ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, May 22, 1996 TAG: 9605220032
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
Politics is, or should be, about making choices. You can have X or Y, but not always both. Yet politicians often are rewarded for making grand promises while obscuring the tradeoffs.
This is unfortunate. A greater appreciation for the prevalence of tradeoffs, and more thoroughgoing attempts to identify them clearly, could go a long way toward improving decisionmaking in our democracy.
For this reason, an ongoing if somewhat obscure debate about federal regulation has, in its potential long-term effects, great import.
The debate concerns whether cost-benefit analysis and risk assessment ought to be applied more systematically to the promulgation of regulations.
When a diverse group of 11 economists recently took up the subject in a careful study, they accepted as their core premise the necessity of tradeoffs. As American Enterprise Institute economist Robert Hahn put it: "Any regulation that 'bites' - that changes how things work - requires Americans to spend money differently and thereby to give up something to receive the benefit that the regulation provides."
The point of cost-benefit analysis is to clarify such tradeoffs, to help regulators assess whether benefits outweigh costs. Along with better risk assessment, such analysis can also help indicate whether a different sort of regulation might produce greater benefit at less cost by focusing on the most serious problems.
Unfortunately, there is a great deal of resistance on Capitol Hill and elsewhere to efforts aimed at exposing more environmental and safety regulations to such analysis. Instead of recognizing tradeoffs, regulators and their allies tend to see only stark choices between "safe" and "dangerous," or "healthy" and "unhealthy."
Meantime, a lot of government programs spend millions going after relatively minor risks - even though the same investments directed at more serious risks would produce a bigger bang for the regulatory buck.
Of course, not all costs and benefits can be gauged in dollars, and no policies are value-free. Public benefits often are underestimated. And some government actions that would be economically efficient might fail a fairness test. Also, as some congressional ideologues intent on dismantling environmental protections have demonstrated, cost-benefit analysis is vulnerable to political abuse and manipulation.
Surely, though, the purpose of such analysis needn't be less regulation; it can be more effective regulation. And surely, absent rigorous analysis and a shared consideration of tradeoffs, political discourse is even more vulnerable to abuse and manipulation.
If a democracy shouldn't defer big decisions to experts, neither should it shrink from analyzing and informing, and so improving, its decisionmaking. The first step: Recall the phrase from a 1966 book by Robert Heinlein: "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."
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