Emissions Testing and the Pollution of Big Government

I got my notice from the state last month: you can’t renew your plates until you get an emissions test.

Naturally, my first thought was “Sounds good to me; so I just won’t renew my plates! There’s a nice hundred dollar savings…”

But of course, realistically, that’s not an option. So I awakened early and drove to an Illinois Air Team location for the test.

I can’t complain, exactly… the employees are always polite and efficient; since I arrived before they opened, I was first in line; it took no time at all. So, let me make this clear: I have no complaint about the Illinois Air Team site I visited; if you have to have one, they’ve always been great, in my experience.

Auto emissions testing is a response to a very real problem: air pollution in our big cities. Between traffic congestion and old leaded gasoline and the inefficiency of old cars, compounded by the pollution of factories in the days when America was a manufacturing powerhouse, the government recognized a need: we needed to do something to clean up the air.

So the government required that carmakers design autos that polluted less, and mandated that big metro areas like Chicago have pollution testing stations to weed out the high-polluting cars.

Fast forward to the present, in which most Chicagoland drivers (and drivers in other metros under the same requirements) don’t even remember an era before emissions testing.

Today, we drive in, have the car tested, and it passes. It takes no time (if you go at the right time of day), or it’s a considerable inconvenience (if you must go when they’re busy). So as long as we have a convenient testing center, we probably don’t complain about it. Modern cars always pass, so once it’s over, you’ve checked off that chore and you can move on with your life. Probably don’t think about it again until two years later when your vehicle is up for it again.

…unless of course you drive an older car – actually, probably, a much older car – and it fails. Then you have to take it into a shop and spend a thousand dollars or so getting enough parts replaced to make the car pass the test.

But that’s okay, isn’t it, because it’s all about the goal of cleaner air?

We have a poverty problem in America. We always have, of course, but it was dropping during the 19th century. As America expanded economically, most people were able to move up… from poverty to the middle class, from middle class to wealth. Immigrants arriving with nothing or their children born in ethnic ghettos would soon manage to climb out of them, through hard work and, often, entrepreneurial drive.

Then the 20th century came along, and we began to expect generosity from the government. Again, this is a real problem; it wasn’t imagined or concocted. There was, and remains, true poverty, particularly during the Great Depression when many of our biggest responses commenced.

If you didn’t have a job, you could get a check. If you didn’t have a job, you could get an apartment in public housing. If you didn’t have a job, you could get a free public school education. If you didn’t have a job, you could get food stamps, or now, a WIC or SNAP or EBT card. So you don’t have to starve or shiver or grow up illiterate anymore.

These are all well-intentioned programs. But consider what their presence has done to both incentives and the cost of opportunities:

In the old days, if you wanted to move to a better apartment, you worked harder. If you wanted to afford more or better food, you worked harder. If you wanted to afford more luxuries in life, you worked harder.

Today, once you live in the welfare state, the harder you work, the more those benefits fall away. Get a job, and the unemployment check is gone. Get a job, and the welfare benefits shrink or disappear. As they SHOULD, we would argue… but still… they do shrink or disappear. And that becomes a disincentive from the very improvements that make all the difference.

If our goal is for the family to rise up, out of welfare housing, first to a small private apartment, but then hopefully into the middle class or even better… the more generous the welfare benefits are, the harder that first step away from them becomes.

This is the problem of incentives. Without a welfare state, there are ONLY incentives to improve. But with a welfare state, those incentives are destabilized by incentives to stay put… disincentives from improvement, in fact.

Without a welfare state – that is, with a Constitutionally limited government – businesses would be free to do what they once did: hire the uneducated, hire the unskilled; give them a chance to get a start. Once they’re in the door, they are limited only by their own ability and drive. If they work hard, learn quickly, and impress the boss, they can move up, up, up… to team lead, or foreman, or plant manager… or from customer service rep to sales to sales director…

But with a welfare state, there is a huge burden on the company with every employee. A new hire doesn’t cost you his salary, he costs 140% of his salary (or thereabouts)… because the company must pay the matching FICA contribution and pay for benefits and pay for the state’s unemployment and worker’s comp costs. These are well-intentioned programs, but… by raising the cost burden of employing people, these programs unintentionally make it harder for a company to justify taking the risk on that new hire. They make every hiring decision harder, make every employee costlier.

In the end, it hurts exactly the people it intends to help; the welfare state makes it harder and harder for a person in the grip of the welfare state to set foot on those first couple rungs of the ladder out.

The same goes for the ridiculously-named Affordable Care Act, even more so. We had a genuine problem: many Americans could not afford health insurance and/or much healthcare. There were plenty of things the government could have done to help (Paul Ryan famously and rightly listed them on national television in 2009 and 2010)… but the government instead attacked the insurance market, demolished a system that really only needed tweaking, and created new bureaucracies and increasingly costly options. If people couldn’t afford the insurance of 2009, they sure can’t afford the insurance of 2016, at incredibly higher cost and lower actual value!

