Plum Deal or Prune Job
Sen. Max Baucus (D-MN) happily announced that Congress passed what the National Taxpayers Union has called the “bloated farm bill” in a letter to President Bush urging him to veto the bill. What you may not know is just how bloated the bill is.
David Freddoso, reporting for National Review Online provides this example of “a plum deal for Plum Creek Timber.” Last Monday, he wrote:
“But this year’s farm bill contains a special-interest provision you’ve probably never heard of — the Qualified Forestry Bonds program. This provides federally funded tax-credit bonds for forest purchases that meet the following four criteria:
- The forest must be adjacent to U.S. Forest Service Land;
- Half of the parcel must be turned over to the U.S. Forest Service;
- It must include at least 40,000 total acres; and
- It must be subject to a “native fish habitat conservation plan approved by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.
‘Your initial reaction might be, “What’s so bad about that?” The government does far more damaging things than forest-land preservation, after all. But this farm-bill provision offers a lesson on how things are sometimes done in Washington. Only one parcel of land in the entire United States meets the criteria set for the Qualified Forestry Bonds program.” (emphasis added)
Who owns that parcel of land? The answer: “Plum Creek Timber Company, the single largest private landowner in the United States,” which “began its corporate life in 1987 as Burlington Resources, spinning off of Burlington Northern to manage the railroad giant’s timber and mineral resources — some of which date back to the original railroad land grants of the Lincoln administration.” The following paragraph from Freddoso’s column is worth noting although it won’t be a surprise:
“Plum Creek spent some $220,000 lobbying Congress in the first quarter of this year. Its PAC has spread $400,000 in campaign contributions between the parties in the last decade. PCL Employees have given $16,600 this cycle to Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance committee and the author of the bond provision. Baucus, whose staff did not answer inquiries, was enthusiastic enough about the forestry bonds that he put them into the Farm Bill (H.R. 2419), though they have nothing to do with agriculture. The bonds also didn’t have anything to do with energy when Baucus put them in last year’s energy bill.”
Thank you David Freddoso, and a HT to Coyote Blog for alerting the public about the NRO column. Express yourself about this outrageous abuse of taxpayers by using the following link to write to:
Sen. Max Baucus