Bush Cuts Taxpayers Out of Return on Our Assets

As taxpayers, the least we should all hope for is that taxpayer-owned property isn't just given away to already-wealthy corporations, with no return for the public. But a major new report from the New York Times says that's exactly what's happening with taxpayer-owned minerals on federal land, thanks to the Bush administration.

Here are the key excerpts:

"At a time when energy prices and industry profits are soaring, the federal government collected little more money last year than it did five years ago from the companies that extracted more than $60 billion in oil and gas from publicly owned lands and coastal waters. If royalty payments in fiscal 2005 for natural gas had risen in step with market prices, the government would have received about $700 million more than it actually did, a three-month investigation by The New York Times has found...As a result, the nation's taxpayers, collectively, the biggest owner of American oil and gas reserves, have missed much of the recent energy bonanza....The disparities in gas prices parallel those uncovered just five years ago in a wave of scandals involving royalty payments for oil. From 1998 to 2001, a dozen major companies, while admitting no wrongdoing, paid a total of $438 million to settle charges that they had fraudulently understated their sale prices for oil. Since then, the government has tightened its rules for oil payments. But with natural gas, the Bush administration recently loosened the rules and eased its audits intended to uncover cheating."

This stands in stark contrast to states like Wyoming who have tried to make sure the energy price boom helps the public - and not just the private profiteers. The state has used its taxpayer-owned minerals to build up a massive surplus that can be used on key public priorities like small business infrastructure development and education. And unlike the Bush administration and the energy industry cronies who now oversee all of this as federal regulators, Wyoming is actually looking to increase the benefits to taxpayers by tightening its mineral tax structure even further.

So we see two contrasting ways of governing. One, is the Bush model, where loosening enforcement and handing over huge swaths of public assets to private industry means no real gains for taxpayers. The other is the Wyoming model, where the state sees taxpayer-owned assets as a way to build revenue for taxpayers - revenue that can be used not to enrich energy executives, but to enrich the state's communities. Which would you choose?