The federal government has terrible, massive debt, but local schools want to keep receiving funds paid for not harvesting timber. Some members of Congress do not want to renew the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act which, like all government programs these days, has a self-explanatory title. (Hint: Words mean their opposites, but you can ignore them altogether. All federal programs grow government, increase the national debt, and strengthen personal dependencies on said rackets.)

Historically, in 1911, Congress agreed National Forests put local communities at a disadvantage because they could not collect revenue from the acreage. (Pay no attention to the fact that the deer and the turtles were not organized enough to demand public schools, city water, trash collection – or even economic development incentives. What’s more, the bears and the owls didn’t mind being left out of student-to-teacher ratio calculations. From the magnitude of their truancy rates, one might conclude all the woodland animals were boycotting the schools.) So, the federal government agreed to compensate local governments at a rate of 25% of revenues collected from commercial activities on the protected lands.

According to Joel Yelverton, a consultant for the Partnership for Rural America Campaign, the 25-percent arrangement worked very well for many years, supporting education, infrastructure and economic development in rural communities which needed it the most. However, in the late 1980s and 1990s, the country saw a tremendous decline in timber harvests, due in part to the increased emphasis on conservation, endangered species protection and ecosystem restoration.

That gave birth to the SRSCA. (Don’t ask why “Self-Determination” has no representation in the acronym.)

The Partnership for Rural America Campaign estimates that if SRSCA were to expire, it would mean a loss of nearly $440 million and 11,000 jobs nationwide. Funding to North Carolina would decline by 82 percent, from $2.54 million in 2008 to $446,374 in 2012—a loss of almost $2.1 million.