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So now I've provided two opinion pieces from local op-ed writers.
The Permanent Fund dividend was a bad idea. Enshrining it in the Alaska Constitution would be harebrained.
If you can say anything for certain about many lawmakers, it is this: They never, ever give up pushing their ideas — no matter how lousy those ideas might be.
Take, for instance, the notion of enshrining the Permanent Fund dividend — itself a particularly harebrained public policy decision dating back to 1980 — in the Alaska Constitution, thereby compounding the Legislature’s 39-year-old error.
Lawmakers — Republicans and Democrats alike, I’m sorry to say — have embarrassed themselves over the past few years with repeated attempts to constitutionally ensure the Permanent Fund dividend is paid, no matter what.
This time around, Democratic Sen. Bill Wielechowski, as he did in 2016, has offered Senate Joint Resolution 1. In the House, Democratic Rep. Chris Tuck has offered mirror legislation in House Joint Resolution 3. If approved by two-thirds of the Legislature and voters, the amendment would enshrine the dividends and a formula to calculate them.
The impetus for all this appears to be former Gov. Bill Walker’s overriding the statute-based formula in 2016 and vetoing $696 million of the $1.4 billion appropriated by the Legislature for dividends as the state faced massive budget deficits.
Wielechowski sued, challenging the governor’s veto authority. The Alaska Supreme Court sided with Walker. The Legislature, not to be outdone, overrode the formula in the following two years. The money remains stashed in the fund’s $16.6 billion earnings reserve account.
A lingering question unanswered by the save-the-dividend-at-all-costs crowd is this: If oil prices crash, as they did in the 1980s and again a few years ago — and prices were to remain low — what then? Dividends are nice, but Alaska has other constitutional obligations, funding retirees and education among them. Would an enshrined dividend, complete with its own formula, elevate the annual payout above retirement pay or funding education, which have no constitutionally mandated spending formula, when push comes to shove? That seems almost unthinkable.
In a state with a long, sad history of boom-and-bust cycles and only one resource to pay the bills, how can anybody begin to guarantee — constitutionally guarantee, no less — an annual dividend, when nobody even knows for sure how much money the state will have next Thursday? What happens when there is not even enough money to pay the required dividends? What if there is not enough money for dividends and government services, even truncated government services? What goes away to pay dividends? Public safety? Health? Courts? Medicaid?
Count me among the grievously conflicted, those who like the dividend, but know it is wrong, wrong, wrong. OK, count me among the grievously conflicted, those who love the dividend, but know it is wrong, wrong, wrong. It is free dough, a sinfully guilty pleasure akin to ignoring your doctor and eating a pile of Chicago hot dogs, pizza and chocolate cake — and washing it all down with $200-a-shot hooch. And the idea of reimbursing the dividends shorted over the past few years? That is more than appealing — despite real questions about where the dough would come from.
That the dividend, as hatched, was a bad idea is undebatable. It has pushed and tugged at Alaska’s fiscal policy for decades and now is the tail wagging the dog. Ostensibly created as a buffer to protect the state’s oil wealth savings account from greedy lawmakers, it has morphed into a vast entitlement program. Over the years, as Alaskans grew more attached to their slice of Alaska’s oil wealth, the now-$61 billion saving and investment account’s raison d’ętre evolved — from being the Alaska Permanent Fund to the Alaska Permanent Dividend Fund.
When it comes to the dividends, it would be nice to stuff the genie back in the bottle, rethink the entire idea and find a better way to keep government honest, but we are all grown-ups here. The dividend is going nowhere; that train left years ago. It now is an integral part of the Alaska economy, a financial cornerstone for many Alaskans and economic manna from heaven. Doing away with it could be calamitous on many levels.
While there are many Weilechowskis and Tucks among us who sincerely believe enshrining the dividend is a good idea, they are wrong. At some point, a constitutionally protected dividend would inflict real fiscal damage. The answer is not in making the dividends unassailable, it is in changing the statute to provide an affordable dividend and electing lawmakers and a governor who will follow established law — and punishing them at the ballot box when they do not. The dividend program, you will remember, chugged along just fine without constitutional protection from 1980 until Walker’s veto.
Adopting a new, untenable and burdensome constitutional amendment with the potential for catastrophic consequences is not just an idea.
It is a lousy idea.
One very liberal, the other very conservative.The dividend seems to be all many Alaskans care about now. Politics reflects that.
https://www.adn.com/opinions/2019/01...c-fb9fce026ebb
Both opinions are very very negative about the PFD . Not only is it dysfunctional but downright bad for the state.
