If the government regularly does a poor jobs of managing the resources, perhaps it should just sell a lot of them off to the highest bidder. That doesn't mean you can't have national parks, national monuments, military bases, etc. but something is a bit out of whack when the feds own almost 85% of Nevada, almost 70% of Alaska, the majority of Utah, Oregon, and Idaho, almost half of Arizona, and over 40 percent of California, Wyoming, and New Mexico.
bigthink.com
Its one thing if the areas is needed for military purposes, or its so environmentally sensitive that we want to keep all development away from it (although that can be done by states or the private sector as well). But areas primarily used for resource extraction should probably be privatized. The proceeds (and the taxes on later profits from these lands) could be used to help straighten out our fiscal mess.
Also as Bearcatbob points out the logging does represent creating wealth. It produces useful items for which there is a market even without subsidies.
If you consider the price that the land was leased at to be a subsidy.
1 - There would still be a market without the subsidy.
2 - The feds are not going more in to debt in order to provide this subsidy, the logging reduces the deficit, through the direct payments, even if they are too low, and through taxes on the profits, and taxes on the profits of people down the line who sell or use the wood and wood products.
3 - If its mismanaged by the feds that's an argument for getting the feds out of it, not that the activity doesn't create wealth.
In cases like Solyndram you had the government providing cash, which it won't get back, and then the private sector company went bankrupt anyway. A lot different then just (maybe) not charging full market prices for the initial raw materials that go to a profitable company, to meet a real market demand, that would exist without subsidies (defined broadly, not just subsidies, but loans, tax favoritism etc.). |
