Alaskans for Sustainable Budgets Founder Brad Keithley today issued the following response to incoming Senate President Pete Kelly’s statement yesterday (https://goo.gl/P4mJx2) supporting the “restructuring” of the Alaska Permanent Fund:
“I disagree with Senator Kelly’s approach to the extent he is continuing to call for a cut in the Alaska PFD.
In a report last March the University of Alaska – Anchorage’s Institute for Social Economic Research (ISER) found cutting Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) to be the ‘most regressive’ and to have the ‘largest adverse impact’ on the overall Alaska economy of all of the state’s fiscal options.
In a subsequent report just this past October one of the authors of the earlier report went on to find that ‘reducing the PFD by $1,000 will likely increase the number of Alaskans below the poverty line by 12-15,000 (2% of Alaskans).’
And cutting the PFD is hugely unfair to Alaskans. According to the ISER reports, ‘[f]or every $100 million raised with PFD cuts, the ten percent of Alaskan households with the lowest income lose 3.3 percent of per-capita disposable income, compared with only 0.1 percent among households with the highest incomes.’ Continue reading
Thoughts on Alaska Oil & Gas 
You must be logged in to post a comment.