Implementing Governor Hammond’s “50/50” Plan for the use of Permanent Fund earnings …

Earlier this fall we wrote a piece discussing Governor Hammond’s original plan for building the Permanent Fund and thereafter using the earnings derived from the fund. “Fully implementing Governor Hammond’s 50/50 plan (or, how to find another $1.5 billion in annual revenue without PFD cuts and taxes)…”, https://goo.gl/7Ct8B5.

As reflected in his final book, Diapering the Devil (https://goo.gl/FFTi9M at 15, 19), Governor Hammond’s vision was simple:

“I wanted to transform oil wells pumping oil for a finite period into money wells pumping money for infinity. …[Once the “money wells” were pumping] each year one-half of the account’s earnings would be dispersed among Alaska residents …. The other half of the earnings could be used for essential government services.”

.As we noted in that piece, while the first and second steps have long since been implemented in the form of the Permanent Fund (the “money wells”) and PFD (“one-half of the account’s earnings would be dispersed among Alaska citizens”), the third and final step — the “other half of the earnings could be used for essential government services” — never has.

Our earlier piece discussed how to — and the importance of — implementing that final step.

Yesterday, we turned the piece into slide deck form and discussed it with the Fairbanks Chapter of the Alaska Support Industry Alliance.  A copy of the slide deck is above, or can be viewed and downloaded here:  https://goo.gl/m1W1Jh.

We at Alaskans for Sustainable Budgets will be talking about this more — lots more — in the coming weeks and months.