Just North of Something Important

mikehudack:

jeffmiller:

“The Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming.  See the map for more.  It is time for a sale.  Selling even some western land could raise hundreds of billions of dollars - perhaps trillions of dollars - for the Federal government at a time when the funds are badly needed and no one want to raise taxes.  At the same time, a sale of western land would improve the efficiency of land allocation.” (via Marginal Revolution: Now is the Time for the Buffalo Commons)

I couldn’t agree with this more.

Makes tons of sense, assuming we’re not talking about national parks and military bases.

Well, according to the cited report, here are the major categories of use:

• Forest and wildlife - 30%
• All other - 27%
• Grazing - 22%
• Parks and historic sites - 15%
• Military - 2%
• Flood control - 1%
• Vacant - 1%

So national parks and military bases are 17% of the total land, but probably we’d want to include forests in there too, which bumps it up to 39%, and then grazing, well, I don’t know a damn thing about farming [edit: er, livestock—see, that’s how little I know], so maybe that’s necessary?  The big question is that giant “all other” category, which comprises, according to the appendix: “Land that cannot be classified elsewhere as well as vacant land not being used.”  Which is confusing, since “vacant” is already a category, and if you look at the full use chart, there are about 20 categories, so I don’t know what else could be in there.  Secret robot bases?  Alien jails?  CIA heroin farms?  Who knows?

Anyway, all I know is that land use is a big political football out west, but I don’t know exactly why, so I’ll leave it at this.  Rachel will probably chime in in the comments once she wakes up.