Economic Benefits and Costs
According to the federal Bureau of Reclamation the yearly value of the Columbia Basin Project is $630 million in irrigated crops, $950 million in power production, $20 million in flood damage prevention, and $50 million in recreation. The project itself involves costs that are difficult to determine. The farms that receive irrigation water must pay for it, but due to insufficient data from the Bureau of Reclamation it is not possible to compare the total cost paid by the Bureau to the payments received. Nevertheless, the farm payments account for only a small fraction of the total cost to the government, resulting in a the project's agricultural corporations receiving a large water subsidy from the government. Critics describe the CBP as a classical example of federal money being used to subsidize a relatively small group of private special interest irrigation farming in the American West in places where it would never be economically viable under other circumstances.
Read more about this topic: Columbia Basin Project
Famous quotes containing the words economic, benefits and/or costs:
“A society in which everyone works is not necessarily a free society and may indeed be a slave society; on the other hand, a society in which there is widespread economic insecurity can turn freedom into a barren and vapid right for the millions of people.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“When over Catholics the ocean rolls,
They must wait several weeks before a mass
Takes off one peck of purgatorial coals,
Because, till people know what’s come to pass,
They won’t lay out their money on the dead—
It costs three francs for every mass that’s said.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)