SOS Forests

Hmmm. The electoral majority is liberal, and led by public employee unions, mandatory union dues collected from every public employee, whether they deign to join a union or not. They still pay. And the preponderance of that money goes to fund political goals and gains designed to benefit public employees, above all.

The present and past public employees all have a stake in the state’s revenue and their own well being. State’s revenue determines their pay, their benefits, and their retirement. With short work lives, we have ended up with a public employment situation in which private side employees actually are working two public employee work years for every one the public employee works. This full Wally retirement in your late 40’s for Federal workers, and early 50s for state and local workers, means that for every working day of their life, we now have to support them at the same pay level in retirement for as long as they worked and longer. It is schedule doomed to failure and bankruptcy for the public sector. It is unsustainable. Add to that the expected 8% annual compounded growth of Tier 1 retirements, the ability for part time workers to get a full time job that lasts three years that will give them full time worker retirements (you see, annually, legislators moving from the legislature to an agency job at close to a six figure income, and that in three years will give them a state retirement benefit of more than they ever make working, from retirement to death.)

Oregon has to fix a problem, without a consensus to fix it. Add to that Mr. Veto, our new retread governor, and you do know that nothing, absolutely nothing, will come of this legislative session in 2011, and the ones to be held annually after. The influence and votes of those who are publicly employed are in the majority. It is their votes, the votes of the retired public employees, and their families, and all those who think that their lot in life is better when governments are handing out money and services that they really ought to be paying for themselves. But they can’t. Their low wage jobs won’t allow for that. But you cannot get high wage jobs to locate in a nanny state that wants to tax, tax, and tax some more. And then won’t allow natural resource business, and is saddled with over half the land in Federal hands, and not producing income. In fact, the lack of budget attention, and constant litigation has rendered the public lands to caretaker status, and the caretaker has no interest in paying the caretaker a decent wage, nor will it invest in infrastructure that will keep the present one intact. The whole of their budge is dedicated to tearing out things. Asset destruction.

I make it sound like economic recovery in Oregon is going to be tough, but I am understating the case. Under current national and state leadership, it is impossible.

The new jobs in the world go to the young who will work cheap. And the jobs lost in the world are those that involve older workers who come with expensive health and welfare, pension baggage, and high wages. Over 50, lose your job, and you are toast… done… through. Fries with that? Your job has fled to Asia. Or the other Americas. No matter, it is gone, never to return. Your government spending, and the cradle-to-grave entitlements were unsustainable, but politically supported, and the Feds borrowed to pay your cost. Now we pay $0.48 out of every dollar of Federal revenue on INTEREST ONLY on our debt. And then we do entitlements, like SSI, Medicaid, and Medicare, and we have $0.13 left to pay all the bills for defense, land management and caretaking, public roads, airports, seaways, and farm support. And that is not enough money so we borrow more. We be wipin’ our ass on a hoop and lookin’ for a place to grab it for the next round. No way, now, not to get you hands shitty.

Thank you, politicians. Our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren thank you. I do hope you rot in hell.

The interesting thing is that there is no way under the sun that Oregon’s bled-dry taxpayers can come up with $5 billion out of thin air. We don’t print money. If the Feds don’t bail us out, we are sunk.

Ditto CA, WA, and many of (all?) the other states. The only option is for the Feds to “monetize the debt”, which means print more fiat currency. That will cause runaway inflation, which appears to be inevitable no matter what.

But time has run out. It is unlikely Congress will act soon enough to prevent shutdown of Oregon’s state government and lay off of 90% of the state employees. The school system will collapse. No money to pay the teachers or, by extension, the teachers’ union.

Ta ta, P.E.’s. And don’t bother trying to collect unemployment. That well is dry, too.

The all state and local government PERS make up due to investments not producing is $1.1 Billion for the biennium. That is just hole filling. The investment gains are distributed immediately to pensioners, and any losses are made up by taxpayers. Heads they win. Tails we lose. Playground economics at work in Oregon.

The State Board of Forestry is interested in “stakeholder” opinion on the direction of State forest policy. That policy is so restrictive and micro managed now that diversity in industrial forestry is a joke. It is clear by age 40, Oust based herbicide and pile burning, and planting. No viable grass, forb or brush growth on the clear cut as it will oversprayed once after planting if there is a brush and grass regrowth threat. No real habitat in the reprod until maybe age 7 or 8. And then it is gone in 4 years max. And the monoculture of doug fir arises phoenix like from the clear cut, on its way to a fast and early clear cut interruption of the capitalization schedule. It is not the FPA now running that show. It is investor expectations over the three and four decades from one clear cut cycle to the next.

So, the effective truth of forest policy and regulation is that we have a perpetual juvenile stand of monocultural trees intensively managed because of investor expectations, and the reality of invested money needing to make an early and needed profit.

Most industrial forest land is tied one way or another to a conversion facility, a mill complex. But that 40% or more of Oregon private timber land that is noted as “small woodlands” is not connected in anyway to a milling facility, and logs from that land is opportunistic in that logs are only produced when the owner sees a favorable market, which does little to fund Oregon governments in times of economic distress. Those are the times when public timber should be cut and used to create jobs and cash flow for government. That is now a joke of vast possibility unrealized. Boom or bust by the demographics of land ownership. Certain bust in public timber appraised to standards with little fealty to the current market, and certain failure of availability of small woodlands timber due to distrust and depressed prices. So the dependable standard is the industrial timberlands that are managed like a carrot farm. Plant, spray, thin, harvest, spray, plant, spray, thin, harvest until urban needs claim the land for housing or “open space.”

Someone should post a map of Oregon in Wikipedia under the definition of “tits up.” And that we be. A floater in the river of ruin by those who think someone else should pay for their dinner. Done: as put a fork in it. Oregon: the state that falls of its bone. Put a fork in it. Oregon is done. There are now more tax dependents than there are tax originators. More people paying taxes on income that all comes from taxes and fees. Wipe your fanny on a hoop money. The law of diminishing returns. Over cropping, and depleted top soil of taxable money.