Summary: The Great Lake Restoration Initiative

The Great Lake Restoration Initiative (GLRI), started in 2010, is an attempt toward the restoration of Great Lakes ecosystem that was devastated in the previous century. Using the resources grated by federal government, Great Lakes Restoration Initiative supplemented Environmental Protection Agency “to improve water quality…restore native habitat…and control invasive species” (“The Great Lakes…”). Currently, the GLRI program is in its second 5-year-phase, planned for implementation in fiscal year 2015-2019. The funding in second plan is focused on addressing the issues of “cleaning up Areas of Concern,” managing invasive species, toxic algae bloom and preservation of native species. In its second 5-year-phase, GLRI also planned to implement
This is an overall reduction of 97% of funding, which will undoubtedly stunt to progress of the GLRI to restore the ecosystem of the great lakes. Under the assumption that the initial state is for the initiative to continue as is and the change to be the budget cut, this paper will attempt to use Benefit-cost analysis to examine the proposal. Benefit-cost analysis is essentially a method, originated from the US water projects, to determine “whether the benefits of an activity are larger than the costs” (Berck & Helfand
Military and national defense are public goods, meaning that it could suffer from free rider problem. Citizens of the United States of America will benefit from military, a component of national defense, even if they do not pay directly. However, the production of the service required an input in the form of budget, which is partitioned from the tax collected. In a certain sense, budget for each year can be considered scarce, thus reducing funding for EPA allows for increase budget for military. The benefit for the nation as a whole is the improvement of military power, thus ability for the nation to protect its citizens, interest and sovereignty. Compared to the initial status however, it is perhaps unneeded. US military spending is already ranked as the first in the world, thus the marginal benefit of allocating more funding to such area will result in vastly diminished return. Therefore, the benefit payout, while might be evident in shorter term, might be rather small. The costs of the proposed change are the benefits forgone from the restoration projects conducted by the Great Lakes Restoration Project. The main benefits of GLRI derived from its pollution remediation efforts. The Great Lakes made up 95 percent of the “fresh surface water in the U.S.” (Regan 2017), so its condition has