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Hiking taxes is the less traumatic course, though it will only be accepted as the cost of inaction rises. "Congress only responds to financial crisis or some other external shock," says Bill Gale, co-director of the Tax Policy Center in Washington. "Nothing will be done in Obama's first term to substantially increase tax revenue." (See the top 10 bankruptcies...
...estimate of cost is well above previous calculations of the impact of food-safety problems, and the new study suggests that foodborne illness will continue to take an increasing toll on public health if the nation's frayed food-safety net is not repaired. President Barack Obama called for new food-safety regulations a year ago, and the House of Representatives passed a bill to overhaul the system last July. The onus now is on the Senate, which is still waiting to act. "This study underlines how important this battle is," says Jim O'Hara, director of the Produce Safety...
...serious public-health threat in the U.S., resulting in 5,000 deaths and 325,000 hospitalizations each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). When tallied up, the consequences of foodborne illness - including doctor visits, medication, lost work days and pain and suffering - cost the U.S. an estimated $152 billion annually. That figure was reported on Wednesday in a new study by the Produce Safety Project, an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trust...
Previous reports have pegged the total cost of foodborne illness at between $6.9 billion and $35 billion, based on past estimates by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But those numbers are almost surely based on serious undercounting. Most cases of foodborne illness are never officially reported - for every one case of E. coli that goes into the books, another 20 are undocumented. What's more, the FDA and USDA focus on just a handful of reportable pathogens: E. coli, campylobacter, salmonella and listeria, which excludes the many cases of food poisoning for which...
...such underestimates, the Produce Safety Project study used CDC data showing that there are 76 million new cases of foodborne illness in the U.S. each year. Study author Robert Scharff, a professor at Ohio State University and a former FDA economist, then tried to account for the overall cost of illness, factoring in every expense, from onetime costs for prescription medication to losses in "quality of life" - a dollars-and-cents picture of exactly how miserable that bout with a bad falafel made you. "The study really illustrates just how serious foodborne illness is as a problem in society," says...