At the bottom of the article it states there’s a 15% royalty on oil etc and that there’s 2-3 billion USD of minerals produced from federal land annually. There’s also 11.36 million acres claimed with a $165 annual maintenance fee per acre for a total gov revenue of $1.875 billion not including the higher first-year claim fees. If there were no oil/gas/coal/fuel extraction on claimed lands, the effective royalty garnered by this system would be in excess of 50% (1.875/[2 to 3 billion]). More data — specially on annual fuel extraction from federal lands — is needed, but this article as it stands makes a terribly poor argument that the current state of economic affairs is a failure. The numbers actually imply this sort of gambling system may be better for the government than a royalty system.

This reminds me of how, according to my TikTok feed, Jade miners prefer to sell their extracted rocks to blind buyers for a fixed price per rock (only a few of which will be revealed to contain valuable jade once cut open) rather than cut them open themselves and only profit from the lucky few rocks. (Or maybe that’s just a small part of the business, as most other gemstone mining doesn’t seem to work that way).