Originally published at: $100m gift to the National Park Service is "transformative" - Boing Boing
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The National Parks System is sometimes described as “America’s best idea” (a term coined by that Ken Burns miniseries?) and I think that the answer to keep it going strong is pretty simple: just keep paying for it with taxes. It’s one part of the Federal Budget that’s totally worth it!
And FWIW the annual parks budget is currently about $3.1 billion, so this donation from Big Pharma would be about 3% of that. Welcome funding that I hope will be put to good use, but when was the last time that a 3% budget increase was considered to be “transformative?” And if that gift comes with any strings attached, such as signage saying “made possible by a generous grant from…” then the government should say “thanks but no thanks.” The National Parks belong to all of us and we should never come to rely on the largesse of corporate donors in order to enjoy them.
Edit to add: you know what really would be transformative? Taxing companies like Eli Lilly appropriately and actually making them pay what they owe. The elaborate tax avoidance shenanigans that Eli Lilly has engaged in has cost the US Treasury billions, so excuse me for failing to be impressed with this $100M “gift.”
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Yeah. “Tesla State Park” just doesn’t sound all that appealing. The opposite, really.
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It’s a bit silly how we don’t spend much on parks in the US. I remember going to a cave in the Ozarks in Missouri. I think it was a state park, but they had this cool feature with water coming in, and the guide/ranger was saying they aren’t really sure where the water was coming from. They got the budget one year for some dye to do some tests, but it didn’t materialize in the cave. I can’t remember how much it was, but something like $500 or $800 to do it. And I remember thinking, “That’s not a lot. Why not give these guys more money for this kind of thing??”
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A quick google says that Lilly had a net income of 2.9 BILLION dollars, for just one quarter of this year.
A 100 million gift is a lovely thing.
Rough brain math says that’s 3.7% of the quarterly income, or 0.85 percent of their yearly.
it is, however, more than they paid their CEO.
So even a 1% tax would yield more than this, from ONE company only, in One year only.
Imagine if we had a National Parks National Tax rate of 1/4 % on large companies.
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And thanks to their financial shenanigans that number is basically pure fiction. Their gross profits (not income) for 2023 was $27B. (How can gross profit possibly be higher than net income, you ask? That’s what they pay an army of expensive accountants to figure out!)
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$100 M to the National Parks is wonderful. So wonderful in fact that we should tax Eli Lilly and other companies enough that the government can give the parks whatever they need.
This is true even if the philanthropy is helpful and not just some personal Zucker Trust meant to hide wealth:
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I look forward to the day when I never see another ‘sponsored by’ or ‘supported by donations from’ PR fluff statement designed to whitewash the reputations of rapacious corporations, and instead I see all their marketing materials saying “Z Corp is a proud taxpayer. Last year we paid $nnnn to the US [insert country of choice] government in taxes, to support the things you and your elected representatives think are important.”
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It better be not like the London Museum 's new logo!
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