Posted by iancmceachern 10/23/2024
As a camp host I occasionally do these tasks when these employees are absent as well as my usual duties. For this I theoretically receive a small stipend. I say theoretically because the payroll operation is so understaffed it is five months behind in paying me.
Without the seasonal staff, I don't see any way the USFS can keep the campgrounds open as well as do many other functions.
I don't think many Americans understand how 40 years or so of declining agency budgets have hollowed out the staffing of many government agencies.
Can you provide a citation for where you’re getting this data indicating that the USFS budget has been declining over time?
Based on the data I found, the USFS budget has increased steadily from 2011-2024 [0]. The 2024 budget was $9.3b [1] versus $5.1b in 2011 [0]. The 2025 budget was cut from 2024, but still higher than the 2020 budget.
> Overall, in 1995 16% of the Forest Service budget was dedicated to wildfires. By 2015 it was 52% and by 2025 it’s projected to be upwards of 67%. Without large amounts of additional funding it is virtually guaranteed that the Forest Service’s budget will continue to be siphoned away by firefighting needs.
i.e. subsidizing states with antiquated "just don't touch it, but also fight every little fire" forest management policy
If forests are maintained as a tinderbox then that's unstable, regardless of whether the immediate cause of ignition is lightning or human activity.
If areas were having small semi-annual fires cleaning out the brush rather than these once per several decades monsters there wouldn't be the need for people to flee and there wouldn't be the same crime impact. And routinely dealing with small fires would make all the organizations involved better practiced when the big ones some around.
For context: Just keeping up with inflation puts the 2011 budget at $7.1b in 2024.
They also claim to have "13 billion dollars contributed to the U.S. economy by visitor spending each year"[2].
Investing $9b into $13b of revenue sounds like a great use of government funds to me.
[2] https://www.fs.usda.gov/about-agency/newsroom/by-the-numbers
No. By math alone, it is a horrible waste. It would be a good investment if those funds generated economic activity resulting 9+b in tax dollars. But this is about parks, not simply stimulating the economy. The value of parks cannot be expressed in dollars.
But I also acknowledge ROI does help fend off alternate agendas. My state's investments in birdwatching, vineyards, hunting/fishing/gaming. etc have huge ROI. Thereby empowering the conservationsists in those never ending policymaking slap fights.
Adjacently, I've seen (local) budgets for pre-K get over the hump because of their outsized economic impact. Some people only see the world thru dollars signs.
Framing with positive ROI helps moot the "we can't afford it" zero sum scarcity mindset. Like exposing NIMBYs.
Based on the ROI, we can't afford TO NOT invest in our national parks. Taking away the economic counter arguments shows the opponents just don't want to. For reasons.
References to economic activity in relation to parks can be dangerous. Once we see them as engines of economic activity, then we will seek to maximize that activity. A national forest should not be described as a source of timber fees and tourist dollars. Down that road comes drilling for oil in parks, more roads, more hotels and the inevitable conversion of wild fields into condos.
Even if it makes financial sense, the fact that we can only quantify a public good in USD (or any other currency) is a tragedy.
Not all things have a monetary amount associated to them, but they are still somehow valuable.
Money is the way we quantify the relative value of anything vs anything else. That's all money is.
I think because it's state-run, the "value" is extremely hard to quantify, in many directions. It might be over-valued, as people who've never seen it have to pay for it, or under-valued, as money that people might've paid to visit the park has already been taken from their paycheques.
For example, a smallish local park in my neighborhood is completely free and generates $0. Various entities spend some decent amount of money to maintain the park. The value is in how many people visit the park and enjoy it, which is inherently not quantifiable.
The only thing you can quantify is how many people visit the park each day or week or whatever, and, say, the average number of person-hours it is used per time period. Maybe those are useful metrics that can help inform whether or not the park's existence is justified, or as to how much money should be spent maintaining and improving it, in a very rough sense. But that's not the same thing as quantifying its value.
This requirement that everything must have some currency value attached to it is a societal disease. We can extrapolate this to say that anything that increases the country GDP should be done.
I can think of many awful examples. Maybe it makes more monetary sense to uproot every last tree to extract lumber. Maybe it makes more monetary sense to just kill people with serious illnesses or disabilities instead of building more hospitals. Maybe it makes more monetary sense to just put every damn child to work in the mines or in an Amazon fulfillment center instead of sending them to school.
I can go on. As long as we can only measure the value of anything in USD, we can justify quite a lot of things that would be pretty awful for society as a whole.
