Unintended Consequences?

The AP put out this anonymous bit of stupid fluff about air quality in the three most in-your-face liberal states: California, New York, and Oregon. To put a fine point on it, laws don't clean air. If anything, there appears to be some kind of correlation between clean air laws (including anti-smoking laws) and dirty air!

I will grant that the report is based on data from seven years ago, so things may have changed significantly since then. But 1999 was still the Clinton era, and these states had a near carte-blanche to restrict people's lives in any way their legislatures saw fit. A whole fat lot of good it did, huh?

As a side note, the cancer risk statistics are reported incompletely. A figure like "68 per million" is meaningless without a time frame. Are these 68 people going to develop cancer in a week, a year, or a lifetime? My guess is over a year, but that's only a guess, no thanks to the shoddy reporting from the anonymous coward at the AP.

(H/T: My mother, who hates New York specifically because of their anti-smoking laws.)

Posted on Mar 22, 2006 at 11:50:37 PM EST.