INSTITUTE INDEX: The myth of 'job-killing' regulations

Number of weeks straight last month that Republicans used their weekly radio address to attack government regulations for killing jobs: 3

Percent of people who lost their jobs in 2010 because of government regulation: 0.3

Percent who lost their jobs because of a drop in business demand: 25

Number of temporary workers hired by energy giant AEP to build a pollution scrubber for one of its coal-fired power plants in order to meet Clean Air Act regulations: more than 1,000

Number of full-time employees the plant then hired to monitor the scrubber: 40

Number of temporary jobs created by installing scrubbers at two PSE&G coal plants: 1,600

Number of permanent jobs the installation created: 24

Percent increase in boilermaker jobs from 1999 to 2001 alone due to Clean Air Act regulations: 35

Number of person-years of labor occupied over the past seven years to comply with just one Clean Air Act standard: 200,000

Rank of environmental spending among the most labor-intensive of all business expenditures: 1

Number of U.S. jobs directly supported by the environmental technologies industry, which has grown dramatically because of the Clean Air Act: 1,700,000

Trade surplus generated by U.S. environmental technology exports in 2008: $11,000,000,000

Rank of the U.S. among world leaders in the environmental technology industry: 1

(Click on figure to go to source. Photo of boilermakers from the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers website.)