8% NSR is just ludicrous. It is 40% of profits. No one else could put an NSR on top of that and hope to get paid. Can you imagine a 3% private NSR, an 8% government royalty and 50% taxes? With operations costs of 75% of revenue? What do you get on 100 million of ore production. Let's sharpen our pencil. Interest on closure bond of 20 million is 1 million per year, so that is 1%. Total rip off by royalties is another 11% to that leaves 13% before taxes. What do you get after taxes? 6.5% of revenue. If it cost 100 million to get into production you make a grand total of 6.5% on investment, depending on how long you are in production. 7.7 years to payback. If your costs were 50% before loan interest, you would still only make 16% after taxes.
Mining is a one crop industry. What the hell does the government need to make money off the metals for? They already have VAT, tariffs, state taxes, property tax, income tax, and corporate tax. And they do have royalties. They even make money on gravel and stone. The various levels of government tax adds about 75% to the cost of a good. It is really incalculable as without tax there would be more business, more competition lower salaries, lower property costs, etc.. I would not be surprised in a no tax, no regulation environment to see the cost of manufactured goods drop to perhaps 25% of what it is today. The argument that you could not have schools and roads and city services is false. Right now property tax pays all of the local needs or should. A levy for military defense could be
be done with a tariff of about 12%. That would raise 240,000,000,000 which should be enough for the army, navy and airforce, if they did not P the money against Cheyenne Mt. Matter of fact they should be able to run the whole US govt for 600 bill without breaking a sweat. It is about 60% waste.
I had my eye on a 300,000,000 ton iron ore deposit in the states, but if that bill goes thru, they can shove it.
The states needs foreign exchange right now and they could use a domestic supply of metals. They don't need more money for fat cat governments.
We have been running on bankrupt governments for 30 years now who have just printed paper and raised taxes to pay their bills. They steadily roll out service sectors that are motherhood issues, like the ministry of the environment, with 100's of thousands of do nothing employees. 6 months after the Trudeau formed the Ministry of the Environment, a group that duplicated the services of 8 other government organizations, there were found to be 30,000 employees. During question period Trudeau admitted he did not know how many employees the new department had. The opposition thought there might be 3,000 or more and wanted to know. A week later the answer came back. 30K and none of them knew what their duties were. 40 years later most of them still don't. The most common thing your hear from government civil servants is "I don't know what my job is. I just come to work and fill in time." True goddamn story as I live and breathe.
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