Personal Ignore Policy PIP: I like civil discourse. I will give you all the respect in the world if you respect me. Mouth off to me, or express overt racism, you will be PERMANENTLY Ignore Listed. Zero tolerance. No exceptions. I'll never read a word you write, even if quoted by another, nor respond to you, nor participate in your threads. ... Ignore the shallow. Cherish the thoughtful. Long Live Civil Discourse, Mutual Respect, and Good Debate! ps: Feel free to adopt my PIP. It works well.
And how do we know if the ADN is slanted or not? If the ADN is taking a position on the PFD, it appears they ARE slanted.
It has already been done and complied into an article of investigative journalism.
It's in the OP link from Mother Jones.
"After visiting the state in July 2017, Mark Zuckerberg, a vocal basic-income booster, wrote in a Facebook post that the dividend provides “good lessons for the rest of our country.” "
Zuckerberg has never declared whether he leans conservative or liberal, and has displayed elements of both. So there you have both sides in one view.
It's not like liberals took over the State and forced this thing on conservatives:
"The dividend’s origins are rooted less in ideal*ism than in greed. In 1968, nearly a decade after Alaska joined the Union, the largest oil field in North America was discovered on its northern coast at Prudhoe Bay. Lease sales filled the young state’s coffers with $900 million, more than five times its annual budget. Within five years, the entire windfall was gone. Much of it paid for education and transportation projects, but some politicians and members of the public felt that spending had overinflated the bureaucracy. Jay Hammond, a trapper and fisherman elected governor in 1974, declared that the “nest egg” had been “scrambled.” He and other leaders decided the state ought to safeguard some oil revenue for future generations. In 1976, voters approved a constitutional amendment creating the Permanent Fund, a savings account that would be managed by a semi-independent, state-owned corporation and would take in at least a quarter of oil royalties and related income and invest it.
The fund’s principal could never be touched, barring a constitutional amendment, but Hammond strongly believed the earnings should go directly to residents. The self-styled “bush rat governor” had no interest in charity or wealth redistribution. Rather, influenced by consultants like Milton Friedman who advocated a federal basic income, he viewed recipients as shareholders that should benefit equally from ownership in “Alaska, Inc.” and could spend money more efficiently than the government. Hammond reasoned individual distributions would give the public a personal stake in keeping the fund safe—were politicians to fritter away or mismanage the savings, it would hit every resident right in the pocketbook. If oil was, in the words of OPEC’s founder, “the devil’s excrement,” breeding waste and corruption, Hammond argued a dividend would “at least halfway pin a “diaper'” on it.
As the young fund slowly built up principal, lawmakers debated how to spend the earnings. Most of them strongly opposed dividends, preferring to fund infrastructure or loans to small businesses. Many feared handouts would attract “freeloaders” to the state, or that people would stop working or waste money on frills and vices. But when oil prices soared after the Iranian revolution, there seemed to be enough revenue to go around. In 1980, legislators repealed individual income taxes and put the fund to use, enacting a dividend that would give every adult Alaskan $50 for each year they’d been a resident since statehood. The US Supreme Court ruled the seniority provision unconstitutional, so legislators replaced it with flat annual payouts, extending them to children and adding provisions that prevented recipients from losing federal public assistance because of any windfall. In 1982, Alaskans received their first checks of $1,000. It was the first time in contemporary history that a government had sent money to people just for living in its jurisdiction.
...
Public support for a dividend was tepid before its launch, but it soon became the state’s most popular policy, with backing across party lines. Officials have regularly tried to cut payouts, particularly in lean years, but just as Hammond intended, those attempts have historically spelled political suicide. After oil prices cratered in the late ’90s, an advisory ballot question polled voters on whether a portion of the fund’s earnings should go toward closing the state’s general budget deficit; 83 percent said no. If anything, support for dividends has intensified over time. The Economic Security Project survey found that 58 percent of respondents would rather pay new taxes than give up a portion of their dividend. The anti-tax Alaska State Chamber of Commerce’s own 2018 survey found that 35 percent of Alaskans were open to new taxes to balance the state’s budget; only 9 percent were open to using fund earnings."
Personal Ignore Policy PIP: I like civil discourse. I will give you all the respect in the world if you respect me. Mouth off to me, or express overt racism, you will be PERMANENTLY Ignore Listed. Zero tolerance. No exceptions. I'll never read a word you write, even if quoted by another, nor respond to you, nor participate in your threads. ... Ignore the shallow. Cherish the thoughtful. Long Live Civil Discourse, Mutual Respect, and Good Debate! ps: Feel free to adopt my PIP. It works well.
I'm glad Mother Jones knows more about what's going on in Alaska than the Aanchorage Daily News and good to know Zuck knows what's better for AK than the people living there do.
Am I supposed care about Zuckerberg's opinion on anything? Let me know.
