
Who owns the west? The Government [map] - soundsop
http://www.strangecosmos.com/content/item/145203.html
======
tc
It has been suggested, before we got into the current bailout boondoggle
anyway, that the US government could extinguish its debts and past entitlement
promises by simply selling off the western states. With an accrual-basis
calculated debt rising towards $60 T and real estate prices dropping, it's an
open question of whether even this would still be sufficient.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I'm afraid that with a political system that encourages something-for-nothing
and zero-pain benefits, the idea of selling something of value to pay for
national debt is a complete non-starter.

~~~
gibsonf1
This is the big question I've been pondering lately: will this economic
madness create an inflection point in American cultural/political values
leading to the idea that you can't spend more than you have? Clearly
Washington has no plans to change yet: will the US have to go bankrupt before
the lesson is learned?

~~~
Brushfire
This is a very big problem to address -- the idea of excessive consumerism is
so deeply embedded into our social structure and mentality that it is hard to
get away from even when you are conscious of it.

I drive a car made in 2002, which is kind of beat up (people hit me in parking
lots and I dont repair dings/dents). The engine is working perfectly. But I
regularly get comments from people asking me if I'm shopping for new cars. Its
such a sin in some circles to have a 4+ year old car that these people think
they are doing me a favor by reminding me its time to upgrade.

America is going to have to really come to a point of real peril before the
attitudes of most people will switch. The good news, I suppose, is that if we
arent there now, we will be soon.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Consumerism -- trading money for bigger and better things you probably don't
need -- isn't that bad. What's bad is that politically we want things without
having to trade anything at all for it. This leads to the attitude that the
only reason we don't have things is because we haven't legislated it.

Not a good thing.

------
sammyo
Many of those areas are mountainous infertile wasteland and forests that are
mostly logged off. Shoulda just sold off the lower half of Manhattan last year
;-)

------
indiejade
Very interesting that Texas, being the second largest state and the largest in
the lower 48, has only 1.9 percent owned by the USG. If the theory that more
private ownership leads to more wealth were true, it would be expected that TX
would have fewer people living below the poverty line. A bit of research
reveals that it actually has more -- statistically significant: 16.2 percent
of its population lives below the poverty line compared to the 12.1 percent
national average. Source: <http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/48000.html>

~~~
iigs
Land isn't perfectly fungible -- in fact, one of the cornerstones of the tech
startup world is that land near SF, CA or Boston, MA is worth many orders of
magnitude more than land in eastern Iowa or western Texas for certain people.

There's very little value in preserving any particular acre of land in Iowa
(0.8%) -- they're all essentially the same, and the one thing that land is
good for is growing corn/soybeans. Likewise with TX, as far as I know it's
roughly a gradient of drilling for oil in the west to ranch land in the east.

Unlike ranch land (generally uninteresting as park land) and farm land (crops
would be destroyed by tourism), forest land (Washington state, and I assume a
fair amount the mountainous portions of the other western states, as well) is
a bit different in that the land can be used simultaneously as wood crop land
and park space. On the east side of Seattle there are some large commercially
owned forests that are legally obligated to provide public access for fishing,
hunting, and mountain biking. You can achieve similar results with state
ownership of the forest land and logging grants -- making the land valuable to
hold as state (national) property.

I think the TX poverty issue could be attributed to the low-profit land not
supporting much more than the people it takes to operate it. The overwhelming
amount of said space probably overshadows the (moderately-)positive effects of
the big cities.

~~~
herdrick
Many national parks were at least partly rangeland for livestock. Think of
Arches, Bryce, Zion, Joshua Tree, etc. I certainly think Texas and Iowa would
be better off with more national parks. The original tall prairie grass
ecosystem is mostly gone from the midwest. I'd like to see some of that.

------
herdrick
A better map:
[http://www.nationalatlas.gov/printable/images/preview/fedlan...](http://www.nationalatlas.gov/printable/images/preview/fedlands/fedlands3.gif)

EDIT: this one is better yet:
<http://www.adcre8tr.com/oldgrowthweb/where.html>

