Government bureaucrats are true heroes: they all want to help stimulate the economy. They way they want to help, of course, is for Congress to give them billions of dollars.
The noble Forest Service, for example, has a $10 billion wish list for road maintenance and culverts. Not just any culverts, mind you, but “culverts for fish passage.” That makes them extra “green.”
The Forest Service is also preparing a “green jobs” that would create 90,000 jobs, mostly treating fuels on private lands. This is in accord, says the document, with the agency’s “cohesive strategy” for protecting homes in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) from fire.
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But that cohesive strategy is behind the times, as the latest research shows that the only areas that need to be treated to protect homes are the areas within 100 to 200 feet of those homes. In contrast, the Cohesive Strategy claims, “Treating WUI acres alone will not allow us to achieve the wide range of human and natural resource benefits expected of the program,” so it proposes to treat lands that are miles away from homes. In essence, the Green Jobs program is a bailout for private forest landowners, not homeowners in the WUI.
Of course, the Park Service wants to get into the act with its $6 to $13 billion backlog of maintenance projects. Many if not most of these projects consist of upgrading houses for Park Service employees. But why do Park Service employees deserve their own heavily subsidized housing? Forest Service employees live in private homes and rental properties in nearby towns. Except for a few parks in Alaska, virtually all national parks are close to towns that would be glad to house employees.
In any case, never let it be said that government agencies were not stepping up to do their parts to help the economy by spending lots of your tax dollars on worthless projects.
Government bureaucrats are true heroes: they all want to help stimulate the economy. They way they want to help, of course, is for Congress to give them billions of dollars.
Meanwhile, the private sector never accepts money from Congress. Only “government bureaucrats” do that.
Well, whatdoyaknowaboutthat. Here are a few excerpts from a story I just ran across today in the Wall Street Journal:
With a record amount of commercial real-estate debt coming due, some of the country’s biggest property developers have become the latest to go hat-in-hand to the government for assistance.
Commercial real-estate owners, of course, are just the latest to get in line in Washington, D.C., for the billions of bailout dollars that the government has begun to hand out. Other businesses that have received or are campaigning for some form of aid include banks, credit-card issuers, car companies and even farm equipment maker Deere & Co.
http://tinyurl.com/privatesectorwantstaxdollars2
So the noble, patriotic private sector is frugally spending money and not spending lots of your tax dollars on worthless projects.
Oh, wait: never mind.
This is a kleptocracy and clownocracy and ineptocracy, not a bureaucracy.
DS
So, ROT has received money from the Koch’s, to fund his anti-transit/anti-choice/anti-market activities.
Although it’s tempting to bite at the Red Herring cast in this thread, the season requires that thoughts turn to the under-appreciated and less fortunate.
First, a word of thanks to urban planners – can you imagine how awful life would be without the thoughtful guidance of bureaucrats with geography degrees from freshwater colleges?
May the veil of ignorance be lifted from Al Gore’s constituency.
May our selfless public servants get their just rewards.
Have mercy on the victims of Peak Oil. Oh wait, never mind…
Last, thanks AP for demonstrating the common trait of geologists, independence of mind.
Darn, missed one
the helpful urban planner
Anyone else see the Simpsons Movie that came out in 2007?
I am not much of a fan of this show, but the plot of the movie, which had the USEPA first putting Springfield in a massive quarantine, and then destroying the entire place, all in the name of environmental protection, was pretty amusing.
> So, ROT has received money from the Koch’s, to fund his
> anti-transit/anti-choice/anti-market activities.
Got any proof to substantiate the came above? Who are
the “Koch’s,” by the way?
Speaking of funding of the American Dream Coalition, I do
know one of the people that help to fund it – quite
well – it’s me.
> In any case, never let it be said that government agencies were not stepping
> up to do their parts to help the economy by spending lots of your tax dollars
> on worthless projects.
One thing that the government has done quite well over the past 50-or-so years
is to build and expand highways. And highways, unlike most of the other
projects promoted (including light rail lines and bike paths) have pretty
decent economic multipliers.
Few have been more outspokenly critical of National Park Service bureaucracy than I (and for verification, check my comments on the “National Parks Traveler” blog, especially those concerning the hundreds of millions of dollars for regional offices), but I would like to see hard evidence from the Antiplanner that “[m]any if not most of these [maintenance backlog] projects consist of upgrading houses for Park Service employees.”
I stand ready to be corrected, and perhaps using more specific terms rather than “many” and “most” would help clarify. Maybe I’m misreading the statement. Maybe more than 50% of the projects are focused on park housing (but that still seems unlikely), but I highly doubt more than 50% of the total maintenance backlog dollar figure consists of Park Service employee housing projects.
“But why do Park Service employees deserve their own heavily subsidized housing?”
I can’t rebut a value statement like this. Why does anyone “deserve” any subsidy?
But portraying it as a subsidy rather than as a total employment compensation package seems dubious.
Oh, and NPS employees do pay rent on NPS housing, even long after the cost of construction has been paid. Those rents are calculated (by bureaucrats) based on local market rent.
“Forest Service employees live in private homes and rental properties in nearby towns.”
Not all Forest Service employees live in private homes. The Forest Service also has employee housing; for example, fire management personnel live in government housing in remote guard stations. I don’t know what the actual comparison is to NPS housing, but the Antiplanner hasn’t furnished any information, only an assertion.
“Except for a few parks in Alaska, virtually all national parks are close to towns that would be glad to house employees.”
Another unsupported assertion here. It also depends on one’s definition of “close”. Chaco Canyon is too remote for commuting. I can think of dozens more.
Also consider that a seasonal GS-5 employee grosses about $15,000 for a six-month season, and seasons in some parks, like Rainer, Glacier, Crater Lake, Sequoia, are substantially shorter. If parks want to attract highly qualified, experienced seasonal employees, it behooves them to provide housing. Finding affordable three-month rentals in expensive and limited markets, and providing first, last, and deposit for housing for a temporary job proves extremely difficult if not impossible. I have personal experience attempting this when I worked at a national seashore off Long Island, New York.
Then consider my “subsidized” housing at the aforementioned seashore. It consisted of beach shacks taken from squatters in the 1960s. No insulation. Rats. Broken windows. Holes in the walls. A dump.
Again consider my above statements about the difficulty seasonals have obtaining short-term housing.
Of course, an answer lies in eliminating bureaucratic management of national parks and placing their management under conservation trusts. Parks could be self-sufficient, collecting revenue from user fees. Ending government-granted monopolies to multinational corporations to provide food, lodging, and other services to visitors would also help. Currently concessions pay a paltry 2-3% franchise fee, but under conservation trusts, a larger share of lodging and trinket sales could go toward operations.
Individual parks could also make local decisions on whether or not to provide housing to their employees. They could also negotiate rents with those employees, and local conditions would help the trusts’ board of directors decide whether or not they need to subsidize employee rents.
But making broad statements and assertions without facts will not further this cause.
C. P. Zilliacus Says:
December 23rd, 2008 at 1:25 pm
> So, ROT has received money from the Koch’s, to fund his
> anti-transit/anti-choice/anti-market activities.
Got any proof to substantiate the came above? Who are
the “Koch’s,†by the way?
THWM: Well he got $50,000 from them.
Speaking of funding of the American Dream Coalition, I do
know one of the people that help to fund it – quite
well – it’s me.
THWM: Well it also helps to be connected to the MWCOG.