• As one in fourteen Americans live in Texas, if the Texas experience was repeated in each of the fifty states, the total cost to businesses, big and small, of the personal injury tort system would be on the order of $30 billion per year, not the $88 billion claimed by the Chamber of Commerce as the cost to small business alone.
• In 2002, Texas had a gross state product of about $742 billion. The personal injury costs to Texas businesses and professionals in 2002 represented a little more than a quarter of one percent of the Texas GSP.
• With a price tag of about $2.1 billion, the cost of personal injury cases to businesses works out to about $95 per Texan per year. In 2001, per capita personal income in Texas was $28,581. Tort costs to businesses amounts to about one third of one percent of per capita income, or about a quarter per day per Texan. If you imposed all of the costs of personal injury on the victims and gave defendants immunity from damages for personal injuries, and if those businesses passed the savings along to consumers, the average Texan would save enough money to take a round trip on the Dallas bus system once a week or so.
And once again another plum issue taken up by the right seems to have been fabricated out of whole cloth to solve a problem that doesn't really exist.
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