It has been suggested, before we got into the current bailout boondoggle anyway, that the US government could extinguish its debts and past entitlement promises by simply selling off the western states. With an accrual-basis calculated debt rising towards $60 T and real estate prices dropping, it's an open question of whether even this would still be sufficient.
I'm afraid that with a political system that encourages something-for-nothing and zero-pain benefits, the idea of selling something of value to pay for national debt is a complete non-starter.
This is the big question I've been pondering lately: will this economic madness create an inflection point in American cultural/political values leading to the idea that you can't spend more than you have? Clearly Washington has no plans to change yet: will the US have to go bankrupt before the lesson is learned?
This is a very big problem to address -- the idea of excessive consumerism is so deeply embedded into our social structure and mentality that it is hard to get away from even when you are conscious of it.
I drive a car made in 2002, which is kind of beat up (people hit me in parking lots and I dont repair dings/dents). The engine is working perfectly. But I regularly get comments from people asking me if I'm shopping for new cars. Its such a sin in some circles to have a 4+ year old car that these people think they are doing me a favor by reminding me its time to upgrade.
America is going to have to really come to a point of real peril before the attitudes of most people will switch. The good news, I suppose, is that if we arent there now, we will be soon.
Consumerism -- trading money for bigger and better things you probably don't need -- isn't that bad. What's bad is that politically we want things without having to trade anything at all for it. This leads to the attitude that the only reason we don't have things is because we haven't legislated it.
Many of those areas are mountainous infertile wasteland and forests that are mostly logged off. Shoulda just sold off the lower half of Manhattan last year ;-)
Very interesting that Texas, being the second largest state and the largest in the lower 48, has only 1.9 percent owned by the USG. If the theory that more private ownership leads to more wealth were true, it would be expected that TX would have fewer people living below the poverty line. A bit of research reveals that it actually has more -- statistically significant: 16.2 percent of its population lives below the poverty line compared to the 12.1 percent national average. Source: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/48000.html
Land isn't perfectly fungible -- in fact, one of the cornerstones of the tech startup world is that land near SF, CA or Boston, MA is worth many orders of magnitude more than land in eastern Iowa or western Texas for certain people.
There's very little value in preserving any particular acre of land in Iowa (0.8%) -- they're all essentially the same, and the one thing that land is good for is growing corn/soybeans. Likewise with TX, as far as I know it's roughly a gradient of drilling for oil in the west to ranch land in the east.
Unlike ranch land (generally uninteresting as park land) and farm land (crops would be destroyed by tourism), forest land (Washington state, and I assume a fair amount the mountainous portions of the other western states, as well) is a bit different in that the land can be used simultaneously as wood crop land and park space. On the east side of Seattle there are some large commercially owned forests that are legally obligated to provide public access for fishing, hunting, and mountain biking. You can achieve similar results with state ownership of the forest land and logging grants -- making the land valuable to hold as state (national) property.
I think the TX poverty issue could be attributed to the low-profit land not supporting much more than the people it takes to operate it. The overwhelming amount of said space probably overshadows the (moderately-)positive effects of the big cities.
Many national parks were at least partly rangeland for livestock. Think of Arches, Bryce, Zion, Joshua Tree, etc. I certainly think Texas and Iowa would be better off with more national parks. The original tall prairie grass ecosystem is mostly gone from the midwest. I'd like to see some of that.
Whoops -- 12.7 was the percentage statistic of persons in the USA living below the poverty line, not 12.1. NV, by contrast has 11.1 percent below the poverty line despite having 84.5 percent of its land area owned by the USG.
