The next poll is for the photo contest; see the post above...
| I like government-run parks, and I am willing to fund (choose 1+) of these programs to keep them. | |
| roads |  38 votes |
| defence |  16 votes |
| postal service |  36 votes |
| agricultural programs |  13 votes |
| oil and minerals exploration |  7 votes |
This poll was motivated by a memory of a conversation I had with a PhD economist a few years back. He said "I'm willing to pay for roads because I get parks as part of the package."
Let's take a look at the cost-benefit of that calculation using actual 2009 federal spending [1]:
National Park Service (Dept of Interior): $2.6 billion.
Roads (Dept of Transportation): $50 billion = 20x NPS.
Depts of Defense/Homeland Security: $688 billion = 265x NPS [2].
Postal Service: $3.8 billion = 1.5x NPS [3].
Agricultural Programs: $43 billion = 16.5x NPS [4].
From these examples, you may see the "opportunity cost" of your NPS.
Bottom Line: Government is not about trade-offs. The government should do some useful things without wasting our money on programs that can be done elsewhere or should not be done at all.
[1] Yes, I left off State parks. Sorry.
[2] That doesn't include intelligence spending, which is secret.
[3] The USPS is supposedly self-sustaining. It lost this much in 2009; see page 71 of this PDF.
[4] Excluding food stamps.
[5] That was a silly choice for the poll. The Minerals Management Service and the Office of Surface Mining have a total budget of $320 million. The US coal industry produced 1,170 million short tons worth $31/ton in 2008; the domestic oil industry produced about 2 billion barrels in 2009, worth about $60/bbl. Total revenues (ignoring natural gas, which is about 10-20% of oil) were therefore in the range of $155 billion, or 485x the budgets of MMS and OSM.
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