The “one big, beautiful bill” received a draft proposal last week from the Republican Utah Senator Mike Lee-led Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which would mandate the sale of between 2.2 million and 3.3 million acres of public land owned by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service in the American West.
While Lee has framed the proposal as a means to increase affordable housing, critics claim it would do little to aid in the housing crisis and instead would just bar the public from beautiful land they now still can enjoy.
Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck doesn’t share their critique.
“What we mean by ‘affordable housing’ is if you take a look at the percentage of land that is owned in some of these states, you can’t live in a house in some of these states, close to anything, for less than a million dollars. Because there’s no land,” Glenn explains on “The Glenn Beck Program.”
“Can we just look at the perspective here? The federal government owns 640 million acres. That is nearly 28% of all land in America. How much land do we have? Well, that’s about the size of France, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom combined,” he continues.
“They own and hold pristine land that is more than the size of those countries combined, and most of that is west of the Mississippi, where the federal control smothers the states, shuts down opportunity, and turns local citizens into tenants of the federal estate,” he adds.
With less land available for citizens, there are higher prices and less state taxes paid on land.
“We’re not talking about selling Yellowstone or paving over Yosemite or anything like that. We’re talking about less than one-half of one percent of federal land that is remote, hard to access, or mismanaged,” Glenn says.
“This is really important,” he continues. “The federal government is, what, $35 trillion in debt, or are we $45 trillion now? I’m not sure. Our entitlement programs are all strained, infrastructure crumbling, and yet we’re still clinging to millions of acres of land that the federal government can’t maintain.”
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