Your Tax Dollars At Work – The Use It, or Lose It Edition

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If you make money available to .gov bureaucrats, they will spend it, for fear you will take it away in the future. Report rips expensive decisions in California wildfire fight.

California wildfires have been on my mind since I ran across some videos that offered more information about the Camp Fire than I was getting from the media. (See my post on that at this link.)

This report covers a review of fire suppression efforts for a fire in Big Sur two years ago, known as the Soberanes Fire.

In the first week, the blaze destroyed 57 homes and killed a bulldozer operator, then moved into remote wilderness in the Los Padres National Forest. Yet for nearly three more months the attack barely let up.

The Soberanes Fire burned its way into the record books, costing $262 million as the most expensive wildland firefight in U.S. history in what a new report calls an “extreme example of excessive, unaccountable, budget-busting suppression spending.”

You should fight to save lives, homes and infrastructure, but should you continue to spend at the same rate when none of that is at risk?

Also, you couldn’t possibly spend some of the 260 million dollars on forest management, because that is a different department. (Let them get their own budget!)

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. – P. J. O’Rourke