Camping & Language

Now be honest, is that really true?

There’s been a fair amount of consternation and grumbling around my community because the State, specifically the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, is closing down some popular campgrounds.

Due to budget cuts.

The State faced a budget crisis this year, and there just isn’t enough money to keep them open.

That’s the word from the Capitol anyway.

1959 Apache Chief

Recently I was listening to the Governor of California speak about his opposition to that State’s proposed “Billionaire’s Tax.” He explained that he was opposed to this tax because in America, with our Federal system, people can easily move. And he’s right. When it’s done to escape onerous taxation or regulation it even has a name, ‘capital flight.’ Pass an extreme tax on billionaires and the billionaires will just move to a place where that tax doesn’t exist.

We all can choose the State in which we live.

But we don’t choose, I don’t think, simply for economic reasons. Certainly if everyone wanted to live where everything is affordable, New York City would be a ghost town. It’s not. People choose to live there despite the high costs of doing so because there are things about the City that they love. Things about the City that draw them and hold them.

Here in Washington State one of the strongest pulls we have is outdoor recreation. People who live here choose to do so, at least partly, because of our State’s extreme natural beauty, its vast public lands, and the ability to explore those lands.

My own home illustrates this pretty well I think. I can jump in my car and in about an hour be in the Cascade Mountains, sitting at the base of the most spectacular mountain in the Continental United States. Or I can head in the opposite direction and in about an hour be sitting on a vast and sandy Pacific Ocean beach. If I get a hankering for the urban instead, in about an hour my car will get me to either Seattle or Portland, Oregon. We’ve got options. I’d argue that we’ve got easy options not replicated in very many other places in the world.

And outdoor recreation is a massive draw for smart and energetic people to want to live here. It always has been. Hunting, fishing, camping, mountaineering, backpacking, hiking. Our public lands offer vast opportunity for all of these things and more.

But the State had to close some popular campgrounds this year. Due to the budget crisis and budget cuts.

Or so the story goes. And so the story is believed, at least by all of those people who don’t pay much attention.

The trouble is, the story just isn’t true.

The truth is that Washington State is spending vast numbers of more dollars in the next biennium than it spent in the last biennium. It has been like that for many years now. Indeed Washington State spending has doubled in just a few short years. There hasn’t been any budget crisis, and there certainly haven’t been any budget cuts.

What there has been is a reprioritization of spending.

If one drives around our State Capitol, and the three small cities that surround it, one will see gleaming new office buildings. Beautiful new buildings filled with State Offices. People work in those buildings. Bureaucrats work in those buildings. What do they do all day? Who knows. What we do know is that there are more and more of them each and every year.

The other thing we know is that campgrounds had to be closed so that more and more of these bureaucrats can be employed. That one of the primary reasons why people want to live in Washington State was disregarded so that more bureaucrats could do busywork that has a positive impact for no one.

It is all just a distortion of language. Spending more next year than last year is not a budget cut. But it is pawned off as such on a largely uninformed public that does not see the truth that it is simply a shifting of priorities. Campgrounds are of course a little thing in the scheme of things. But this has happened, and continues to happen, across the entire State Budget, touching everything the State does, or attempts to do.

We had another interesting such distortion this week. Elected leaders of our State’s government were making a big show of ‘the largest small business tax cut in State history’ or some such nonsense.

And nonsense it is. Last year Washington State passed massive tax increases. This year Washington State passed more massive tax increases. The tax burden, for a small group of taxpayers, small business owners, was shifted from their business balance sheet to their personal balance sheet. People won’t be paying less, they will be paying in a different way. Taxes were increased on a massive scale, not cut. But this distortion of language stands.

We see this distortion throughout government. If we listen to the Federal Government it seems that we have decisively defeated the nation of Iran in war about a dozen times over these past weeks. I heard just again yesterday that Iran’s entire navy rests at the bottom of the sea. Yet for some reason an utterly defeated Iran, a nation with no navy, manages to disrupt worldwide maritime shipping. A distortion of language.

Long ago George Orwell warned us about this distortion of language in his excellent book “1984.” He painted an extreme picture with censorship reaching back in time, and the destruction of words. We don’t see that in our time, but we do see distortion of language on a broad scale. If we hope to thrive as a society, we can’t allow that, because solving problems first requires that those problems be seen clearly.