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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (14003)	3/29/2012 1:57:05 PM
From: koan	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 85487

<<Without the oil it wouldn't be such a big deal. Yes a fund can help other states as well, you mention Texas as an oil heavy state and it is, but Texas has three dozen times as many people as Alaska. Cut the permanent fund in to that many pieces and give Alaska just one of them, and how much help would Alaska be getting from the permanent fund? A bit, but it wouldn't be nearly so significant.>> Texas has been pumping oil and gas for 100 years. How much would be in there over that amount of time? But here our revenue pays for everything with money left over. Without that fund we would be in big trouble now to! The fund has tax revenue, without the fund structure the state sill would have had all that tax revenue. The fund does stabilize things a bit, it can restrain overspending in good times, and give some money when things are rough, so it is useful, but it is useful mainly as a control on politicians. If they where disciplined you could get by just fine without the fund (but with all the revenue that flows in to the fund). Of course they aren't disciplined so the fund is useful, but since they aren't disciplined that's just one more reason to not give them more power by making government bigger. Huh? that paragraph makes no sense to me at all? The fund has little impact on politicans or state budgets except when oil prices were low. I did state budgets for 30 years.

To: TimF who wrote (14003)	3/29/2012 2:31:33 PM
From: Brumar89	4 Recommendations Respond to of 85487

TX has ~15M acres of state owned land, held by the TX Permanent School Fund and TX Permanent University Fund. Income from the university fund is split - 2/3 to UT and 1/3 to TX A&M. The Permanent School Fund income goes to fund elementary and secondary education. AK was given 101M acres of state owned land by the Alaska Statehood Act. State owned land is significant in that it puts the state in the position of lessor or royalty owner. TX's population is 37X that of Alaska's. If you took AK's 2011 dividend paid to AK citizens ($1174) and divided by 37, it would come to less than $32 per head. Ironically from koan's standpoint, the AK permanent fund was established to prevent AK's politicians from squandering the state's oil income. The lease bonus AK got from leasing the oil fields in 1969 disappeared very fast. So the permanent fund was to keep the money out of the hands of the state's koanheads in Juneau.