The Wealth of (Indian) Nations

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Hoover Institute :

Friday, June 4, 2010

The Wealth of (Indian) Nations

by Terry Anderson

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

 

If you ever venture onto an Indian reservation, other than to a fancy casino, you will be struck by the poverty and lack of economic development. Housing is typically substandard, businesses are small if they exist at all, and infrastructure is poor.

 

Digging into the statistics, you would find that average household income on reservations was 68 percent below the U.S. average of $53,657 in 2015. Twenty percent of the households made less than $5,000 annually compared to 6 percent for the overall U.S. population, and 25 percent of the population was below the poverty level compared to 15 percent for the nation as a whole. The suicide rate among Native American males aged 15 to 34 is 1.5 times that of the general population, the rate at which Native American females are raped is 2.5 times the national average, and the rate of child abuse on reservations is twice the national average.

 

Because reservations are scattered islands of poverty in a sea of wealth, the plight of 2.9 million American Indians—roughly the population of Kansas—is mainly ignored except by Washington bureaucrats. These bureaucracies, housed mostly in the Department of Interior, had 9,000 employees and spent approximately $2.9 billion in 2012. That amounts to one bureaucrat for every 322 Indians and $1,000 for every Indian. The Bureau of Indian Education alone spent $850 million in 2012 or $20,000 per Indian student compared to a national average of $12,400.