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13 hours 37 min ago
Sabattis
I can offer a few points of speculation on this:
- The Federal budget process is very long and very opaque, from the time the President submit's his or her proposed budget to Congress in February, it is typically at least eight months, and often more, before a budget is actually passed. Plus, the intermediate steps to getting to that point involve a lot of parliamentary maneuvering, tons of long meetings, and plenty of spreadsheets - in ther words, budgets can be plenty boring.
- Budgets don't typically involve matters of principle. Two persons who are equally concerned about the Park System can very honestly reach two different numbers on recommended funding levels for the Park Service for next year. By contrast, this "Guns in Parks" issue has become a proxy battle for those people who wanted to ban most forms of guns and the various friends of the NRA. The "2nd Amendment" debate is perhaps the one of the longest-running debates on the Internet. *Of course* it generated a ton of traffic. (To say nothing of the fact that the Supreme Court had already pushed the issue to near the top of the national agenda for this year.)
- Most people recognize that one of the basic laws of economics is that "our needs are infinite, and our resources to meet those needs are finite." Everyone understands this in basic way when it comes to our household budgets - and it holds true of Federal budgets as well. The various members of Congress who set funding levels for the National Park Service (outside of NPS-generated revenues) are also hearing about the Nation's needs for:
- more highways and transit to relieve congestion in our cities
- more healthcare for the millions of uninsured in this country
- better classrooms for failing schools in rural areas and inner cities
- more research into alternative fuels, new cures for diseases, and basic science
- more safety inspections of imported consumer goods and health inspections of our food supply
And the list goes on. So the National Parks have to compete against all those funding priorities. Its a good fight - but its also anything but an easy one. And many honest people will set other priorities....