to address the very real concerns that I and many others have about the potential significant additional costs that the Biden administration could force on consumers."

The only way to reduce these accidents is via real-time monitoring, whether on the train or on the track. That'll cost money. A decent among of money. Granted, if this is more limited to hazardous material hauling trains, that can help. But it'll cost money. Safety = money. Sen. Cruz is appalled! That these costs could impact the consumer.

It is just where we seem to be in America. Can't try and stop massacres. Trying to stop train accidents is problematic too. What will it be tomorrow? Guardrails are an unacceptable price to highways and roads near downhill embankments. How much money is lost to car manufacturers in safety requirements? As it stands, if this passes the Senate, it might just barely do so... and likely has no shot in fucking hell in the GOP controlled House. I mean, how much easier of an issue is there to agree with, beyond the "Destroy Asteroid 938C8 which is doomed to strike Earth in 87 days" Bill? The vast majority of GOP'ers apparently just don't give a fuck that a town was notably polluted, their property values terribly impacted.

 

[Ford]

The vast majority of GOP'ers apparently just don't give a fuck that a town was notably polluted, their property values terribly impacted.

When I was very young (one or maybe 2 years old), my parents moved us out of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. Partly because my dad got a better job in Michigan, but also because of the nearby river that was so polluted it repeatedly caught fire. When you Google "rivers that caught fire in America," the top result is the one right down the street from where I used to live.

For current Republicans, the efforts to clean up that river over the last 50 years are...not the way we should be handling things. Because cleaning up the river so it wouldn't catch on fire anymore would take regulation. Putting the burden for cleaning it up on the companies that dumped the toxic waste into it in the first place. Spending several orders of magnitude more in tax money to fix the problem, and subsequently restricting businesses from fucking the river up all over again.

This is all bad according to the likes of Ted Cruz. He's the sort who would try to convince you that buying a plot of land in Love Canal is a good investment, and the property values will go up once he and his ilk get rid of all those "pesky regulations."

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Cue Randy Newman song: Burn on great river burn on.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It's always a tradeoff--too much safety is bad for you because it reduces the amount of other things available.

Now, whether the Republicans are making the right tradeoff is quite another matter....

Fundamentally, safety measures need to be evaluated in $ spent per life saved (or, when dealing with risks involving subsets of the population $ per year of life saved can be more relevant.) While there will be something of a range this makes a very good guideline and is generally followed--so long as the politicians are kept out. When the politicians get involved we have some cheap stuff left on the table (IIRC things like pap smears for poor women) and $1B/life for some insane regulations of nuclear plants. And probably $∞ per life saved for PSA screening tests as they appear to not save lives at all.