Alan Simpson, Social Security, and the Welfare Barons of the Livestock Industry

[Joanne98]

For OpEdNews: Bill Willers - Writer

Alan Simpson, co-chair of President Obama's Deficit Commission, likens Social Security to "a milk cow with 310 million tits." But Simpson, a Wyoming rancher, is certainly familiar with a welfare "tit" that is a con game of continental magnitude maintained for "permittees," mostly ranchers like himself, who lease grazing allotments on America's public lands.

This fleecing carried out on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land and national forests is immense in scope. BLM alone has 18,000 permits on 157 million acres -- an area equal in size to Montana and Wyoming combined. In addition, the Forest Service manages 93 million of its public forests for some 8,000 permits.


Although this land belongs to all Americans in common, it's managed primarily for a minority of permittees producing just 3% of the nation's beef. Cowboy history notwithstanding, cattle are not suited for ecosystems of the West. As Donald Peters put it in 1990, "Trying to fit European cattle into arid North American ecosystems is like putting a size-12 foot into a size-8 shoe." Aside from the well-documented ecological damage wrought by domestic livestock, and their displacement of wild native animals, the financial setup alone should incense taxpayers.

Here's the rub: Permittees pay a fraction of the market. The unit used for grazing livestock is an "Animal Unit per Month" (AUM), equal to a cow and her calf (or five sheep). To graze livestock on private land, the current market now runs about $20, but permittees pay $1.35, so $18.65 for each AUM that should go into the federal till is compensated for by U.S. taxpayers -- a sum running into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year. How ironic that many haters of "big guv'ment" are major-league welfare recipients.

Permittees who understand their favored status have tried to maintain anonymity. In Simpson's home state of Wyoming, for example, permittees sued when the U.S. Forest Service released their names, claiming infringement on their privacy. Putting it bluntly, we citizen taxpayers who own the public land are not supposed to know the identities of those we're bankrolling.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Alan-Simpson-Social-Secur-by-Bill-Willers-100912-410.html

[Kali]

1. lots o bullshit in that piece

Land in the west is mingled - it is a mixture of ownerships, and blm land tends to be some of the shittiest, production-wise. Most ranches are a mixture of private and other lands, with the private being the best - usually with the water sources and rights. It takes more country to raise a cow out here than in the wetter (and more populated, I might add) parts of the US.

Leased grazing land has to be shared with other public uses no matter what the author claims. It has to be shared with recreation (both responsible and idiots) mining, hunting, oil and gas development and transport etc etc etc and the rancher bears almost the entire brunt of caring for it including policing.

Cattle are very well adapted to the various types of environments they are raised in - otherwise it wouldn't work. No you can't take a pet milk cow from Ireland and dump her in the desert, but there are plenty of breeds and herds within breeds that do just fine.

Lease rates are not comparable to most private leases - the amenities and guaranties in a private contract are way better than a simple govt. grazing lease. Like comparing staying in your car in the parking lot of at a motel 6 next to an IHOP plus vending machines and going on freaking cruise where everything you could want is provided.