This report tries to quantify the costs of inaction on a lot of America’s social and environmental problems, and makes the case that the cost of inaction is higher than the cost of action. I tend to buy this, although they don’t give references in their summary and I bet if you dig deeper they may have cherry picked studies that produce the largest savings. Still, it illustrates how easily politicians can trick people by comparing the cost of action to an assumed zero cost of inaction, which is never the case. I don’t how you would go about educating the public about that, other than starting in kindergarten and teaching people how to look at evidence, think and draw conclusions.