America's Gold Giveaway

Budget Watchdog All Federal

In this episode, we explore the inexplicable gold giveaway that the 18th President of the United States signed into law to incentives the development of the west. Ulysses S. Grant signed the General Mining Law of 1872 into law. He thereby set the royalty rate on the sale of publicly owned minerals like gold, silver, copper, and uranium at ZERO. That’s right, ZERO. This outdated and still operable law continues to allow precious metals to be mined and profited from without compensation to the resource owners, federal taxpayers. So how much lost taxpayer revenue are we talking about? Over the last decade … approximately two billion dollars. Joining Steve Ellis to dig deeper is TCS Research & Data Analyst, Mia Huang and TCS Vice President Autumn Hanna.