Alan Simpson, co-chair of President Obama's Deficit Commission, likens Social Security to "a milk cow with 310 million tits." But Simpson, a Wyoming rancher, is certainly familiar with a welfare "tit" that is a con game of continental magnitude maintained for "permittees," mostly ranchers like himself, who lease grazing allotments on America's public lands. This fleecing carried out on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land and national forests is immense in scope. BLM alone has 18,000 permits on 157 million acres -- an area equal in size to Montana and Wyoming combined. In addition, the Forest Service manages 93 million of its public forests for some 8,000 permits. Although this land belongs to all Americans in common, it's managed primarily for a minority of permittees producing just 3% of the nation's beef. Cowboy history notwithstanding, cattle are not suited for ecosystems of the West. As Donald Peters put it in 1990, "Trying to fit European cattle into arid North American ecosystems is like putting a size-12 foot into a size-8 shoe." Aside from the well-documented ecological damage wrought by domestic livestock, and their displacement of wild native animals, the financial setup alone should incense taxpayers. Here's the rub: Permittees pay a fraction of the market. The unit used for grazing livestock is an "Animal Unit per Month" (AUM), equal to a cow and her calf (or five sheep). To graze livestock on private land, the current market now runs about $20, but permittees pay $1.35, so $18.65 for each AUM that should go into the federal till is compensated for by U.S. taxpayers -- a sum running into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year. How ironic that many haters of "big guv'ment" are major-league welfare recipients...more
I'm pretty good at "reading between the lines", and I believe Bill Willers, a retired professor of biology, is really not a fan of livestock grazing in the West.
2 comments:
Maybe someone should remind him of the original intent of the Taylor Grazing Act. . .
"Bill Willers is emeritus professor of biology, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh now living in Middleton, WI. He is founder of Superior Wilderness Action Network (SWAN) and editor of Learning to Listen to the Land and Unmanaged Landscapes, both from Island Press. He posts occasionally online at OpEdNews, Common Dreams, Counterpunch and Dissident Voice."
Another left wing kook academic who does not live here trying to dictate how we live. Big freakin' surprise there, right?
Could someone please tell me where these wealthy ranchers are? Do they have any unmarried daughters that actually still want to work the place and not live in town, by any chance? I have some friends that could really use the help, and would work like dogs improving the place, too. Nope, these people are pulling the same socialist dirty trick that they do to the farmers, namely that they count the land and equipment and pretend that it is personal wealth. I don't see them doing that to small businessmen, let alone private individuals in the city, but perhaps I am giving them bad ideas. I am sick to death of this notion that the men and women who are breaking their backs to feed the world are all subsidized gazillionaires.
The American public does not "own" the public lands. Ownership confers the right to sell. Ever try to sell your stake in the public lands system? Try it sometime, and then please write back and tell me about how that ownership or stakeholdership is working out for you. The old timers were right. They called it Government Land from the start.
Should I even bother slicing through the silliness about public versus private AMUs? Ever hear of supply and demand? How about risk premium? Unsurprisingly, people are willing to pay more for highly improved grazing land and feedlot space than they are for rugged terrain, the use of which is riddled with regulatory junk and constantly under attack from, well, from wild-eyed zealots, their powerful lawyer buddies (who are being subsidized! Oh, no!), urbanite congressmen (ditto), and their pets in the media and academe (ditto there, too).
I haven't even gotten to Senator Simpson-babe yet, but don't any of you taxaholics get your panties in a wad. The Obama deficit panel is going to come back with nothing but fun new taxes for folks you don't like.
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