As we devise legislation of this kind, my observation through the years has been that we tend to work at the Federal end of the chain. We will put the money in the Federal end, and it’s almost always on the assumption that the party at the very other end gets his full cost. If there ever was a circumstance under which you wanted the various parties and participants to share, this is the circumstance. I would again come back to fostering and leaving opportunities open for encouraging initiatives on the part of the insurance underwriters, providers, and communities to share in the cost of this problem. Don’t make it so easy. Don’t just give 100 percent Federal money. Somebody has got to start giving on the chain.
Let us go on the record as saying we believe that this program should be temporary. Clearly, we share with the chairman [Senator Bob Dole] the belief that the general economy is not by tomorrow going to turn upside down, and during the time in which it takes to do that, this program should be in place. But it should indeed be temporary. It should have a limited scope. Indeed, we are not in a position in this country today to institute another Cadillac-care program when it is not necessary…Certainly we do not wish to see this become another entitlement program…”
I can imagine the mounds of paperwork with little to do with providing information about hazards. We can see very little if any benefits to the worker….very marginal costs often make the difference between whether you get the business or not.
Our feeling was and still is that there is no scientific reason for not relaxing regulations. [Easing lead rules would] save billions of dollars in the balance of payments and also of million of barrels of crude oil a year.
In contrast to popularized reports, there is no persuasive evidence that low-level lead exposure is responsible for any intelligence defects.
We don’t think it adequately protects proprietary information. Competing companies will be looking with a careful eye to acquire that information. Chemists and analysts could pick up one of those sheets and say ‘Aha! So that’s what they’re using!”
Additional money spent on secondary cleanup standards is not going to make that much difference in air quality, but it will hurt the American steel industry….In short, if it did not have to meet environmental requirements, the steel industry would have the capital to increase its annual shipments from 92 million tons in 1981 to 105 million tons in 1990….The need to meet future environmental requirements will reduce this expansion to 96 million tons.
We’ll do everything in our power to have it defeated. All these attorneys have to do is grab these records, and they can play all kinds of games with them. Just about anything that happens to a person can be connected to his work.
[The proposed OSHA right-to-know regulation will be] an enormously expensive and unnecessarily burdensome regulation.
[The OSHA right-to-know regulation would create] virtually unmanageable burdens on small manufacturers….workers would be just as safe without this regulation.
