A New York Times article (February 23, 2011) describes the current EPA emissions rules – rolling back requirements for industrial boilers, incinerators etc.  The impact is to permit many plants, municipalities, universities etc to reduce their costs of compliance – merely requiring minor adjustments to comply.  This decreases the “cost of Federal regulation” and could thus, potentially, decrease the costs to expand and add jobs.  Is the decreased cost of compliance, and the associated postponement of capital investments to comply, imply more job growth than the alternative stimulus to move to a less polluting industrial operation ? Is this a case where the associated health costs, borne by the government in many cases, lower than the potential immediate benefit to the US supply chain ? Or this is just the US standards descending to those of developing countries in order to compete in global manufacturing ?