Michael Lissack to estimate the risk. Instead unknown risks cannot be. Practical advice - if the risk is one in a million (the level of risk often found for things like incin- erator fumes and pesticides), it may not be worth attempting to reduce it any further. But not to the government -- Superfund sites are to be cleaned so that a child could eat the dirt and not get ill. Why? The risk of drowning (16 in a million), or dying in an accident at home (90 in a million), or dying in an automobile accident (192 in a million) greatly exceed almost all alleged environmental risks. Or take driving. Americans love cars and hate welfare. George Bush needs to speak to that dichotomy from the bully pulpit and explain that our private vehicles are by far the nation’s biggest welfare cheats. The highway trust fund is a unique, self-perpetuating paving and construction fund financed by a ded- icated tax. Yet even the tens of billions of dollars each year that swell the highway trust fund cover only about half the cost of roads and a tiny fraction of the overall medical, social, environmental, police, and fire costs generated by vehicular use. By my estimate the subsidy to cars and trucks is nearly $300 billion a year, thirty times more than the federal government gives in aid to cities. If Americans had to pay the true costs of personal vehicles, they would not be able to afford them. Driving seems inexpensive only because in thinking about it we neglect to include such social costs as polluted air, rush hour gridlock, illness from breathing gas fumes, huge government subsidies for highways and parking, and maintenance of an expensive military presence in oil producing coun- tries. Americans pay a hidden cost of $2.25 per gallon each time we fuel up, over and above what we pay at the pump. Only a political death wish could motivate a member of Congress to vote for a $2.25-a-gallon gasoline tax, yet the auto-centric policies Congress has endorsed over the last several generations have actually imposed a burden of that size on all Americans. Highway subsidies are not merely the con- struction and maintenance costs that road revenues do not cover. Roads also burden taxpayers because of the need for someone to patrol highways, clean polluted air, insure that foreign oil flows freely to U.S. shores, subsidize
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