Why people are slipping on rugs, how to contribute to Lyndon LaRouche, Congress vs. teenagers. UNSAFE IN WASHINGTON
By DANIEL SELIGMAN REPORTER ASSOCIATE Patty de Llosa

(FORTUNE Magazine) – About one American worker in 10,000 dies in an on-the-job accident. Cooks in restaurants have higher mortality rates than firemen. Federal regulations on formaldehyde exposure result in expenditures of $72 billion for each life saved. Baseball is associated with more than twice as many injuries as skating (1981 data). We learn all this from Fatal Tradeoffs: Public and Private Responsibilities for Risk, an utterly fascinating work by W. Kip Viscusi, a Duke economist who has long specialized in studies of risk and regulation. The book, published last summer (by Oxford University Press), would appear to have a special relevance nowadays. The Clintonites are jeering at Republicans who demand more cuts in federal programs, claiming the demands lack specificity. Appearing before the Senate Budget Committee, Leon Panetta, director of the Office of Management and Budget, complained, ''I have yet to get specific recommendations that don't include gimmicks.'' Coming off several hours spent with Fatal Tradeoffs, your servant offers Leon two genuine money savers: Abolish (1) the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and (2) the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Both agencies languished during the Reagan-Bush years, but the AFL-CIO is ecstatic about the prospects for OSHAism in the present period, and the National Journal says Clinton could bring the CPSC ''back from the near dead.'' Viscusi is not pitching for abolition of the two agencies, and at some points seems to be saying that OSHA, at least, might be useful if only it were run differently. But his data leave a fellow yearning to zap both outfits. The data show that OSHA's enforcement policies have had at best minor effects on workplace safety -- one or two accidents per 1,000 workers per year -- while compliance costs ''run in the billions.'' The accidents prevented are overwhelmingly nonthreatening to life and limb. And while no one wants any accidents at all, Viscusi says the hazards to which OSHA persistently directs its attention are generally those that ''market forces are well equipped to handle.'' Market forces? Yes, friends, the plain old free market is the real enforcer of safety in the land. When workers identify jobs as hazardous, they demand and ultimately receive higher pay, all of which gives employers incentives to develop safer workplaces. Viscusi's analysis relating pay scales to industry accident rates tells us that the market is in effect charging employers an average of $13,000 or $14,000 per accident. And, of course, they have to make higher worker's compensation payments if their companies have rotten accident records. The data show that the bosses' responsiveness to this particular pressure does ten times more for workplace safety than the current OSHA effect. The record is, if anything, unkinder to the consumer-product-safety bureaucracy. CPSC regulations range mainly in a zone between the futile and the counterproductive. The ''safety caps'' required on aspirin and other bottles (to keep children from poisoning themselves) have proved so difficult for many adults to get off that they end up leaving the bottles uncapped -- which, of course, increases the risk of poisoning. Carpet-related injury rates, mostly from slips and falls, have doubled since the agency introduced new flammability standards in the Seventies. The reasons are not entirely clear, but one possibility is that the materials introduced in efforts to comply with the standards are quite slippery. The agency's mattress-flammability standards represent one arguable success: Mattress fire deaths actually declined after the standards were promulgated in 1975. It seems likely, however, that these gains came mainly from less smoking, in bed and elsewhere, than from federal regulatory policy. Taking all the agency's regs together, Viscusi concludes that ''if there is a beneficial effect ((on consumer product safety)) . . . it is too small to estimate reliably.'' Leon, they're all yours.