Subject: RE: Fees
Date: Nov 7 09:03:47 1994
From: Hal Opperman - halop at continuum.com



I'm all for the suggestion that existing taxes be redistributed to favor
non-hunting wildlife recreation such as birding, as several posts have
suggested. Problem is, how do we get those taxes redistributed the way we
want them? The answer is legislative muscle, and birders as a group (so
far) ain't got much. Where does the money come from to pay the lobbyists
who fight to maintain the status quo for public land use? From interest
groups who pony up. Not all interest groups are composed of users, though.
Many of the most powerful are in fact producers (e.g., the tobacco
industry, the dairy industry, the timber industry, the mining industry,
manufacturers of firearms and ORVs). They, not the government, "tax" their
users through the prices they charge, and they dedicate a portion of their
profits to ... lobbying. Maybe we birders should take a look at all the
money we spend to pursue our avocation, break it down by categories, and
figure out who are the principal beneficiaries of our largesse. Then we
could remind these businesses what good customers we are, and begin to form
a coalition that might actually make itself heard by lawmakers.

I suspect, though, that when we do add up our expenditures, we will find
that it's not the bird books and the optics that account for the bulk of
what we lay out. Sure, a good scope is expensive, but that's not an
everyday purchase -- and how many useful bird books are there, anyway? I
think our money goes mostly for getting there. Birding did not really take
off as a popular, widespread phenomenon until dependable and relatively
inexpensive transportation became available to all. It's the automobile
that has made birding possible, and revenue generated from auto-related
taxes that has built the incredible systems of roads that give us access to
practically any place in the United States we want to go. All of this has
been forwarded by irresistible pressure for decades from the highway lobby
-- big oil, heavy construction (contractors, labor, suppliers, equipment
manufacturers) and Detroit. What have those guys done for us lately?
Except keep on lobbying to use our taxes to build more roads to subsidize
exploitation of natural resources, fragmentation of what little habit
remains and -- eventually -- development? And, incidentally, allow birders
to easily spend a day in once-remote areas and be back home at night to
sleep comfortably in their own beds?

I have the nagging suspicion that the profits on something like four out of
every five dollars we spend birding eventually end up in the hands of
business people who don't care a fig for managing wildlife habitat for the
likes of us. To say the least, it's going to be a challenge to get a
hearing from them. But that's where our money is going, and if we're going
to call the tune, the piper's got to know who's paying.