The Games People Play

UPDATED

We are in yet another round of our ongoing and seemingly never ending kabuki theatre regarding budgets (for prior chapters see The Fiscal UnCliff, Wile E Coyote On Our Financial Future, Dogs and Cats Living Together and More On Dogs and Cats).

National Parks, Forests and Monuments seem to be the chosen ground for showing the terrible impact of the current stalemate.  Warren Meyer, who operates Coyote Blog and owns a small business providing services in public parks, reports on the Obama Administration's latest maneuver; from his letter to his Arizona representatives in Congress:

My company, based in North Phoenix, operates over 100 US Forest Service campgrounds and day use areas under concession contract. Yesterday, as in all past government shutdowns, the Department of Agriculture and US Forest Service confirmed we would stay open during the government shutdown. This makes total sense, since our operations are self-sufficient (we are fully funded by user fees at the gate), we get no federal funds, we employ no government workers on these sites, and we actually pay rent into the Treasury.

However, today, we have been told by senior member of the US Forest Service and Department of Agriculture that people “above the department”, which I presume means the White House, plan to order the Forest Service to needlessly and illegally close all private operations. I can only assume their intention is to artificially increase the cost of the shutdown as some sort of political ploy.

The point of the shutdown is to close non-essential operations that require Federal money and manpower to stay open. So why is the White House closing private operations that require no government money to keep open and actually pay a percentage of their gate revenues back to the Treasury?

This comes on top of the bizarre Administration decision to restrict access to the monuments on the Washington Mall, prompting a group of aged WWII veterans to re-enact the D-Day landings.

UPDATED

More on the phony closure of open access monuments.  I believe the government is in the process of seeking a people more worthy of it.