John Kerry says he wants to increase the Park Service budget by $600 million per year funded by "updating" the 1872 Mining Act. Just think of the incentives: Park Service officials will lobby hard for more mining on federal lands in order to increase their own budgets.

Aside from debate over the mining laws, the real problem with Kerry's proposal is that he thinks the national parks need more money. He obviously doesn't know that half the Park Service budget goes into administrative overhead.

Kerry points to a "$4.9 billion maintenance backlog (that) has grown to $6.8 billion." He obviously doesn't know that a huge portion of this "backlog" consists of employee housing. Why should the Park Service provide housing to employees when every park in the lower 48 states (not to mention Hawaii and most in Alaska) are within easy driving distance of private housing?

The Park Service is a classic example of the failure of socialized housing. The agency typically spends twice as much on construction and reconstruction as any private owner would pay, again partly because a huge percentage of the agency's "construction" budget is siphoned off into administrative overhead.

Unfortunately, Gale Norton defends the Bush Administration's record by pointing out that the Park Service has increased its budget by 20 percent since 2001. When are we going to stop measuring the success of bureaucracies by the growth of their budgets?

Sorry, Secretary Norton. No, thanks, Senator Kerry. The parks are better off with less money, not more.