Posted by iancmceachern 10/23/2024
Also really not comfortable with giving more welfare to a single individuals company that routinely breaks the law and brags about firing unionized workers.
You probably wouldn't need first responders if you could hire & not fire all the people you have proactively managing your lands. (So many face-palms.)
https://appropriations.house.gov/news/press-releases/house-v...
If you don't believe they're partisan, read through the "key takeaways" section. They are responsible for this budget shortfall. Their games of government shutdown chicken are also the reason the budget hasn't even been finalized yet.
The whole system is rotten and corrupt.
These aren’t careers.
The only reason they're not careers now and are forced to be seasonal hires is due to ongoing defunding of the forest service over decades
> “I moved across the country to work here, for a seasonal job,” she says. “We have people who have worked here for 10 years as seasonals, and made a career out of these positions. They trusted that the jobs wouldn’t go away.”
I suspect the other part of these careers involve seasonal work that covers a different part of the year, such as working at ski resorts.
> In addition, the agency is freezing all external hiring for permanent positions.
Time for this to stop being a shock. The country needs some harsh belt tightening and stories like these will become commonplace if real reform is practiced.
I could eat steak at a lavish restaurant every night but I realize that if I did so my credit card balance would eventually come to the point I would be using the total of my income to pay the interest. Instead I do the sustainable option and buy groceries and cook at home.
Continuing deficit spending at the federal level will eventually bankrupt our government and make this a worse world to live in.
We don't, you do. The USFS is already working with a tightened belt.
Talk about deficit spending is basically nonsense from the vein of fake austerity politics of the past several decades, whose real purpose was to starve most government functionality while distracting from the many trillions of dollars given out as artificially low interest loans, basically shameless handouts to the financial industry and asset holders (see: the everything bubble).
Raise taxes back to what they were back in the 1950s when the top marginal rate was over 90%.
Close off the methods rich people use to legally lower their true tax rate. Buffet famously pointed out his tax rate was lower than his secretary's. Bezos back in 2011 when he was worth $18 billion got a $4,000 tax credit because he reported investment losses.
Why are we paying for Bezos' steak?
Fund the IRS to go after rich people, instead of targeting poor people simply because it's cheaper and easier than going after wealthy ones. ("we estimate that each dollar spent on auditing an individual in the 70–80th percentiles produces a return of $9.06. Each dollar spent auditing an individual in the 90–99th percentiles produces a return of $12.48.", https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31376/w313...)
Create a global wealth tax.
Stop paying for all this ridiculously expensive road transportation system and housing sprawl on the backs of our children's future.
And yes, stop eating steak. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
Maybe you could change who's paying that money but I doubt it. In any case getting a bigger chunk of GDP into the governments hands seems like a fool's errand to me.
You could try to grow GDP but that's hardly better. Anyone who tells you they know how to make that grow faster is selling something.
Don't focus so much on GDP, when the increasing Gini coefficient tells you it's unevenly distributed.
It's especially odd given how single-income families were more common in the 1950s, so a lot of adults had no salary.
If we really wanted to raise the GDP, use tax dollars to fund preschools. Unpaid parents (usually mothers) watching the kids for free isn't included in GDP. Paid teachers are. And those mothers can get a job, raising the GDP even more, all paid by a progressive taxation and wealth tax to help lower Gini.
Eating steak every day is a fool's errand. The metaphor being used to justify austerity is even worse. I was explaining a reason why people might have downvoted that comment. That you have a different opinion is besides the point.
I don't know, ask FDR how he did it (hint: it did not involve less government spending or crippling agencies)
Also the government is spending as much as percent of GDP as it did during WWII. You want to increase that?
I don't know how old you are, but I predict you will not see a balanced federal budget in your lifetime.
Not maintaining a tremendously valuable asset (nearly priceless) is a waste.
They do have a bit of a point. The asset isn't really being maintained. It's being maintained for human use as recreation. Overall you don't need to really maintain wilderness to preserve it. Overall you just leave it untouched.
You would actually do a better job if you locked down the entire area and just spent the money on keeping everyone out as my own self fish usage of nature as recreation harms it more then it helps it.
That would work until a mining company wanted to extract oxygen from Yellowstone Quartz and met with zero public opposition to making use of "empty land."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wilderness_areas_of_th...
And besides how selfish would it be to preserve nothing for the future generations.
Invasive species are the biggest problem. Fuel buildup is another. Ignoring the problem is the third.
Now your claim is forests don’t preserve themselves since humans arrived?
First off my solution is to reverse the arrival of humans. Second your claims are inconsistent as they’ve changed.
I don’t think you’re maintaining a clear and consistent thought process you’re just attacking me from every possible angle. We should be having a discussion here, don’t get defensive.
It's not the spending people have a problem with, it's the what.
It’s funny how funding weapons and things like endless TSA security theater is not ever criticized for their contribution to insolvency. The gain has been negligent. No clearly the problem is the education and parks that actually contribute good and real safety and security to the country.
You can object to the overall non-profit egalitarian mission (and I do in many cases) but it's not unique to the forest service.
the FDA's job is to think about this stuff and provide recommendations and regulations. and a big part of their purview is Food, hence the F. Drugs are in the name too, but that's as much about the latest cancer medication as it as about street heroin.
However, forest recreation (which obviously requires the forests to still have trees) also generates a lot of money — both for the local economy around the forest and via things like permits for the government itself.
Basically the goal is to maintain the forests as long term assets, not sell them off in one go.
Assuming that is healthy, activate leasing on federal land (USFS & BLM) to generate income. e.g. logging, petroleum, recreational leases, mining , etc.
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/u-s-federal-budget-breakdown...
For basically all future years, an even greater proportion (more than two thirds) of federal government spending will be for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (old and sick and poorer people).
If that land was generating income, we could pay off the entire $35+T debt in no time.
Reads like something straight out of George Orwell
He also was very much opposed to authoritarian rule and one of the points of 1984 was to distrust how a government used words to mislead -like in what I quoted
The mission of the US Forest Service (USFS) is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the Nation's forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations.
"Public forest reservations are established to protect and improve the forests for the purpose of securing a permanent supply of timber for the people"
context: i live in PNW around Columbia gorge and the former logging towns around here hardly have any industry left.
For example, this quote is not a mission, “The U.S. Forest Service is a federal agency that manages 193 million acres of land, an area about the size of Texas.”
It might be part of what they do to accomplish their mission, but it’s not a mission.
Could you quote the part of the article that makes their mission clear?