FOREST TAXATION IN THE UNITED STATES 293 
which would determine the estimates for all local services and establish a single 
tax levy for supplying the funds. 
While the overlapping of taxing districts is more aggravated in 
metropolitan areas, it exists also in agricultural and forest areas. 
In Oregon and Washington, for example, forest lands are sometimes 
subject to two or three special district taxes in addition to the State, 
county, and school district taxes. There are port districts, dike 
districts, fire-protection districts, road districts, and various other 
kinds of special districts. 
Granting that the creation of special tax districts is sometimes the 
only means of distributing equitably the costs of a service benefitting 
a limited constituency, it is also true that the ease with which they 
have been created and the freedom which they have enjoyed in 
handling their funds have invited very great abuses and have con- 
tributed materially to heavy taxation in many rural areas. 
ECONOMICAL ORGANIZATION FOR SPARSELY SETTLED REGIONS 
THE SITUATION IN GENERAL 
It has been shown that the prevailing system of rural local govern- 
ment in the United States is needlessly decentralized and overmanned 
in the agricultural regions and even more in the forest and cut-over 
regions of sparse population. Instead of varying the size and charac- 
ter of local governmental units to fit different types of economic 
development and different population densities, the same pattern 
has generally been applied to an entire State. At least, when a 
political organization has once been set up, it has remained unchanged 
regardless of subsequent economic changes. ‘Thus county and town- 
ship governments have been perpetuated even after these jurisdictions 
have become completely covered by a city. On the other hand, 
they have been perpetuated in areas which have become almost com- 
pletely depopulated. Naturally it is their survival under this latter 
condition which chiefly affects the taxation of forest land and deserves 
consideration at this point. 
In the Lake States, and to a less extent in other States, there are 
school districts, townships, and even whole counties which consist 
largely of cut-over land. They contain only scattered farms, many 
of which have been abandoned, with scattered villages, declining in 
population, trade, and wealth. Because of a limited and shrinking 
tax base, the tax rate is extremely burdensome. ‘The burden does 
not rest on forest land alone, but on all property within the taxing 
districts where these adverse economic conditions prevail. 
The laissez-faire policy which has pretty generally prevailed until 
recently has been to let the tax rate increase as the tax base decreases, 
driving one taxpayer after another into delinquency. This system 
compels the solvent to carry the burden of the insolvent, even though 
the solvent taxpayers may be paying their taxes out of capital assets 
or out of income earned outside the district. 
Even though progressive delinquency and abandonment lead to a 
reduction in population, the reduction in governmental expenditures 
is not usually so rapid as the decline in the tax base. It costs practi- 
cally as much to operate a school with 10 pupils as it does to operate 
one with 25 pupils. It may not be possible to close a single road, even 
though half of the farms are abandoned. The overhead costs of 
