Debbie Schlussel: Sign of the Bad Times: Your Life Now Worth $1 Million Less
I thought for sure it was a sign of the times when I saw a building, which only recently housed a mortgage banker's office, now transformed into a pawn shop. Even more significant, the building is in the upscale Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills and right on the border of even more upscale West Bloomfield. I never thought in a million years I'd see a pawn shop within miles of this location. It tells you things are bad for everybody, even the "rich."
But now, here's another ominous sign of the bad times--which are NOT all in our mind, though a good deal of it is certainly our leaders' (and some of our own) fault. Some of this is due to the fall of the value of the American dollar, but still troubling:
It's not just the U.S. dollar that's losing value: A government agency has decided that a U.S. life isn't worth what it used to be.
The "value of a statistical life" is $6.9 million in today's dollars, the Environmental Protection Agency decided in May -- a drop of nearly $1 million from five years ago. The Associated Press discovered the change after a review of cost-benefit analyses over more than a dozen years.Though it may seem like a harmless bureaucratic recalculation, the devaluation has real consequences.
When drawing up regulations, government agencies weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule. The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation, such as tighter pollution restrictions.
Consider, for example, a hypothetical regulation that costs $18 billion to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At $7.8 million per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at $6.9 million per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted.
The fact is that as Americans earn more, the calculated value of their lives goes up, so this drop sends the alternatively downwardly corellative message.
Posted by Debbie on July 15, 2008 01:51 PM to Debbie Schlussel