It’s all the same problem: the government attempts to address a problem for a segment of society by building a costly safety net, and all that really does is make it harder on everyone, especially the segment that was most severely affected at first!

We have a wonderful healthcare system in the United States, but it was unaffordable for some… and thanks to obamacare, it’s now unaffordable for far more people than it was before!

Why? Because the problem never really was a lack of a bureaucracy. That’s just the default offering of a statist mentality, no matter what the issue.

The problem was an insufficient level of opportunity. There were too many jobless, and too many of the employed, too, were underemployed.

We should have concentrated on creating an economic boom. If more people had moved up to a better salary, that would have decreased the health insurance problem… but instead we created a government program that increased the problem, by expanding joblessness.

When we talk of all these problems, it’s always the same thing, at the heart: lack of ability to buy food is solved with a job; lack of ability to rent an apartment is solved with a job; lack of ability to buy healthcare is solved with a job. While these welfare programs look like they help, at least in the short term, they actually do untold damage in the long term, because they both create disincentives for the individual to work to improve himself, and they make it ever harder for the free market to create the jobs they need to get out!

Now, back to where we began: auto emissions testing began when cars polluted a lot. So we take in the car, we see if it pollutes, and if it does, we must go to a repair facility to improve the car so it doesn’t pollute anymore.

This program costs the taxpayers a mint. All the land, buildings, equipment, and staff, six days a week, to perform tests on vehicles.

So the older cars’ owners are forced to spend money – five hundred, a thousand, fifteen hundred – to have their old cars brought up to code. If they still had that money, they might have been able to trade up to a newer car, which would have both removed the other costly repair bills of an old car AND accomplished the alleged goal of improving the air quality!

We often talk about ‘regressive’ taxes, burdens that fall unfairly on the poor. This is one of the biggest of such burdens, because it’s precisely the working poor owners of old cars who are hit hardest by the well-intentioned goofiness of emissions testing. Consider:

1: It’s just a huge waste of time for newer cars, because of course they pass. The number of newer cars that fail are such a statistical minority that the pollution they produce is too little to be worth the bother.

2: For the old cars that we would expect to fail, the additional cost of bringing them up to code is so onerous on these mostly working-poor car owners, it just puts them further behind. That cost, specifically relative to the budgets of the working-poor in question, is utterly unjustifiable; for people who must count every transportation penny, it often has the effect of causing them to postpone much more important car-related purchases, such as auto insurance, brake repairs, alignments, and other issues that pose genuine safety concerns.

3: The cost of maintaining this service – all these buildings, public employees, etc. – contribute to the unsustainable government budgets of states like Illinois. This cost drives employers and entrepreneurs out of state, drying up the tax base, necessitating ever-larger collections from an ever-shrinking pool, and again contributing to the reduction of opportunities for the poor and lower middle class to climb upward.

4: And the timing itself has been insane all along, since the birth of these metropolitan emissions testing centers coincided with the (mandated) popularity of unleaded fuel and the catalytic converter. These advancements already had the country on a successful and fast-moving trend toward cleaner air; the emissions testing center archipelago was, frankly, obsolete almost at its inception! (How do you like that? I buried the lede.)

We have a new administration in Washington… a new president, a senate and house all of the same party… and soon, we can hope, a Supreme Court that will also be rational in the majority.

They have a mighty task before them – addressing the core economic problem of our society: removing the barriers to entry that keep people from a path to prosperity.

The challenge is great: they must remove the weight of costly and burdensome bureaucracy that rests like a manacle around the ankle of a runner… without leaving people behind by cutting off their benefits before they can find the private sector ticket out of dependence.

It is a challenge indeed, and both federal government and states as well need to tackle it, if our nation is to be saved.

To see the state and federal EPAs proudly smile, declare victory, and eliminate the well-intentioned but ever-more ridiculous, archaic, counterproductive and costly chain of emissions testing centers from coast to coast might well be a darned good start.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based writer, actor, international trade consultant and recovering politician. His columns are regularly found in Illinois Review.

Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the IR URL and byline are included.

Nicely written, interesting to read. Only thing is he pulls his punch by not naming the source of government created emissions requirements or social security. I was taught by the grandaddy of leftists at a top University that social security as conceived during FDR's administration is a Marxist program of income redistribution.

Until editorialists name the actual source of government regulation of the economy, they are wasting their time.

“From each according to his ability to each according to his need” was not the Founders’ moral imperative.

Di Leo paints with a broad brush. A little more detail.

Illinois EPA ordered the last two Chicago auto emissions testing locations closed by end of 2016.
Chicago drivers will have to go elsewhere (suburbs).

In Illinois
New cars get a 4 year break from emissions testing.
Cars older than 4 years get tested every other year.
Cars older than 1996 get a break from emissions testing.
I agree with the writer that somewhere down the road, this test will be eliminated - probably later rather than sooner be cause the loony left will scream about VW and their emissions scam, nevermind that it was diesels only(see any nuke plants built lately ?)

