Forest Road in the Pacific Northwest
One of the first real-world examples of Public Choice I heard was government building logging roads for timber companies. Superficially, it sounds like a clear-cut example of corporate welfare (excuse the pun). To document and quantify this special-interest handout, I looked into the statute and the budget for the forestry service. This is focusing on the national policies, since in this case, these are the most difficult to defend from a Public Interest perspective.
The statute authorizing the forest service to build logging roads is Public Law 88-657. The first paragraph reads as follows:
[…] the Congress hereby finds and declares that the construction and maintenance of an adequate system of roads and trails within and near the national forests and other lands administered by the Forest Service is essential if increasing demands for timber, recreation, and other uses of such lands are to be met; that the existence of such a system would have the effect, among other things, of increasing the value of timber and other resources tributary to such roads; and that such a system is essential to enable the Secretary of Agriculture (hereinafter called the Secretary) to provide for intensive use, protection, development, and management of these lands under principles of multiple use and sustained yield of products and services.
In the National Forest budget, I find the line-item for road construction and maintenance. In 2019, this came out to $218 million. One note defending an increase in road costs (for 2021) says:
This critical increase […] will enable the Forest Service to manage, protect, and provide safe public access to National Forest System lands, and to meet the agency’s goal of offering 4.0 billion board feet of timber in FY 2021.
Forest Roads are each used for multiple purposes, and it is not possible to quantify to what extent the road network as a whole – or, say, an average mile of forest road – is used for logging, vs personnel access, recreational uses, emergency responses, etc. Still, given the language in the statute and the budget, it is clear one of the main purposes of the roads is access to timber. In the context of the huge Federal budget as a whole, $218 million is nothing, but I find it interesting that the Federal government runs such blatant corporate handouts.
In the meantime, in 2019, Weyrhaeuser alone made $165 million out of a $6.5 billion in revenue.
The above is not taking into account the advantageous prices for the timber itself.
Real Life Plutocracy 