Comment on Anon tries to understand his coworker
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 18 hours agoThere’s no profit here, it’s just a different form of taxation where the users of a service pay more for its upkeep than those who don’t use it. The only time a private org gets involved is if you make a reservation (and even then, many sites use a government agency) or arrange for a guided tour or something.
Everything here is publicly owned, except maybe the handful of hotels that are operated inside Yellowstone (not sure how those work). So whether you’re paying with income tax or park fees isn’t particularly relevant since it’s all federal or state land.
Dasus@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
I meant “profit” in the sense of that profit being the taxation. As in, people walking around the park don’t actually cost anything to anyone, so it is profit when you charge people to walk around, but the people wouldn’t be able to come there in the first place where there not the infrastructure which is upheld by said profit.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
Well, they do. They leave litter, destroy trails, vandalize formations, etc. Keeping things nice takes a lot of work, especially with how much foot traffic these parks get. Yellowstone gets over 4 million visitors every year, and that’s with the park fees, quotas, etc. Glacier is a bit less popular and still gets around 3 million visitors every year.
National and State parks are funded with both income taxes and park fees. Park fees keep the number of visitors down to a manageable level to preserve the natural beauty.
And walk-ins generally don’t need to pay, though some of the larger parks also have walk-in rates.
Dasus@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
OK yeah I’ll admit cleaning up after shitheads does cost, and probably a fair amount because of how famous those places are. (So it’s very much non-locals most of the time, I’d wager.)
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
Yup. The annual visitors to Yellowstone and Glacier is like 4x higher than the total populations of their respective states. I would be surprised if even 5% of yearly visitors come from the state they’re in, and I bet more than half are from outside the country.