Molly Ivins August 3

AUSTIN — Now that the orgy of back-slapping is over in Washington, D.C. — what an epidemic of carpal tunnel syndrome that caused — we are at leisure to examine what wonders our bought-and-paid-for Congress has saddled us with this time. The Joint Committee on Taxation, operating under a new law, reported no fewer than 80 new tax breaks tailored for just a few individuals or businesses.

President Clinton can line-item-veto any of these suckers, but I'll give you odds that he doesn't touch the special deal Microsoft got to "encourage exports." Wouldn't want to put Bill Gates in the poorhouse.

Although it's interesting to study these "limited tax benefits" (i.e., a tax deduction, credit, exclusion or preference for 100 or fewer beneficiaries), the real damage is elsewhere in the tax bill. Our man, Bill Archer, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, engineered some truly impressive loopholes. I like the one that increases the tax exemption for income earned by American citizens living abroad; that's a little favor for oil company execs spending time in Saudi Arabia.

But the worst news is old news — bad old stuff we couldn't get rid of, even though it becomes more rancid by the year. In this category, I would particularly like to mention the $40 million-plus annual subsidy for building logging roads in the national forests, both because reformers came so close to getting rid of it (just two votes shy) and because this one is not just a waste of money — it does real damage.

According to The New York Times, we now have more than 380,000 miles of logging roads nationwide — enough to circle the globe 15 times, eight times the size of the interstate highway system. It is not uncommon to find 20 miles of logging road in a single square mile.

Last winter was unusually wet in the Pacific Northwest. The result was landslides all over caused by logging roads; five people died, spawning streams were ruined, water supplies were contaminated and the flooding was tremendously aggravated. According to David Bayles, conservation director of the Pacific Rivers Council, aerial surveys documented more than 650 landslides in February in Washington and Oregon alone. The stupidest and most dangerous practice is allowing logging roads on steep slopes — that's really asking for it.

You may ask yourself why the taxpayers are expected to pony up to build roads for profitable logging companies.

Well, you see, we build roads for the timber companies in order to stimulate the U.S. logging, paper and building industries. There's just one problem. A lot of U.S. logs get shipped overseas, mostly to Japan. We're actually subsidizing Japanese companies while doing terrible damage to our environment and not helping the U.S. job scene much except when it comes to cutting.

Start with the assumption that the U.S. Forest Service, a component of the Department of Agriculture, is simply an auxiliary branch of the timber industry and you'll pretty much have the picture of what's going on. Last winter, the Forest Service refused a bid at a timber auction from an environmentalist who wanted to save, not harvest, a stand of evergreens in the Okanogan National Forest in Washington. Instead, the Forest Service accepted a bid of $15,000 from a logging company that cut 3.5 million board-feet of lumber in that stand. Try to find a price like that at Home Depot.

For years Congress accepted the phony bookkeeping by the Forest Service that supposedly showed the country was making money by allowing logging in the national forests. Bull — we don't even get back costs. Not only do we pay for the logging roads, but after the timber companies have gone in and clear-cut all over, the government then replants the forests. This year, the White House Council of Economic Advisers did its own study and concluded that in 1995 (the last year reported), logging in the national forests actually cost the taxpayers $234 million. And they weren't counting the environmental damage.

All this so we can ship logs to Japan. Among the happy side effects of logging roads — along with your landslides, floods, destroyed streams, etc. — we find the following laundry list from the Wilderness Society:

— Increased wildfires, which, of course, we then pay to put out.

— Fragmentation of wildlife habitats. Many species will not cross roads, so the population is just as isolated as if separated by large cities.

— Ten acres of clear-cutting for every mile of road built.

— Degradation or elimination of habitats for species such as grizzly bears, wolves, wolverines and other large, wide-ranging predators, as well as deleterious affects on songbirds, elk, etc.

— Devastating impact on stream ecosystems and fish habitat.

— Tremendous increase in erosion.

— And much, much more.

That's $234 million a year plus horrendous environmental damage, and all of it a great help to the Japanese. But the timber companies are generous contributors to the campaign costs of our Western politicians.

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Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

COPYRIGHT 1997 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.