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EDITORIAL Black lung fund should be subsidized by coal companies

3 min read
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Though some Americans are quick to extol the virtues of a free market that has few restraints, sometimes we end up engaging in a form of socialism when the free market goes awry.

The bailout of U.S. banks at the start of the Great Recession is a prime example of profits being privatized and losses being socialized, even if the bailout was ultimately necessary to keep the economy from sliding into a paralyzing depression. The payouts that have been made to coal miners who develop black lung disease are another example.

For a little more than 40 years, the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund has paid the medical bills and disability benefits for miners diagnosed with the sickness after years of breathing in coal dust. A report released last week painted a grim picture of the fund’s prospects. Coal companies have been taxed at a rate of $1.10 per ton of coal to keep the fund afloat, but even then it has run deficits. U.S. taxpayers have had to make up the difference, and the fund now owes the U.S. Treasury a little more than $4 billion.

Things could get even worse.

The report prepared by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the fund could be $15 billion in the red by 2050, fueled by growing numbers of miners diagnosed with black lung disease, and by plans to cut the tax that is levied on coal companies. By the end of this year, it is set to be reduced to its 1977 level of 50 cents, a 55 percent decrease.

This is exactly the wrong time to undertake such a reduction.

If the fund’s solvency becomes even more shaky, miners could face cuts to their benefits. But there has been no push by Congress or President Trump – who asserted in his 2016 campaign that he was sympathetic to the plight of the working man – to keep the tax at its current level. The coal industry has asserted that the tax should be lowered and the woes of the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund can be pegged to mismanagement. However, government health officials have pointed out that the number of miners coming down with black lung is increasing because miners are blasting into played-out seams, and inhaling more coal dust along the way.

The GAO report stated that if the tax is kept at its current level, the fund will only be $4.5 billion 32 years from now. A 25 percent increase on the tax would leave the fund debt-free in 2050.

The report also outlined a third option, that would allow the tax rate to be reduced as scheduled, wipe out the standing debt, and appropriate an additional $7.8 billion from the Treasury to the fund.

In other words, privatizing the profits and socializing the losses.

The other day, CNN reported on a Kentucky coal miner named Kenny Fleming who is 59 years old and has already received a black lung diagnosis after 35 years in mines. He now sometimes needs to insert an oxygen tube in his nose to aid his compromised breathing.

“Coal miners are dedicated, hard-working, great people,” he told the cable network. “It’s a dangerous job. It’s a hard job. It just seems like coal miners are used for what they’re worth, and when it’s time to compensate them for their hard work and dedication, they’re forgotten sometimes.”

It shouldn’t be that way. Not at all.

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