Chicago’s Mayor Richard j Daley had Chicago become the first big city to test for auto emissions. Originally, the test was voluntary.

Believe it or not, cash for clunkers pulled a lot of old cars off the road ( not that they wouldn’t be gone by now anyway, without cash for clunkers).
We’re just not seeing many 1988 sentras for sale for 500 bucks on a street corner anymore.

Tbe myth is that older cars are tested.

Anything around 1996 or older, in our state, are not tested because they know they will fail, and assume they are a very small % of cars on the road.

Yet there are tons of the on the road, and in the inner cities there are lots of them.

I have many opinions on this topic. But my main one is that cars in general are a horrible burden on the working poor. If we designed our cities better and focused on educating motorists I believe alternative transportation would be the best solution for them.

I personally cycle commute in part to conserve the little income I do have. I do have a vehicle but I try to minimize the mileage to around 3000 a year.

Focusing on education and effective public transportation would alleviate the “requirement” that we all have a motor vehicle.

I personally cycle commute in part to conserve the little income I do have. I do have a vehicle but I try to minimize the mileage to around 3000 a year.

Focusing on education and effective public transportation would alleviate the “requirement” that we all have a motor vehicle.

I came from downstate IL; when they came up with the emissions test for us it was an obvious boondoggle- East St. Louis was exempt, but surrounding areas- white areas- were required to comply.
Here I was, being forced to replace my catalytic converter because it was getting old and inefficient, working three jobs to pay for college...while someone in East St. Louis with the exact same problem went unnoticed and did not have to pay a dime.
I drove to school through there seeing buildings on fire many mornings, thick black smoke boiling up from old tarred roof after old tarred roof. Passed and was passed by numerous vehicles exempted from the law that were putting out clouds of visible gunk. Piles of discarded tires burning. And on the other side of the river were those foul city busses running on diesel and putting out gunk that could be smelled three blocks away even when performing at their peak.
Steel Mills emitting fumes, coal burning, oil refineries emitting various colors of gasses, cars burning in the woods that someone intended to collect insurance on, or hide the identities of corpses in... cattail-filled sloughs burning now and then...
But my truck- whose exhaust was not even visible- was the demonic pollution machine, and I criminal #1. Unable to afford a new truck and unable to afford the repairs. Getting junkers off the street? Hardly- most of the junkers in the area were in the exempt areas. Was there an improvement after the repairs were done? No... still drove past the same pollutants every day.

Our testing center was never busy as the people forced to use it were mainly rural or small townsfolk.

Most everyone, where I’m
from also has a gas
powered mower, weed eater,
leaf blower, weed burner,
fire place, edger, hedge
trimmer, log splitter,
kerosene heater. Hell,
I’ve even got one friend
who has a gasoline powered
drink mixer...makes a great
margarita....these all
exist, and I’m exaggerating
when I say each one of my
friends has each of these.
The earth is self healing.
Mother Nature is a strong and
powerful entity. I don’t believe
in open dumping, and would
like to see our waterways kept
clean.
I’ve fished from shore in the
gulf, only to see a plastic baby
diaper float by...catch and release...

Friend drove a 1974 Chevy which had the hood replaced with one from a junkyard, due to collision damage. The hood was from a later model which came with a catalytic convertor (his car did not). When he took it in for emissions, a worker saw a sticker on the underside of the hood which referred to the non-existent catalytic convertor, and failed the test for lack of same. Notwithstanding that the form he printed out with verbiage saying the test failed for lack of convertor indicated “N/A” in the catalytic convertor test category for that year model of his car. And also notwithstanding the obvious difference in paint color on the underside of the hood. When friend complained to emissions contractor he was repeatedly told, as he worked his way up the management chain, that there was nothing they could do because the failure was “already entered in the system” and at that point it becomes a matter of state law that the car cannot receive an emissions certification until the failed condition is “passed”. It was some time ago but I believe he got the failure waived for one year and ended up getting rid of the car because he couldn’t get a waiver again and it wasn’t worth the cost of adding a cat convertor.

Friend was confident none of the people working for the contractor company, including the managers, had IQs above 80, nor any problem-solving skills whatever.

Moral of the story is, when dealing with the intellectually challenged who nonetheless have power to mess up your life, never present them with information the least bit confusing or contradictory, because if the process gets derailed they won’t have the skills to fix it, and thus you are screwed.

Cars = freedom.

Anything the government (at any level) does to limit people’s ability to transport themselves for purposes of sustaining their existence or the pursuit of happiness, cuts into that freedom.

Liberal fascists want nothing more than to force people into public transportation, and eventually into self-driving cars as the technology matures. That will give them the ability to track and control people’s movements, something every tyrant dreams of.

President Trump has already put a hold on regulations that required car makers to install technology that allowed certain parameters of a car’s operation to be transmitted to “nearby vehicles”.

And, as with “emissions testing”, the official justification is always safety. Every incursion into our transportational and environmental liberty is blessed with fictional government estimates of “lives saved”.

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