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Show HUNGRY HORSE PREDICTION 51 3 - There would be interest money left, about $372 million, but neither would it be repaid to the Treasury. It would be kept in the crsp account, and used to build more participating projects. But even under these circumstances, the account balance would continue to increase, for the interest that was not repaid to the tax- payers would continue to mount up. It wouldn't be long before there was a balance of unpaid interest of $675 million, and this, too, could be used to build more projects. If the good burghers of the Upper Basin didn't quite understand Jacobson, they did not let on, but nodded in approval of his ingenious system that would not cost the nation's taxpayers a cent more than three or four billions in lost interest. After all this complicated explanation, Jacobson naively made the statement that the farmers who would benefit from the crsp "can't pay a dime, not one dime. They can't even pay for the participating projects." 63 The whole thing was to be a gigantic gift to them. Other hydrologists employed by the Colorado River Board of California, perhaps not as gifted as Jacobson when it came to finances, reported after a study of his figures that if his system was followed to the 103rd year - which was the repayment period the Reclamation Bureau recommended - the total unpaid investment in the crsp would be "$3,793 billions." 64 But California engineers, as the Upper Basin Com- mission so frequently said, were always talking through their hats and not with their slide rules. |