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- cross-posted to:
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20665840
President Biden on Tuesday announced $2.6 billion in funding to replace all lead pipes in the United States as part of a new EPA rule that will require lead pipes to be identified and replaced within 10 years using the new funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act.
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bUt ThE eCoNoMy?!?!?
what’s next? remove lead acetate from wine? smh this is tyranny
You can pry my wine sweetener from my cold, dead, neurologically damaged hands.
President Biden on Tuesday announced $2.6 billion in funding to replace all lead pipes in the United States as part of a new EPA rule that will require lead pipes to be identified and replaced within 10 years using the new funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act.
The EPA estimates that nine million homes in the U.S. still have lead pipes. The city of Milwaukee, where Mr. Biden is making the announcement, has 65,000 lead pipes, which the city says will cost an estimated $700 million to remove.
How is it going to cover the whole country when 1/4 of the total is needed for just one city?
The math ain’t mathing…
Maybe if we took the 17+ billion dollars Biden sent to Israel so they can genocide all their neighbors it would be enough, but 2.6 billion is nowhere near enough to actually fix this problem, but is it enough for people to give Biden credit before it’s done. No idea why people keep wanting to do that. The vast majority of the time nothing ever gets done.
The program has been going on for decades. The Feds put money in a big account the EPA manages that gives grants and loans to areas that need it to get the process completed faster.
As loans get repaid over the years, the money is leant out again. Most areas have enough income to afford the project, but not enough cash on hand to afford to pay all at once.This is the first batch of additional money being added to the fund along with a mandate that the problem be resolved in a fixed timeframe.
Currently the fund has used about $20billion to provide $40billion in upgrades over nearly 30 years.
Funding: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides $50 billion to support upgrades to the nation’s drinking water and wastewater infrastructure. This includes $15 billion over five years dedicated to lead service line replacement and $11.7 billion of general Drinking Water State Revolving Funds that can also be used for lead service line replacement. There are a number of additional pathways for systems to receive financial support for lead service line replacement. These include billions available as low- to no-cost financing through annual funding provided through the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF) program and low-cost financing from the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA) program. Funding may also be available from other federal agencies, state, and local governments. These efforts also advance the Biden-Harris Administration’s Justice40 Initiative, which sets the goal that 40% of the overall benefits of certain Federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.
It’s not supposed to cover the entire thing. Actual estimates for the whole thing are at $20 to $30 billion. This is just the latest round of funding for the pipe replacement, not the entire thing. The Biden administration has secured $15 billion in funding for lead pipe replacement to date.
The article posted above reads: “The $2.6 billion is the latest disbursement by the Biden administration for lead pipes in the $50 billion from the 2021 infrastructure law for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure.” But you decided to read one paragraph in (which could I guess be further than average) and write a long-winded outraged comment that it isn’t enough.
Oh wow…
So it is almost as much as we’ve given this year to a foreign country with free higher education and universal healthcare so they can maintain their standard of living while genociding their neighbors…
Yeah. This is waaaaay better and there’s no issue with this at all. We just have to wait a decade, this isn’t something Biden can speed up by just going around congress, he only does that for important things like supporting genocide.
I don’t support Israel’s genocide in Gaza either or the Biden administration’s ongoing support of it (I think all of that military aid should be going to Ukraine instead, for starters), but you really just shitted up the thread by deciding that reading past the first paragraph was too hard, went off on an unrelated whataboutism tangent, and then when it was pointed out you were wrong, you decided to be a snarky, immature jackass about it instead of just saying “oh, okay”.
It’s not unrelated.
2.6 billion. Even 15 billion sounds like an unimaginably big number.
But for something of this scale, it’s not enough.
I was hoping you could do the math, but here it is:
15 billion divided by 700 million is enough for 24 and almost half a city.
Do you think that’s enough to fulfil this pledge Biden just made?
Because if not. If you do realize there is literally zero way this is accomplished…
How is it uplifting news?
What if I said Santa was going to get you a pony in a decade? Would you get excited?
