The federal government stops paying its "property taxes."

What if the largest property owner in your county suddenly decided he wasn't going to pay property taxes anymore? And, worse, there wasn't a damn thing you could do about it. Some 700 counties scattered across rural America now find themselves in precisely this position. And the deadbeat property owner is none other than the U.S. government, the owner of some 90 million acres of timberland--holdings that account for more than half the entire land base in many counties. The history here is straightforward. Since 1906, counties holding federal forestlands have received a share of the revenue generated by various management-related activities, including timber harvesting. While technically not a property tax, revenue sharing placated the Western solons who feared nationalizing public domain lands would make community formation impossible. But the program has slowly ground to a halt over the last 20 years as one administration after another lost its enthusiasm for harvesting federally owned timber. West of the Cascades in Oregon and Washington, folks blame the Endangered Species Act, lawyers and the northern spotted owl, in that order. Down South, it's red-cockaded woodpeckers. In the Midwest, it's Indiana bats. Here in the Intermountain West, where it is still possible to drive all night without seeing another set of headlights, we prefer to blame Eastern dilettantes, trust-fund babies, liberals in general and soccer moms who have no have no idea where lumber comes from or how tough it is to make a living out here...Congress tried to calm the waters, first in 1993 by granting counties hurt by the owl's 1991 listing annual "owl guarantee payments"; and then, in 2000, by allocating $500 million in "safety net" funding to help all federal lands counties cover their budget shortfalls. But safety net funding wasn't designed to permanently replace lost harvest revenue; and now, in a rare moment of fiscal responsibility, Congress appears poised to cancel the deal--a possibility that has many a county commissioner on the warpath...What's missing from this dialogue is a plain-spoken admission by Messrs. Wyden and Smith that the $500 million is chump change compared to what's really been lost in recent years. Consider this: In 1991, 8.5 billion board feet of commercial timber was harvested from national forests. That 8.5 billion generated $5.5 billion in local income, another $325.5 million in shared harvest receipts and $831 million in federal income taxes. Grand total--$6.656 billion; more than 13 times what counties now get in safety net funding....