Posted on 03/12/2017 5:06:16 AM PDT by vooch
Federal Gov't owns about 750 million acres of land ( excluding Alaska ). Much of this land is low value, but a surprising amount is in high value areas.
If the Feds sold off 1/2 their property at average price of $50,000 per acre that would generate about $20 trillion. This would be enough to retire the entire national debt.
What are Freepers thoughts' ?
$50,000 and acre for undeveloped land????????? Won't be going to any of your garage sales ;-)
Once upon a time there was a kingdom in which the king promised to provide a trust for the elderly if they gave him a share of the money they earned all their lives. It seemed a pretty good idea at the time and, since the king demanded it, the people went along.
The people were industrious and flourished in spite of the confiscated money. Meanwhile, the king spent every penny that came into the trust. Some was spent on providing for the elderly that had not had time to chip into the trust but this showed good faith and what life would be like for the others when they retired. Most, however, was squandered by the king on a lavish life style.
Eventually the people grew old and wished to receive the benefits they had been purchasing all of their lives. They approached the king and asked for their just rewards. The king told them “There is no money. I spent it on more important things.” “Besides, you have been warned that we had already spent the money – why did you not provide for your own retirement? I cannot be bothered with your poverty. Go! Go and live on turnips and cat food for all I care.”
So, the people left, grumbling. “The king lives large, he has vast holdings of land and other things of untold value, more than enough to make us whole.” “Yes, and most of that stuff he neither needs nor should be allowed to own.” “You’re right!” “I think the king needs to hold a garage sale and give me my money.”
So the good people stormed the castle and sold or took what was rightly theirs. They also forced the king to stop robbing their children as he had robbed them and they all lived happily ever after except for the king who, having been used to arugula and Wagyu beef, didn’t like living on turnips and cat food. The end.
I'm for it if they sell the land I'm on, to Switzerland.
While I don't trust the individual states to be intelligent to find an actual use for land (I live in Illinois, so I have no real-world role model for an actual functional state government to draw from) I do trust that the states could find better use than the feds.
Sounds like robbing the balance sheet to pad the income statement.
That is correct, also Postal Roads are authorized.
maybe $50,000 a hectare, sold by the acre.
We don’t want it sold to the Chinese, we want plain old Americans (or fancy young Americans) to buy it.
Almost ALL federal land should be sold to US citizens.
Fedgov would simply rack up the debt again.
++++
Unfortunately TRUE. And a highly insightful observation.
Sell it all to the Chinese and Saudis then take it back with eminent domain.
Remember the reason for these "temporary" near-zero interest rates? GWB said with low interest rates, the gov could pay off debt. How has that worked for us?
Beat me to it. And truer words were never spoken. Not to mention the unfunded liabilities dwarf the acknowledged debt.
You’d have to stagger the inventory if you didn’t want oversupply to push down prices too much.
That was the original premise that allowed us to borrow this much to start with.
It will all be sold to foreign interests if you do. The Chinese and the Middle East already own a staggering amount of our land.
Whole bunch of property worth considerably more than that per acre.
We could lease naming right to pay off a ton of debt:
The Grand Canyon, presented by Exxon Mobil.
not a bad idea because obviously our own government can manage it well enough to keep it in the black. Of course, I bet it will cost more to mail letters and packages from now own. And make sure the "investors" are American...
Since California is considering no taxes for teachers, why not charge foreigners higher property taxes?
No. We would just run up another debt.
The feds didn't confiscate State lands. After ratification of the Constitution, the original 13 states ceded their trans-Appalachian land claims to the federal government. Had they not done so -- and had we still been Europeans -- Virginia, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, and others would still be fighting wars over who owned which mountaintop or swamp in what is today Tennessee or Ohio, because several of those old British crown grants overlapped. But the cessation was made, and at a stroke everything from the crest of the Appalachians to the Mississippi became federal lands, with new states to be carved out of it as the west was settled.
The country then expanded via the Louisiana Purchase, the purchase of Florida from Spain, the seizure of the southwest and California from Mexico, the settlement with Great Britain in the Pacific Northwest, and the purchase of Alaska. ALL of these lands entered the Union as federal lands.
The only exceptions to this rule were Texas and Hawaii, both of which were independent republics before joining the Union.
And the federal government did NOT cede all lands to new states upon the creation of the states. This is a common error, widely believed by some modern state lands advocates who do not read their history. The federal government made large land grants to new states for several public purposes, but it retained the rest and ran federal land offices to sell land to new settlers. This was an important source of federal revenue in the early federal period. Later on, Abraham Lincoln and the first Republican Congress passed the Homestead Act to give federal lands to new settlers; the key here, for our purposes, is to note that they were dispensing federal, not state, lands. The issue that troubles us today is that federal policy changed in the late 19th century, as the frontier reached the desert and mountain west, most of it unsuitable for agriculture. Congress found itself selling federal lands not to sturdy yeoman farmers/homesteaders, but to large timber and mining companies. The policy changed, and the feds retained large holdings in the western states.
Put it this way: the Constitution and the federal government were creations of the first 13 states. Thirty-five of the remaining 37 states were creations of the federal government, having begun life as federal territories. Texas and Hawaii, again, are the exceptions.
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