Select federal lands attract wealthy elites, don’t benefit working class
In her commentary, Lawson cited a Headwaters Institute study, which used 44 years of history to claim growth benefits of federal lands. Unfortunately, that report has major flaws which affect the conclusion it and Lawson draw.
The Headwaters Institute study Lawson cited used historical data, but did not examine federal lands’ actual effect today. The study looked only at gross income, assuming that one dollar is the same, whether it is wages, profit from a farm or small business, or a dollar of welfare payments. Further, the study’s authors assumed that an acre of public land provides the same benefit, whether it is Owyhee BLM sagebrush or protected Yellowstone National Park land.
A reexamination without these assumptions reveals a truth different than the one Lawson asserts. I retrieved 2014 income data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, separating wages, self-employment profits, welfare and other transfer payments, and investment income. I compared that to Federal land ownership in the 276 Western rural counties, sorted into protected park lands and unprotected land such as BLM and Forest Service, using a standard statistical procedure.
The results show most public lands today have little effect on rural income. The only significant effect federal lands have on rural income is an increase of per capita investment income, concentrated in elite counties located near areas of federally protected parklands, such as Sun Valley, Jackson (Wyoming), Park City (Utah), and Aspen. Investment income includes dividends and interest, private pension payments, and rents.
Individuals who have earned their wealth elsewhere bring it to the elite locations when they move or retire near parks paid for by the public. The individuals who move often enjoy lower tax rates on their passive income. The locals who benefit are those who sell or rent real estate — there is no matching, positive effect on local wages.
This pattern, of increased per-capita investment income, benefits a small number of elite locations in the West. It cannot scale up widely, because an attraction of these spots is their exclusivity. Outside of elite counties, federal lands — parks or otherwise — provide no significant economic benefits to those who draw wages, run a farm or business, or are struggling to get by.
Lawson and the Headwaters Institute have attempted to draw a mantle of social benefit over all federal lands in the West, but the federal lands actually benefit only a privileged few in elite locations. Public lands, managed from Washington, D.C., do nothing economically for most of us. That alone is a reason why we should give Western states a chance to experiment, to manage these lands, and realize greater benefits for their rural residents.
Tim Oren recently retired to Idaho after 30 years in Silicon Valley as an engineer, manager and venture capitalist. He holds a graduate degree in systems analysis and statistics from Michigan State University.
Reposted by Free Range Report Admin. 8/26/16
Mr. Oren has penned an excellent article here, on a topic of which few in the general public have an awareness.
From personal experience I can assure you that the federal government has zero interest in the economic condition, benefit, or social welfare of the rural people that live in proximity to the public lands they administer and ostensibly hold in public trust. In actual fact the employees of the several federal bureaucracies – Interior, BLM, Forestry, etc. etc. etc. – charged with this travesty regard the public land as their own private fiefdom.
Having owned a ranch in the central Colorado mountains many years ago that was surrounded by federal land my contacts with ‘the Feds’ were frequent and unfriendly. My land was private property patented prior to the creation of the federal entities in question. Believe me they wanted it back. My presence in the middle of their lands was regarded by them as a thorn in the side of socialism, because I refused their agents and the public access to my land for travel to points beyond. I made them go around, a journey of many miles out of their way.
When dealing with the feds one must keep in mind that they do not care about you at all. Beneath the smiles and glad-handing their focus is on a perception of their own bloated level of importance and rules generated back east somewhere by people who know nothing about our western lands or the people who live around them.
The only solution to this book length topic is to remove the public lands from the jurisdiction of the feds and place it under the watchful care of the states where it is situated; only then, would these lands be administered to include those rural folk who have lived around the public land for generations.
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This article is still relevant today, as they used some of the same stats against Utah as we are working to size down Grand Stair Case Escalante NM.
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