May 08, 2016
I guess we can get a pretty good sense of the priorities of the folks at ABC News from the headline of a piece on the costs of replacing the country’s lead water pipes. The headline noted the price for Flint and then warned of the “colossal price tag for a US-wide remedy.”
The piece gives two estimates of the cost. One puts the costs at between a few billion dollars and fifty billion dollars. The other puts it at $30 billion. If we take the latter figure and assume that the pipes will be replaced over the next decade, the cost would come to roughly 0.025 percent of GDP. (GDP will average roughly $20 trillion, in 2016 dollars, over the next decade.)
To give some points of comparison, we spend roughly 3.5 percent of GDP on the military. Patent protection for prescription drugs raise their cost by close to 2.0 percent of GDP. And, protected our doctors from international competition raises our annual health care bill by 0.5 percent of GDP.
Note: An earlier version wrongly put average GDP over the next decade at $20 billion.
Comments