In last 8 years we blew 10 trillion in debt and could not address this?

It turns out when congress members need to spend up to 50% each day ringing up rich individuals and corporations for donations to stay competitive in their elections - things like corporate subsidies and selectively lowering tax rates for those individuals tends to be where the money goes.

Lead paint is far down the list especially when most will not appreciate that it's silently harming their health. Besides, you can turn out the vote of so called 'single issue voters' by distracting them with social issues that have virtually no consequence on their lives (banning Sharia law, legislating gun carry laws, building ineffective border walls).

As Charles De Mar aptly stated in the 1985 film, Better Off Dead -

"Get the lead out. That is all."

Now I'll go back to my lighter fluid eggnog.

I agree with the general idea -- we should continue to spend, and spend MORE, on getting lead out of the environment (especially in homes and public utilities like water, etc.).

But I do have a semi-minor nit to pick. Oliver mocked the lead industry shill guy from the '70s for suggesting that better general health across the population at the time was because "we must (have been) doing something right", and therefore lead paint must not be dangerous. Yet one of his own major argument points comes from referencing a "study" that shows that every dollar invested in lead abatement ends up returning 17+ times that much in societal gain due to lower crime rates, lower medical bills, etc.

That's a problem because BOTH of those arguments are making a correlation equals causation error. The lead industry shill was wrong -- general population health was higher in the '70s than ever before because of advances in medicine. Lead was holding it back -- but to be fair, only to a tiny degree compared to the gains made in general health care.

I'd argue Oliver's cited study is equally wrong (or at least misleading) -- OK, crime may be lower, but I seriously doubt that spending more on removing lead contributes to that much at all. And total costs of health care spent on caring for people with lead poisoning are almost certainly lower now than they have been previously, but the lion's share of that (legitimate) financial gain undoubtedly came from banning lead paint and then leaded gasoline -- as seen in Oliver's graph of "average blood lead levels of children aged 1 to 5" which dropped incredibly fast between 1980 and 1990, and then much more slowly since then.

So any financial return on further investment in getting rid of lead is very very unlikely to live up to the same rate that it did in the 80s. I doubt that the study accounted for that, if it is also including tenuous things like crime rate to trump up its numbers...

Oliver is right to later suggest that "not poisoning children" is a better argument for getting rid of lead than "17 times financial return on money invested into lead removal". Just stick with the poisoning argument instead of the dubious correlation vs causation study.