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Making Sawdust Out Of Taxes

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 13, 2008

With former Alaska senator Ted Stevens out of office and fighting to stay out of prison, Congress has the opportunity to end an outrageous expenditure that wastes tax dollars while defiling the largest rainforest in North America.

Stevens was able to win annual appropriations for logging in the Tongass National Forest, though the practice made no economic sense and is an environmental outrage.

Consider some numbers supplied by Joe Mehrkens, a former economist for the U.S. Forest Service: The Forest Service lost more than $46 million subsidizing logging in the Tongass last year. That translates to more than $600,000 a job.

The Forest Service has lost more than a billion dollars in the last 25 years subsidizing the timber industry's operations in the forest. Most of them are unprofitable. Mehrkens reports that over the last decade, 45 percent of the Tongass timber offered for sale does not receive a bid. Of the timber that does sell, close to half the transactions are canceled or sold at a reduced price.

Meanwhile, the subsidies force taxpayers to pay for logging that pollutes rivers and streams, causes erosion and undermines economic activities that don't need taxpayers' support.

With the departure of Stevens and the Bush administration, which had also supported the logging, Washington can finally bring sanity to logging policies and put an end to the Tongass folly.

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