He said interested investors set the purchase prices, which are lower than the payments’ present value because various factors — such as a life-contingency clause that stops payments if the holder dies — diminish their worth.
“When you get all the way until 2052, that’s pretty far out there,” he said, adding that his company, which does 80 percent of its work outside Maryland, survives only by offering better deals than other firms.
The study of lead’s effects on the body remains an evolving science. Used as an artificial sweetener in ancient Rome, lead later became a cheap manufacturing additive. But lead never lost its sweetness — a poison candy irresistible to children.
Scientists once assumed the body could withstand a fair amount of lead, which government authorities banned in residential paint in 1978. But researchers now say any trace of lead, which children absorb by eating paint chips and breathing paint dust, can cripple cognitive development.