Trump should protect national monuments

President Donald Trump has taken a monumentally bad idea and made it worse by shrouding it in secrecy.

The president should let go of his misguided notion that reducing the size of three or more national monuments would benefit the nation by opening them up to logging, grazing and oil and gas drilling.

The potential damage to national treasures is immense, while the economic gains are seen by a majority of economists as minimal, at best.

Four months ago Trump asked Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to review more than two dozen national monuments. Zinke floated the idea and opened it for public comment.

Nearly 3 million Americans told the White House what they thought of it: 99.2 percent were strongly opposed.

Zinke and Trump have no valid case for shrinking national monuments.

The Antiquities Act of 1906, signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt, was specifically designed to protect public land from commercial exploitation. Since then, presidents from both parties have designated 200 national monuments.

Trump sees this as a “massive federal land grab” and says “it’s time to end these abuses and return control to the people.”

“The people” in this case means business and industry. The actual public will lose the benefits of the land opened for exploitation.

At the top of the list of monuments Zinke recommends downsizing is the Bears Ears National Monument, home to cliff dwellings, prehistoric villages and rock art panels of ancestral Pueblo Indians in Utah. The other two are Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument.

All three of the national monuments that Zinke wants to shrink are breathtaking in their beauty. his agenda, this vagueness gave way to sophistication. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said lower tax rates for the rich should be accompanied by elimination of many deductions and dodges used to avoid paying income taxes. He called a simpler tax code — not lower rates — the key to boosting growth. Given how byzantine U.S. tax policies have led companies to park $2 trillion in profits overseas — funds that could be powering growth in America — Mnuchin has a strong case.

So when the president gave a speech on tax policy Wednesday, he called for eliminating “loopholes and complexity that primarily benefit the wealthiest Americans and special interests.” But his main emphasis was on cutting corporate tax rates at a time of record corporate profits — not on helping individual Americans. The criticism from Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York — that Trump’s proposed changes should focus on helping the middle class, not the 1 percent — is valid.

Yet a simpler, fairer tax code — one that encourages economic growth — might still emerge when the dust settles.