By Aaron G. Lehmer

Iowa State Daily

We’ve all heard the horror stories:

Excessive government regulations are strangling our economy. Silly rules are piling mountains of red tape on our daily lives. And so on and so on.

The obsession with finding outlandish examples of federal rules has become so intense that many legislators have abandoned any sense of truth. Now, they are simply battling over who can come up with the biggest tall tale of alleged regulatory injustice.

Although many legislators are guilty of this shameful display, none stands out more than Rep. David McIntosh (R-Ind.), whose anti-regulation crusade has literally been based on false anecdotes.

His most prominent ‘misstatement of fact’ dealt with a proposed rule by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) regulating the marketing of five-gallon buckets. During a debate over the Regulatory Transition Act, which would place an across-the-board moratorium on new federal regulations, McIntosh held up a yellow plastic bucket with a small hole in the bottom. He then explained that the CPSC had proposed requiring that all five-gallon buckets have a hole in the bottom to ‘avoid the danger of somebody falling face down into the bucket and drowning.’

In reality, the CPSC wanted to require warning labels on the buckets. Since nearly 500 babies have drowned in such buckets over the past 10 years, such a requirement hardly qualifies as ‘excessive’ governmental regulation.

Even after having been told of his error in a public release by the CPSC, McIntosh repeated his story weeks later in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Indeed, instead of rescinding his earlier claims, he has gone on to propagate even more false stories of regulatory excess within the Occupational Safety and Health Association.

Unfortunately, McIntosh has been given extensive help in his mission to deceive the public.

During debate on the 1995 Private Property Rights Act, Rep. Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho) claimed that a Pennsylvania man was arrested simply for removing tires from his property, which supposedly violated a wetlands protection law. Actually, the man was arrested because he deliberately drained the wetland, causing his neighbor’s basement to flood.

Probably the most interesting example of GOP deception concerns a provision of the Endangered Species Act, which, in Rep. Ken Calvert’s (R-Calif.) view, promotes the ‘welfare of rats over American citizens.’ Calvert claims that a measure regulating the removal of vegetation (crucial for the kangaroo rat) led to a fire outbreak in southern California which destroyed 25,000 acres and 29 homes. However, according to a General Accounting Office report, the regulation had nothing to do with the losses incurred in the fire.

All of these examples of blatant deception point to the real agenda of these so-called public servants: Destroy what is left of the environmental, workplace and consumer safety laws which benefit the average citizen. That way, the ‘important’ people — corporate CEOs and the wealthy elite — can profit more readily at the public’s expense.

Aaron Lehmer is a continuing senior in environmental studies from Ames. He is the opinion page editor of the Daily.