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Article: How subsidies destroy the land. (federal subsidies for mining and agricultural use of land bring meager public revenues and environmental devastation)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- December 13, 1997
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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AS THE global-warming summiteers wend wearily home from Kyoto, Bill Clinton has been taking a pounding for being insufficiently eager to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. A better test of whether his administration is serious about environmental reform, or just willing to let Al Gore bore for America on the subject, is what it has done to phase out federal subsidies that actually encourage dead fish, foul air and denuded landscapes. On this, the record is patchy indeed.
Begin with mining subsidies, basically unchanged since 1872, when Congress wanted to encourage settlement of the West. Anyone who can identify a piece of federal land with hard-rock minerals in it-such ...