No it's not - I'm saying currency is how we measure the relative value of things. Money isn't separate to how we measure something's value; it's the thing we use to measure value. It's like saying "every object having a length value attached is a societal disease; we shouln't only attach a cm value to all objects".
That's not what the GP said, though. They said that the idea that everything needs to be valued in dollars is a societal disease. Not that everything that can be valued in dollars is a societal disease.
The value of a privately-operated park would be no less difficult to quantify. National forests are not theme parks. They have a value even if nobody ever sets foot inside.
I dislike your framing of this.
Most common != only
We just didn’t have to care, but now it is starting to catch up with is.
One hopes things will improve after November 5...
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
Then we will ask why we even have the government owning parks in the first place, and privatize the national parks!
You will pay $500 to park and you will like it!
USFS campgrounds in truly remote areas excepted, but any available camping near a highway is going to be a public safety hazard quickly without someone responsible for keeping it clean and somewhat organized/policed.
USFS ‘managed’ campgrounds generally were setup where there was already a problem area.
So are you proposing Rangers sit there and drive anyone away trying to do what they want to do? Or we turn these spots into National parks? Because just saying ‘dispersed camping’ doesn’t work either without someone sitting there enforcing it.
"Camp bathrooms are always so dirty, and there's never anyone to staff to help!"
"How can the bureaucracy fail so badly, I don't know why we even pay for the USFS if this is the best they can muster"
"We should privatize this. Maybe we could even sell naming rights. Colgate campgrounds, anyone?"
"(Private companies continue to run shitty camp, citing 'hey, at least we're better than the USFS')"
"Remember how the USFS failed so badly? You can't trust the government to do anything!"
It's been the playbook of every government agency that has not been funded properly for about a generation now (thanks, Reagan). Slowly defund a service so the quality degrades, then complain about the quality and say you couldn't possibly fund the service if the quality is that low.
It drives me up the wall how bleeding obvious this is, time and time again, and yet, here we are, doing it again to the USFS, one of the most important agencies we have in (for instance) ensuring people have access to nature, preventing wildfires, managing our timber stocks, and sequestering carbon.
The parent poster you replied to is speaking about the first, and you are speaking about the second.
The USFS, if properly funded, is perfectly capable (as history has shown) of maintaining our national parks.
If the idiots in DC don't continue to fund them properly (as they haven't been), and that causes problems, it doesn't mean the USFS is a failure and can't maintain our parks, and the only solution -- because "the government" failed at it -- is to privatize it.
That is, you can't say that "the entire machine of government" failed to self-manage the parks, but then say "the entire machine of government" was successful in privatizing the parks. (Especially considering the latter would end up in a disgusting capitalist failure anyway, but one that fiscal conservatives would cheer, because even though the parks would be an objectively worse experience for everyone, at least someone is making big money managing them.)
You didn't actually believe elected politicians all personally carry out the bidding and contract process and oversee the projects themselves, hopefully.
Then you said that it was the government which was responsible for doing that in the first place so that is evidence that the government is bad at its job.
I then pointed out that there are policy makers in government, and employees of government, and that the two have separate responsibilities.
Are you saying that employee corruption and private contracts are directly responsible for government agencies being given inadequate funding and staff so that they cannot be effective?
I seems to me that policy makers cutting the budget or not allocating enough of a budget for staffing would be responsible for this, and that private contracting is more of an effect of not being able to hire adequate staff.
The thread is right here to read. The attempted point was basically that privatization is bad, but the poster made up this convoluted scenario that seemed to miss the fact that this is a government service, and in any case horrible and corrupt privatization contracts are made by governments.
> Are you saying that employee corruption and private contracts are directly responsible for government agencies being given inadequate funding and staff so that they cannot be effective?
Also no. I'm saying what I wrote, no more or less.
> Also no. I'm saying what I wrote, no more or less.
> But this is the government failing!
So you are saying that defunding government is a government failure. Is there another way to read that?
I can't do all your work for you. If you want to say something, why don't you say it, instead of repeating 'the thread is there, read it' when you wrote one sentence and then refused any given interpretation of it.
It is like asking a child what they want and they repeat the same ambiguous thing over and over.
I have decided either you have no idea what you mean or you do not care to make it known, so, good luck with that.
That "scenario" of government incompetence and corruption makes for government waste and poor services yes. I didn't bring up anything unrelated.
> So you are saying that defunding government is a government failure. Is there another way to read that?
Trying to put words in my mouth and taking wild stabs in the dark or deliberately misconstructing what I am saying is not "doing all my work", lol. DOn't do the stupid internet arguing style of "Oh so you're saying ...". I'm saying what I'm saying, if you're unclear about it just ask a normal proper question.
