A better way to price toxic waste - and it costs only $70 million

Last weekend I wrote about six flaws in the $1 trillion toxic waste cleanup plan. Yesterday, I added a seventh flaw -- hedge funds and private equity firms are worried that if they participate in the program, political pressure will strip them of their profits.

And now, a bigger problem has reared its ugly head -- investors are becoming less eager to buy the U.S. debt needed to finance all these bailout programs. This puts on even more pressure to come up with a plan that works.

So what to do? Pay $70 million to get hard data on the value of toxic waste rather than putting hundreds of billions at risk to play a game that might get the toxic waste off banks' books. To explain why this $70 million plan to get data will work, let's examine one of the biggest problems with the $1 trillion toxic waste removal plan -- there is no agreement on how to price it.