What you don't understand is that we all like our dividend. It's like crack. It makes us feel good temporarily every Oct.
The reality is that we're making huge cuts in infrastructure spending to save the PFD.
I like my dividend, we all do. But if you had bothered to read the articles I posted and had an ounce of cognitive reasoning you'd understand the point of the articles. We're basically addicted to something that is bad for the state and ultimately for the people living there.
Let me know where you live and I'll tell you what's best for your politics. Deal?
Theres a lot of reasons that make this free Alaskan money thing work to our benefit. Alaska is a dangerous place, nobody wants to live there. People move to Alaska simply for that basic income and start on life, much like people join the military for an easier start. Then theres people who try to get everything free in life, those types would gravitate to Alaska like moths to a lamp post light. Far out of the way. Because the climate is so harsh certain measures must be set in place to insure that a bottom line is above poverty levels.
Personal Ignore Policy PIP: I like civil discourse. I will give you all the respect in the world if you respect me. Mouth off to me, or express overt racism, you will be PERMANENTLY Ignore Listed. Zero tolerance. No exceptions. I'll never read a word you write, even if quoted by another, nor respond to you, nor participate in your threads. ... Ignore the shallow. Cherish the thoughtful. Long Live Civil Discourse, Mutual Respect, and Good Debate! ps: Feel free to adopt my PIP. It works well.
We don't have enough super-wealthy to pay a dividend.
Here's a link to the list of massive cuts that had to be made to preserve the PFD. Think it's worth it?
https://www.adn.com/politics/2019/06...e-item-vetoes/
And these cuts only make a dent in the budget shortfall.
Sailor (07-01-2019)
Hello anonymoose,
We most certainly do.
"The governor vetoed $5.4 billion of a $9.4 billion transfer from the Permanent Fund’s earnings reserve to the corpus of the fund. The transfer was intended to prevent the Legislature or the governor from easily spending that money. The veto leaves the money in the Permanent Fund’s earnings reserve, where it can be spent."
An interesting accounting. All kinds of education and social services were cut, but no taxes were raised for the rich or for big corporations.
Lemme take a wild guess. This governor is a Republican, right?
I also noticed no mention was made of the fact that the legislature has previously raided the fund.
Personal Ignore Policy PIP: I like civil discourse. I will give you all the respect in the world if you respect me. Mouth off to me, or express overt racism, you will be PERMANENTLY Ignore Listed. Zero tolerance. No exceptions. I'll never read a word you write, even if quoted by another, nor respond to you, nor participate in your threads. ... Ignore the shallow. Cherish the thoughtful. Long Live Civil Discourse, Mutual Respect, and Good Debate! ps: Feel free to adopt my PIP. It works well.
I didn't know you live in Alaska. Besides why do you post a vid about the rest of America? We're talking about our state, Alaska. No, there's not enough super wealthy living in AK who can give up most of their income to redistribute to the rest of the population. But if you lived here you'd know that.
You should be happy about that. It preserves the PFD.
Can't raise what isn't there to begin with. We have no state income tax.
Right . He won in a landslide. He campaigned on exactly what he's doing. Like I said the only way to preserve the PFD was to make drastic cuts.
Uh, yeah. So what's your point?
If you live in Alaska why don't you understand better what the limitations are? You seem amazingly uniformed for someone from here. This has been big news for yrs. now. Either preserve the PFD and make drastic cuts or raid the PFD and don't make cuts. The last governor and legislature raided the PFD. He didn't even bother running again he was so unpopular.
We've been spoiled for a long time. No taxes, and a PFD. Something had to give. The voters want their PFD, damn all else. Not good.
Last edited by anonymoose; 07-01-2019 at 03:01 PM.
The PFD is $1600 a year at this time.
While that's a nice little bonus for Alaskans its really no more and isnt going to change anyon's need to work.
"Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything." Joseph Stalin
The USA has lost WWIV to China with no other weapons but China Virus and some cash to buy democrats.
Personal Ignore Policy PIP: I like civil discourse. I will give you all the respect in the world if you respect me. Mouth off to me, or express overt racism, you will be PERMANENTLY Ignore Listed. Zero tolerance. No exceptions. I'll never read a word you write, even if quoted by another, nor respond to you, nor participate in your threads. ... Ignore the shallow. Cherish the thoughtful. Long Live Civil Discourse, Mutual Respect, and Good Debate! ps: Feel free to adopt my PIP. It works well.
Really? That's $133.33/ mo. to live in a place that has the sixth highest cost of living index in the country. I personally don't see how anyone can live off that entirely. That is true. What do you think $444,000,000 in cuts will do to the Alaskan economy?
PoliTalker (07-01-2019)
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