Why fund forests, parks, and other public lands out of their net income?
Whether they work for private companies or for the public, managers always tend to maximize their budgets. Managers funded out of their gross income would try to avoid earning a profit because they would fear that someone would take their profits away from them. This means that they would use any profits they earn from one activity to subsidize some other activity. Such cross-subsidies would almost always be bad for the environment and would lead to overdevelopment of the public lands.
