Taxpayers get the Shaft

There are two ways to buy property in Crested Butte, Colorado.

Buy it from a private party, and you can pay up to a million dollars an acre. Buy it from Uncle Sam, and you can pay only about $5.60 an acre -- if you're a big mining company.

Phelps Dodge bought 155 acres of taxpayer owned, mineral rich land just outside Crested Butte for just $875.

Over the next 11 years, they plan to make $158-million after taxes -- mining minerals that used to belong to you.

This is just one of hundreds of cases of companies getting great breaks to mine taxpayer owned land. The Environmental Working Group, a Washington based advocacy group, added up all the land out west sold off to mining companies at Old West prices. They found 5.6 million acres in 12 western states, sold for as little as 84-cents an acre.

It's thanks to the Mining Law of 1872. It gives big breaks to people and companies who stake a claim on public land. Meaning the taxpayers pad company profits and neighbors who'd like to open their land to mining face unfair competition.

Think about the folks who own mineral rich land next door. Don't you know Uncle Sam is driving down their property values with these bargain basement prices for land? Why buy from Joe Landowner, when Washington's giving away free gold, silver, copper, and whatnot?

And it's not just American companies. One in every five acres with a claim staked to it, belongs to foreign companies. Twenty percent. Ninety-four foreign companies from ten different countries control 1.2 million acres of public land.

As the old saying goes, they got the gold mine, taxpayers got the shaft.