What is the "this" that you are talking about?
Has the funding stagnated or has the mandate of these organizations expanded.
Way back when Regan was cutting things the median USFS camp ground "with bathrooms" probably had an outhouse and the fire rings were probably literally old truck rims tossed on the ground, If a camper wanted toilet paper or a grill they brought. And when they wanted to move the outhouse or add more campsites they probably didn't do a formalized environmental impact study (even if done in house that sort of stuff still costs something) because that wasn't considered within the scope of their jobs. Funding has not kept pace.
Does it matter? Expanding scope without increasing funding is functionally equivalent to maintaining scope and reducing funding.
If the USFS is expected to do more, they need more funding. If they aren't getting it that's a problem. If the USFS is expected to do the same, they need at least the same funding (adjusted for inflation, at minimum). If they aren't getting it, that's a problem.
Who's the president now and why is he absolved of all responsibilities?
This partisanism is useless. I'm not a democrat, I'm not a republican, but it's absolutely clear that Reagan represented a policy change that every admin thereafter has been happy to uphold.
USFS employees seem generally great, and competent at their jobs. If any part of government is the problem, it's the legislators who aren't funding them well enough. That's not a reason to take management of the parks out of the government's hands; that's a reason to stop voting for pro big-business fiscal conservatives who want to trick people into privatizing things because "government doesn't work for this", when the reason it doesn't work is because they deliberately broke it.
I wish more people would recognize it's a standard playbook, quite intentional.
And I live the Forest Service. They make my life better and I value that very highly.
I do not want private companies polluting our rec lands like they have done damn near everywhere else.
You’re exemplifying the problem. NPS and foreign aid funding aren’t competing with each other. They’re both rounding errors in the grand scheme. But everyone has their hobby horse that they have or must cut so we get some oscillation.
Your characterization is badly wrong.
EDIT: Until recently Social Security took in more money than it paid out. It’s run by the government so its expenditures are counted as a budget item. But it is a sound pension system whose defects can be easily fixed if a certain party would actually govern. It is not the largest expense by the government. It’s just that it is a government run pension system. It’s not an entitlement either.
It is intentionally (mis)represented as a pension plan where contributions are connected to benefits but that fiction is solely to maintain popular political support, they can disqualify citizens from eligibility at any time regardless of contributions and, on occasion, have.
The main issue with Social Security is that most people in prior generations took far more out than they contributed, in part because it wasn’t really a requirement since it wasn’t actually a pension.
SS is explicitly sold as a pension. If it stops acting like one, there will be consequences - even if it means rewriting laws.
Your benefit is based on what you pay in. It pays out less than what it takes in. If it were privatized you and the Supremes would call it a pension. It acts like a pension, quacks like a pension and is a pension.
This list paid for with your tax dollars:
https://constitution.congress.gov/resources/decisions-overru...
But to be clear, I favor social security, and I agree with your other points about it.
No, it couldn’t. There were promises made with the full faith and credit of the United Stares.
> obligations that need to be paid to the people who paid for them
Everyone pays taxes. Social Security and Medicare obligations are treated differently because of politics. Otherwise, they’re like any other expense: the Congress can amend them at will. (As is currently expected, e.g. with Social Security benefits beginning to be curtailed from 2035.)
In Finland, the mandatory pension system is similar to Social Security, except that it aims to replace ~60% of earned income without any limits. Pensions based on past contributions have been established as constitutionally protected private property. If the system seems to be out of balance, the basic tools are raising the contribution rates without increasing the benefits and increasing the retirement age for younger generations. Any changes that would substantially lower the pensions that have already been earned would have to go through the same process as constitutional amendments. (There is also a third tool: increasing the tax rates for all retirement income, regardless of the source. But that is understandably unpopular.)
I sincerely hope SCOTUS doesn't care at all about similar decisions made in other countries. What is or is not constitutional in the US should be based solely on the US constitution.
I'm not a lawyer so I'll rephrase. In an alternate universe the U.S. government created a corporation to run Social Security. It mandated that people participate in it. Everyone called it a pension system because that it what it is.
Congress can amend them at will.
All pension systems are subject to amendment. Many pension systems have been amended over the years.
If the U.S. then explicitly guaranteed that corporation's liabilities, sure.
> All pension systems are subject to amendment. Many pension systems have been amended over the years
No. Many state legislatures, for instance, are constitutionally prohibited from fucking with certain obligations, commonly pensions.
