Hacker News Reader

Comment by thisisit | Hacker News Reader

whataboutism is a tiresome argument.

Lets agree that these folks are wrong and ideally they should have petitioned 12 years ago. The question to ask is - for an admin which loudly claims to make America healthy again and talk about making everything chemical free etc - why can't they pass this? Is it because they can't score brownie points with base or they are overtly corrupt and do the same thing they accuse others of doing? Or that they know their supporters will not look at the validity of the claim and instead discredit people by asking whataboutism and party line questions?

View on HN

In any economy, there is a slider you can move to make tradeoffs between environmental protection and ease of doing business. The parties openly campaign on moving the slider in one direction or the other. Regulating PFAS would have a major economic impact, because they're in everything. So it's not a surprise that the folks who favor moving the slider more to the ease-of-business side would be opposed to stringent regulation of them.

What I'm asking--as someone who thinks we should have draconian regulations around endocrine disruptors, costs be damned--is why there's not more energy around regulating PFAS from the side that generally favors protecting the environment even if that increases costs of doing business. The MAHA people seem to be the most energized about the issue, but they're in the wrong party to do anything about it. How did PFAS fall into this weird donut hole?

Congress mandated the FDA for a particular mission and the president is obligated to execute on that mission. He clearly failed, so there needs to be a way to recall the president.

The agencies are not charged with pursuing a maximalist version of some open-ended “mission.” They are charged with enforcing the law. Congress understands that such enforcement involves compromises and tradeoffs and delegated authority to the executive branch to manage those tradeoffs. Making tradeoffs between competing interests is the central function of politics—it’s why we have elected government. Presidential elections then allow voters to turn the knobs that control how those agencies make tradeoffs.

Like, Richard Nixon didn’t create an EPA that was going to pursue maximalist environmentalist goals no matter who was elected President. Nobody thought that when the EPA was created.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com