A reader expresses incredulity about the booze:
Your final number is still 60% of the total population, not adults. I’m pretty sure that the percentage of drinkers under say age 14 is a fraction of 1%. So the final number per drinker is much higher.
But I always wonder about these kinds of estimates. If alcohol costs the U.S. $249 billion and tobacco costs $X billion and “danger Y” costs $Z billion, etc., what happens if you add up all those estimates, and discover they’re larger than the GDP or total wages paid or something like that? Which I suspect it would, instantly putting the lie to the estimates.
It would certainly explain our low savings rate, although at least it isn’t negative, as explained here by the St. Louis Fed Blog.
