Home, Home On The Wrong Range
The GOP’s kid-glove treatment of Western ranchers brings to mind modern parents indulging their sullen teenagers. The adolescents wreck the house, breaking lamps and spilling beer on the carpet. When asked to pay for replacements, the snarling teenager tells the soft-spined elder, “Dad, you’re interfering with my freedom.” Dad says, “I didn’t mean to upset you, son.”
So it is with the ranchers, whose cattle stomp wildflowers into powder and relieve themselves in salmon-spawning streams. They do this on federal land, for which they pay one-quarter of what a private owner would charge. Ask them to accept a greater share of the costs or to tread more lightly on the grass, and they throw a tantrum.
In fashioning an image, the rancher would rather portray himself as Independent Man of the West than as Ungrateful Teenager. He shows up at public-land meetings in full cowboy regalia, ostentatiously displaying his firearms. He roars grand and vaguely threatening pronouncements, like “This land is our land, not your land.”
The truth lies elsewhere. The land belongs to all the American people, and he’s on the dole. In an eye-popping article in Reason magazine, free-market economist Karl Hess wrote: “What is set forth by sagebrush rebels as a war of liberation from a domineering federal government may, in fact, be nothing more than a regional feud among warring siblings over which pampered child gets the federal spoils.”
And consider the spoils! The federal taxpayers have spent billions turning marginal rangeland into “Cadillac grazing fields,” according to Hess. The network of federal dams on rivers, for example, assures ranchers cheap and dependable supplies of water.
When drought gets really bad, the U.S. Agriculture Department’s emergency feed program kicks in. This costs taxpayers from $100 million to $500 million a year and allows ranchers to sustain livestock numbers up to 50 percent higher than the land can support. Nevada’s sagebrush rebels, the noisiest of the lot, receive an average of $18,000 a year for every man and woman in the emergency feed program.
The American taxpayer spends about $30 million a year on federally funded trappers who kill wolves, bear, cougars, coyotes and other animals that prey on domestic livestock. Hess notes that in places like New Mexico, the animal damage control program may spend $1,000 to bag one coyote. The federal government also picks up the entire costs of spraying pesticides on the grazing lands.
President Clinton’s first reversal in office concerned a sensible plan to set grazing fees that would better reflect the real costs of managing rangelands. The ranchers threw a fit, and Clinton withdrew the idea. Small matter, since the fees do not necessarily make their way into federal coffers anyway. Half go back to the ranching community for private projects, such as fences and watering holes.
As a result, grazing programs of the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management operate at a deficit of $200 million a year. Taxpayers bear the entire cost. So much money is poured into these two grazing programs that, according to Hess, “they could buy out every public-land ranch in the West at fair market value over a period of four years.”
The usual Republican response in such situations is to remove the subsidies and let the market decide where chips will fall. Such action would threaten the ranchers’ subsidies and also allow others - such as hunters or promoters of eco-tourism - to bid against them for use of the land. To his credit, President Reagan suggested selling off some of the more marginal federal lands. Nevada ranchers led the pack in strangling that move toward privatization, and Reagan tucked tail.
The business people who profit from ranching frankly want little to do with free markets, and today’s Republicans are happy to indulge them. Thus, they recently pushed a bill through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that protects their monopoly and leaves their subsidies intact. The Public Rangeland Management Act basically gives ranchers more control over the public lands.
In sum, the Republicans seem quite willing to preserve the expensive fantasy that Western ranchers are not creatures of the very federal government they are said to despise. And they are funneling these large wads of taxpayer dollars to less than 1 percent of the nation’s population.
The principled and budget-friendly response, of course, is to turn Western ranchers loose into the free-market frontier. But then we’re back to the dilemma of the unruly teenager. Sure, he can escape the yoke of parental supervision by moving into his own pad. On the other hand, Dad doesn’t charge the going rate for rent, and Mom does the laundry.
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