How many of you own Mississippi property without the mineral rights? I have some land on the Miss. River that has no mineral rights. It seems that Mississippi, like Louisiana, could come up with some legislation that would, after a reasonable period of time, revert the mineral rights to the owner of the land. As it stands now, mineral rights are an untaxed asset. Millions of dollars are made from mineral rights holdings, and unlike real property, taxation is lost. We need some high minded lawyers to get in on this and push it thru.
Hmmm. So what about the people that paid good money, or even too much money, for those mineral rights, even if it was a long time ago? Philosophically, I think we have to be very careful about using hindsight to rip up deals people made in the past. I know a lot of oil companies that won't let me out of old 1/8th royalty leases they own. I know a lot of people that bought land with part of the mineral rights, but not all, but paid extra money to be able to own the "executive rights" so they could control what happened on their surface.
Whenever you radically change a system of property ownership that has existed forever, it smacks of a taking of property rights, in my mind. Thoughts?
Nothing is as appealing and all enduring as a bad idea.
How exactly is taxation lost? Taxes are paid on producing minerals. So if you owned the non-producing minerals in addition to your surface interest, you'd want to pay more tax on your property?
So you should prefer that someone who has mineral rights should get screwed out of tax money for an investment that produces zero income? Why not do the rational thing and tax the production as it is producing. So people that own the surface should get whacked a big tax then too? And even in areas where there is virtually no drilling or chance to drill. Pretty stupid idea. It will force people to surrender their minerals to a non-taxable charity.
FYI - Oil and gas producers in Mississippi pay a Severance Tax on all oil and gas produced.