I was hoping you could do the math
Really fucking projecting here when you can’t even read, aren’t we? 💀 I swear Redditor-types have some kind of allergy to just admitting when they’re wrong about something and moving along with their day.
- Where are you getting 700 million from? (edit: oh my god, they were taking the figure from Milwaukee, namely taking one city and extrapolating it to be the amount that it will cost per city. I didn’t even realize this because it was so fucking stupid.)
- 15 bil / 700 mil is 21.4, not 24 and almost half. But I’m the one who can’t do math I guess.
- “Even 15 billion sounds like an unimaginably big number”? No it doesn’t?? I’m aware that this represents a small fraction of the US’ annual budget. Maybe you’re projecting again?
- “Do you think that’s enough to fulfil this pledge Biden just made?” No? Because I literally just cited the figure of $20 to $30 billion required to fix this. Maybe the math is hard for you, so I’ll explain that $20 billion is actually more than $15 billion.
- “What if I said Santa was going to get you a pony in a decade? Would you get excited?” Ah yes, making huge strides toward eliminating a problem and pledging to continue to do so is totally comparable to this. Holy hell.
So …
You understand there’s no way this will actually be accomplished?
But you think it’s uplifting the American public is being lied to a month before the election with a promise that has 0% chance of coming true?
You do you homie.
But at 700 million a city… Even 70 billion isn’t enough.
I’m sorry I couldn’t help you understand this but it’s obviously not going to work
But you think it’s uplifting the American public is being lied to a month before the election with a promise that has 0% chance of coming true?
Fiscal Year 2025 started October 1st, Congress approved a stop gap so they can continue appropriations. You think a president shouldn’t announce anything or do anything in the months leading up to an election?
Also, it’s lead pipes. We don’t use them anymore. Every pipe replaced is a step forward. Biden just announced a deadline.
They’ve been consistently disbursing funds for this and this time is no different. Here’s last May’s news : https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-announces-3-billion-lead-pipe-replacement-advance-safe
Oh, I think I understand now: you think that $15 billion is all there is and ever can be because you don’t understand that “a decade” is 10 years and consequently that the EPA has time to get more funding for this over a period of – again – 10 years.
Since I know reading is hard for you, here’s something to enhance your comprehension of that $15 billion figure: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/so_far
Edit: and you never answered: where on god’s green Earth is 700 million coming from? Milwaukee? Because that’s one city, and cities have different amounts of lead pipes.
Cities should take on most of the cost themselves. Some cities have already done this from their own revenue - pipes wear out over time and so on - why should those cities pay for cities that couldn’t be bothered?
- The citizens in those cities don’t deserve to have lead poisoning regardless of what city and state officials are willing to allocate to it.
- Some cities just objectively have worse lead problems than others.
- This feels like the “well I paid off my student loans through hard work, so why should they get theirs paid off for free?” argument. (They are still paying through their own funds too; they’re just receiving federal help to accelerate it.)
- Having citizens that aren’t poisoned by lead is good for the whole of the country, full stop.
I didn’t downvote you, by the way; I at least understand the rationale on a surface level.
Citizens should be voting for politicians who do things. They for politicians who cleaned things up. Will you fire all those corrupt politicians in your town that didn’t clean things up? Remember those cities that did clean things up paid for the price on their own. I do not want to reward cities who vote to continue corruption.
You understand that lead poisoning most predominantly affects children, right? So even if your argument is that the minority of voting-age individuals who vote against these politicians should suffer the consequences of the majority who do (let alone that those majority deserve to have lead poisoning for voting in incompetent or corrupt politicians/living in a jurisdiction that can’t afford to rapidly replace these lines), you’re failing to acknowledge that the children who are most deeply affected here have no say whatsoever.
Because we live in a society.
I don’t know how to convey that you should do things that keep people, particularly children, healthy even if they don’t live in the same municipal tax jurisdiction.
If your thought was shared by society, we wouldn’t have lead pipes to begin with and you wouldn’t have cause to reply so smugly to someone merely suggesting people should get what they vote for.
