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:
“The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“It is too late in the century for women who have received the benefits of co-education in schools and colleges, and who bear their full share in the world’s work, not to care who make the laws, who expound and who administer them.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled—because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)