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aft3rthought t1_j6bupyl wrote

Okay, we gotta do the numbers! It looks like about 3.6 million children are born every year in the USA. Each child has 20 baby teeth. That amounts to roughly 72 million baby teeth being created every year. Now the payouts happen later, but I think that can be ignored since children are born at a pretty steady clip and teeth fall out over a series of years. It looks like the average payout per tooth is close to $5 these days, so that’s $360 million/year. The USA GDP is 23 trillion dollars. Inflation of 1% then amounts to 230 billion dollars per year. That would mean an additional 0.16% in teeth alone. Large, but not catastrophic. As a comparison, it looks like the IRS estimates $380 billion in taxes go unpaid per year.

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shastaxc t1_j6e1czy wrote

You are forgetting that not all children participate in the tooth trade.

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aft3rthought t1_j6eecew wrote

You’re right! Continuing the highly scientific practice of using the first page of google results, it looks like the participation rate is about 80%. Personally, $5 seems high to me, and 1% inflation is obviously a little low, so I think we can probably assume the real Fairy inflation rate must be somewhere below 0.16% of GDP.

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