Which is a serious problem. The entire idea of a truly guaranteed pension is not feasible and always leads to a pyramid scheme and then insolvency.
Sure. But the point of full faith and credit is it's irreversible. (Actually, the point of credit, period. You can't declare your past debts pyramid schemes and unilaterally absolve yourself of them.)
The value of Social Security is the expectation that it will be bailed out by the government if it goes bust, for instance if the trust fund is depleted.
The Social Security Retirement benefit is a monthly check that replaces part of your income when you reduce your hours or stop working altogether.
Most people would refer to this as a “pension”. Call it whatever you want to. The fact is that its issues are easily fixable and your benefit is based on how much you put into it.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
Social Security, Health, and Medicare alone account for 49% of the budget, to National Defense's 13%.
Like I went to Iraq twice and I'm only 40. They're gonna be covering me for probably another ~40 years, and the US is owned lock and stock by healthcare companies that sure as hell aren't going to lower the costs of medicines.
Social security is, even if not legally then practically, a debt repayment. Defense spending is largely discretionary.
How is it not practically a debt repayment?
The common understanding is "you pay money in, you get money back when you retire". Do you think you could cut it without widespread backlash? Do you think you could cancel it without borderline revolt?
"It's not a debt. It's just that if you don't pay me I'll kill you."
Is there any practical difference from a debt?
Without a doubt it would not be popular if the government eliminated some or all of Social Security. But it would be strictly legal and Constitutional, popular backlash notwithstanding. This is an important distinction. There are no Constitutional protections that ensure Social Security benefits. Ignorance of this fact doesn’t change its reality.
I would be pretty upset if I paid into an annuity plan my whole adult working life and then the insurer reneged on their obligation. Social security not paying out would be even more upsetting, because you're legally obligated to pay for it, whereas buying an annuity is a choice.
Saying, "Social Security beneficiaries receive more than they paid in..." indicates you don't know what you are talking about. And, believe it or not, Social Security does invest money.
And yes, it does salvage the argument. Defense spending (all of it not just DOD) is the largest expense of the government. This is expected when you are the hegemon.
It's simply an enormous, vast economy, and 13% of a vast economy is a huge number, large enough to outspend the next several countries combined. That's all.
You are absolutely wrong in your belief. Defense spending is roughly 50% of discretionary spending.
You could change the law to axe social security, keep its highly-regressive tax, and instead use that to pay for other stuff—but lots of things are possible with a change in the law, and that’s not possible now without such a change. That’s not something that can happen as an ordinary part of the budgeting process.
You tend to only see it included when the full total of money disbursed by the government from any pot and for any purpose is expressly relevant (it’s usually not) or in writing that is not aimed at policy nerds, but at everyday voters (to convince them whatever batshit crazy spending we’re doing in the author’s preferred non-social-spending item isn’t bad after all, usually)
Trust/transparency would be the tricky problems.
A bold plan. Let's see how the American people feel about this in 12 days.
We absolutely play world police way more than we ought to for our own good.
(Hilariously, the USFS does use artillery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Forest_Service#/...)
ok maybe we should keep a few shells for avalanche stuff
https://wsdot.wa.gov/travel/operations-services/avalanche-co...
As for "why artillery", how do you plan on getting explosives into the snowpack, especially under conditions of severe avalanche risk? Those areas of the mountains are inaccessible by vehicle even in the summertime. A tank can drive on a road and deliver the explosives where needed. They often target 20+ separate snowfields so being able to do it in a timely and efficient manner matters.
While the armor doesn't contribute much, it happens to be what the artillery gun is attached to. It would cost far more to rig some special-purpose vehicle. Sherman tanks are free, the government has loads of them lying around waiting to be scrapped, you just pay for fuel and upkeep.
Artillery works great.
Although it's literally cheaper to use a crop duster with LIDAR mounted, civilian hand held drones, etc.
We (an air geophysics crowd I worked with) used to take contracts to map vegetation height and density under power lines in Australian bush.
This year they gave Israel $18 billion, so much more than usual.
In one sense, all of this is actually a jobs program for the US defense industry, since all that money is required to turn around as weapons purchases from US companies.
Even $18 billion is less than 1% of the US non-military budget, this isn't the reason we "can't afford" the USFS, or the reason to stop giving weapons to Israel -- the US certainly can afford both. (The reason to stop supplying Israel is that those weapons are actually destabilizing the region and encouraging violence and gross human rights violations).
But, no, Israel "buys" US weapons with US money, they are indeed a gift.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2024/USspendingIs...
