The federal government owns about 640 million acres of land — some 28 percent of the land area of the United States — but according to some press reports, members of the U.S. Senate are proposing to sell 250 million of those acres. The press reports are wrong, but even if they weren’t, I can’t help but feel schadenfreude at environment groups that are going ballistic at the proposal.
Grizzly getting a good look at some of the nation’s federal lands. (As it happens, since I took this photo a week ago, this land has been burned in a wildfire. Although the Forest Service has concluded the fire was human-caused, we didn’t do it unless the zooming of a one-year-old dog was enough to ignite the grass.)
Federal land aficionados all agree that the lands are enormously valuable. Yet Congress has given away most of the resources produced by those lands, including minerals, forage for domestic livestock, recreation, and water, to various special interest groups for nothing or well below their true value. As result, federal taxpayers lose roughly $10 billion per year managing the federal lands. Continue reading
