Surprise, surprise, once again Washington lawmakers have found a way to waste your hard-earned tax dollars. The Senate is now working to pass the so-called Fairness in Asbestos Injury Resolution Act (FAIR) Act, an asbestos bailout bill that will create a $140 billion trust fund for victims of asbestos.

This bill is a dream for insurance companies, but it may very well soon become a nightmare for taxpayers, who will be stuck paying the tab when the trust fund’s costs skyrocket and the companies who are supposed to pay into the fund find a way to weasel out of their obligations.

The FAIR Act is structured to take asbestos claims out of the courts and into the Department of Labor, where they will be settled by administrators. Sick workers who can prove five years of occupational exposure to asbestos would be entitled to compensation from the fund, which would supposedly be financed by mandatory contributions from insurers and companies liable for asbestos damages.

At first glance, it may not appear that taxpayer dollars are at play here, but experts say that the federal government will have to chip in big time to the fund when the bill’s lowball cost assumptions are proven wrong.

The fund is based on the cockamamie belief that only 23 percent of all those affected by asbestos would qualify for payment. But experts predict that over two-thirds of victims will be eligible, meaning that the cost of settling claims will be a heck of a lot higher.

This means that the trust fund will be drowning in red ink from the very beginning, and that Uncle Sam – the man with the deep pockets – will have to come to the rescue.

To make matters worse, the companies that are supposed to pay into the fund are about as reliable as a NASA launch date. You can be sure that they are going to use every trick in the book to try and back out of their obligations. By creating legal challenges and declaring bankruptcy, companies can succeed in delaying their payments, and may even find ways of getting out of them altogether. This will force taxpayers to cover more of the costs.

Under the most optimistic projections, the trust fund will accumulate huge debts and will have to pay billions in interest. Even if everything goes as planned, the fund will pay $34 billion in compensation in its first year, but will only receive $20 billion in revenue over its first three years of existence. With huge shortfalls, the fund will have to borrow money from the very start, resulting in debt and interest payments that could range as high as $70 billion over time. We might as well just flush our tax dollars down the proverbial commode.

Perhaps lawmakers should do us a favor: stop delving into judicial matters where they don’t belong and stop using taxpayer dollars to establish trust funds that will only create more problems, more court costs, and more debt. With thousands of lives and billions of tax dollars on the line, lawmakers need to do better than this bad bill.