Forbes Billionaires Top US Welfare Ranchers List

[Sunlei]

Forbes Billionaires Top US Welfare Ranchers List
March 25, 2015 by Vickery Eckhoff

The Koch brothers, Ted Turner, the Hilton family and nine other powerful ranchers share an uncommon privilege: giant public subsidies, unknown to U.S. taxpayers. It’s the other side of the Cliven Bundy story, the other side of the Wright brothers saga—the bronc-riding, ranching family at the center of the New York Times photographic essay published March 11, 2015. It’s also the other side of the ongoing news feed in which ranchers work to remove wild horses from public lands.

The .01 percenters are the nation’s biggest welfare ranchers, according to numerous environmental and policy groups; and it’s time they brought some attention to themselves and the federal grazing program they’re exploiting to the tune of an annual estimated one billion dollars in taxpayer subsidies while causing long-term damage to one of the public’s most treasured assets.

Fifteen years ago, two percent of public lands ranchers controlled fifty percent of permitted grazing acreage , according to John Horning, Executive Director of WildEarth Guardians. Today, Horning says, that elite group of mega-rich owners has consolidated its hold on federal grazing property even further through grazing leases attached to the larger-than-life ranches they inherit or buy outright.

Along with that comes all kinds of perks paid for by taxpayers: the USDA’s wildlife services, which killed four million endangered and predator species in 2013 to help livestock operators. The costly and wildly ineffective Wild Horses and Burros Program which operates to the benefit of welfare ranchers. Numerous programs that work to undo the grazing damage that welfare livestock causes. And let’s not forget the bank loans that an estimated 45% of public lands ranchers obtain, using their grazing leases as collateral, and which heighten the value of their primary ranching property. Only 2.7 percent of the nation’s ranchers hold such leases.

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[Sunlei]

1. I want to show their names! David and Charles Koch (Koch Industries)

The brothers hold a half-dozen grazing permits on public land in Montana to go with its 300,000-acre Matador Ranch there. The brothers are tied for fourth place on Forbes 2014 400 Richest People in America list (net worth: $ 42 billion each). The Koch family ($ 89 billion) is #2 on Forbes Richest Families list; Koch Industries is #2 on Forbes America's Largest Private Companies list, ($ 115 billion in sales).

[Sunlei]

2. and another welfare king! J.R. Simplot Corp.

The largest U.S. public lands ranching entity (with an estimated 2 to 3 million acres of allotments in CA, ID, NV, OR and UT) is #63 on Forbes 2014 list of America's Largest Private Companies ($ 5.8 billion in sales). In 2014, the family was #29 on Forbes list of America’s Richest Families (net worth: $ 8 billion).

[Downwinder]

3. Forget Welfare Queens, we have true Welfare Kings.

Bundy is a piker.

[Thinkingabout]

4. The SNAP gets cut, these guys collect more, smart huh.

[Sunlei]

5. & another top-leech of Americans public lands & Federal money= Bruce McCaw (McCaw Cellular)

McCaw was #382 on Forbes 400 list of America’s Richest People in 2005 (net worth: $ 925 million). Through his 9 sprawling ranches, he controls a significant number of public grazing leases in ID and possibly NV. One of them (Camas Creek ranch) includes 272,000 acres of Federal grazing allotments in Idaho's Camas Prairie. Grazing permitted to his other ranches could easily double or triple that to a million acres or more.

[Doctor_J]

6. The billionaires cover all the bases

[erronis]

7. And which of our favorite presidential candidates is going to do anything about this?

Pissing into the wind is rarely a successful strategy.

[Thespian2]

8. I Guess

that the total number will be...0!

[Dustlawyer]

9. They own most of the Presidential candidates as well as most of Congress, courts, state houses...

We need Publicly Funded Elections! End of story!