Quote:
Originally Posted by Bunz
This year it is roughly $1,600. Not to bad, the highest has been $1954. It comes to every man woman and child qualifying in the state. Qualifications is that someone in simply a resident of the state for the previous calendar year.
To call it the government isnt quite fair. The Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation is its own corporation. %25 of resource revenue generated in the state goes to the fund. That is then invested in various ways, and a percentage of the interest only is paid to Alaskans. So it doesnt come at the expense of state government. It is totally aside, as set aside by Alaska constitution. There was talk of establishing something similar in Iraq. But that seems to be low on the priority level at this point.
What it boils down to is this. The resources of Alaska belong to its residents. This is dictated by its constitution. So when a resource extraction endeavour occurs, %25 of its value to the state are set aside to its residents. The rest falls to operating state government.
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Alberta is currently in a fight with the oil companies to increase the royalty rate... and give more back to the people. The problem with the oil sands is it takes incredible amounts of water and natural gas just to produce one barrel of oil. So not only are we depleting the sticky tar sands, but we are depleting the water and natural gas at an alarming rate just to do this... right now the royalty rate to the provincial government is only about 1% and the oil companies are threatening to slow down and cancel projects if we increase it. Im all for that myself, but others with jobs in the sector are not... So far we all got 400 bucks and thats it.....
Andrew