Government toxicity.

ITEM: New U.S. Environmental Protection Agency pollution regulations are going into effect next spring, reported the Kentucky Post for July 18th. Regulators won't know what action to take in some cases until December, said the Post, "when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will release a new set of pollution control guidelines."

"The federal government," continued the paper, "could withhold road construction funds to force Kentucky and Ohio to tighten vehicle emissions laws, if the tougher standards are not met within a certain time frame.... '[T]his is probably the most stringent that the EPA has been with regard to air quality issues,' said Allen Freeman, communications director for the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments...."

BETWEEN THE LINES: The EPA, by design, will never be satisfied with any pollution solutions. For example, the feds already use the threat of withheld funding to force all Ohio vehicles to take emissions tests, even though 91 percent of all cars in the state pass. New cars are even cleaner and could easily be exempted. As Bob Collins writes in the web-based Tech Central Station, "less than 1 percent of cars from the previous five years fail E-Check. And for those newer cars that do fail, the failing emission levels are comparable to the passing levels for older cars...."

The vice president of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, Benita Dodd, says that even if her state implemented every conceivable environmental precaution, the state would still not meet federal standards. "Environmental officials could halt every vehicle, shut down every power plant, and halt wind-blown pollution at Georgia's borders, yet still struggle to achieve federal clean air standards," she concluded, because of natural background emissions.

Sure, private industry pollutes. But guess who is the biggest culprit. As the Boston Globe has reported: The United States government "is itself the worst polluter in the land. Federal agencies have contaminated more than 60,000 sites across the country," requiring an estimated clean-up cost of nearly. $300 billion, five times the damage caused by private industry.