In June of this year, at the end of what became the next to last extension of the legislature’s 2016 session, the House Finance Committee voted on whether to advance SB 128 to the floor.
That bill, which already had passed the Senate, proposed permanently to cut (what supporters refer to euphemistically as “restructure”) the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD).
By that point the Alaska economy already was in an economic recession. And the legislature already had been advised by the University of Alaska-Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) — the state’s best economic think tank — that cutting the PFD was the “most regressive” and would have the “largest adverse impact on the [overall Alaska] economy” of all the state’s fiscal options. Short-Run Economic Impacts of Alaska Fiscal Options, https://goo.gl/ZxR1Hw at A-12, A- 15 (March 2016). Continue reading
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