But if you know of a clean source of data on the actual amount of aid provided each year, that would be useful. I’d guess the number this year would be a lot more than $3B given the physical reality of tons of expensive offensive and defense missiles fired.
But my main point is we DO give Israel money to buy our weapons, they are indeed a gift. I don't know if Israel spends any of their own budget on US weapons -- my guess would be very little, because they would _rather_ be funding their own Israeli domestic defense industry (which is of course quite developed), they spend our military aid $$ on US defense industry because it is required as a condition of the gift.
(There was a time in the past, when Israel, alone of all military aid recipients, was allowed to spend a portion of military aid on their own domestic defense industry, I guess becuase the US wanted to support the develpment of that specially among all other recipients of US military aid. It worked, Israel now sells $billions of weapons to autocratic Arab regimes in the middle-east and north africa: Notably Bahrain, the UAE, and Morocco. Saudi Arabia would love in on that too. But those provisions expired a few years ago, now all US military aid to Israel has to be spent on weapons from the US, just like other US military aid recipients.)
Israel is on the USA tit as well.
2. Cut forest service funding and jobs
3. “The forest fires are so bad this year, how could this have happened to us??”
It practically means trails won't get the love they deserve and it will be harder to make use of the resource.
> The amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion, according to a former Pentagon official. That's more than NASA's budget.
https://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/137414737/among-the-costs-of-...
Honest curiosity here, I don't know what a lot of the purpose is!
The use of orbital based technologies like GPS and satellite imaging have unlocked entirely new capabilities.
It's hard to find an aspect of modern life that hasn't been transformed in some way by space.
Dollar for dollar, the only better return on our federal spending is education.
For example, how important is weather prediction to you? Genuinely, I’m not sure how much it is to me, but the value isn’t nothing.
GPS is another thing like that: it’s only a little bit useful to me, but it enables a lot of economic activity (like farm automation). And the fact that getting lost went from a regular thing that happens to rarely is probably at least somewhat valuable.
Remote telecom is another thing. For sure, there are diminishing returns, but going from no access to some access for very remote places (think ships at sea, polar research stations, oil rigs, very rural communities) is probably valuable. How many ships haven’t sunk because they got a satellite weather update?
You’re absolutely right, it’s not a strategy to invest randomly. And it’s quite possible that we’re over-investing in space. But there are direct returns in addition to the “exhaust”.
Manned spaceflight has brought and continues to bring many important advances in science. I would argue that the science dividends of the ISS (which is mainly a research station) are quite worth the relativly low costs. How familiar are you with the science currently being done on the ISS? It often doesnt get heavily talked up, so I suspect your "fringe" assertion is coming drom a place of ignorance. Do you have speficic experiments that you think are a waste of time and money?
Manned expeditions to the moon are harder to justify. However, given the track record of technological and scientific payoffs, betting against a positive return, if even from the "exhaust" isn't safe. I do wish that Artemis wasn't our approach though.
FYI we spend more money subsidizing fossil fuels than we do on space travel. If we can afford handouts to oil companies that are killing our planet, we can afford to pay for the research that will help save it.
If you'll recall from my initial comment: "How exactly is it useful?... Honest curiosity here, I don't know what a lot of the purpose is!"
Which you haven't answered.
P.S. I'm not the one who said spaceflight as all, though yes I did interpret it as manned spaceflight, as I just stated
Obviously propulsion will continue to get better and better, but it's a good way to anchor oneself back to technical reality.
What's your gut feeling on how long it'd take to reach our nearest neighbor if we were to travel at the top speed of the fastest spacecraft we've ever made?
I believe that Proxima Centauri is ~10 light years away, and that it would take tens of millions of years to travel that distance based on current propulsion.
Looks like I wasn't wildly off.
I still think that putting humans in space is a worthwhile endeavor, and that the amount we spend on it relative to many other things is not disproportionately high.
There may be some cross talk in this thread where some people are talking about space programs in general and other people are talking about sending people to space.
Ditto the associated contracts for moon lander modules.
NASA's is about $25B. Bigger, but both are pretty small in the overall Federal budget.
Both are plagued with inefficiencies but the military is largely the most useless expense because we aren't at any huge risk that justifies this level of spending.
“Americans on November 5 will be electing a wartime president. This isn’t a prediction. It’s reality.”
and that may not have been in jeopardy a decade ago but there are groups actively, openly, and unambiguously aimed at destroying that, e.g. Russia and China's "no limits partnership". Which has show that it will invade and annihilate people.
The middle east is also popping off, and you have the Yemenis shooting at cargo vessels off the coast.
Neither Russia nor China want to annihilate people.
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