September 21, 2005

• $845.76

  Last night, the state announced the amount of this year’s Alaska
  Permanent Fund Dividend.  Doug, Greyfox and I, and each eligible
  Alaska resident, will get $845.76.  It is down from last year
  because the stock market has been down.  The dividend is
  calculated on a five-year average of earnings from the fund, and it has
  been steadily decreasing all this century.  Still, it’s higher
  than it was back in the 1980s.

  When this thing was started late in the ‘seventies, there was a legal
  challenge by a couple of lawyers, a husband and wife pair.  Their
  challenge was on the residency requirement, and they lost.  Only
  Alaska residents who have spent less than 90 days outside the state in
  the past year (except active-duty military personnel who are exempt
  from that absence restriction) are eligible.  Prison inmates
  aren’t eligible, and there are some other restrictions, but I
  digress.  Anyway, the dividends were held up for the first three
  years because of that legal challenge.  Our first checks were an
  even $1,000 to cover all three years.

  For my family, that worked to our advantage, because Doug was born just
  in time to be eligible for that thousand-dollar dividend, and he’d have
  missed the first two years of dividends if they had been paid on
  schedule.  Another little snafu with his check worked to our
  advantage, too.  His dad and I got ours on time and they were
  spent, pissed away on stuff like food, and clothes for the kid, before
  we learned that zoning changes would force us to move from where we
  were living south of Anchorage.  Doug’s delayed check arrived
  about six months late, just in time to pay the down payment on the lot
  we bought here in the valley, getting us out of the rent rut for life.

  Some Alaskans at the upper end of the economic pyramid wouldn’t mind
  abolishing the dividend program if that would prevent the imposition of
  taxes to support state government.  Alaska doesn’t have any state
  income or sales taxes, and rich people know that they stand to lose
  more than a few hundred dollars a year if they start being taxed on
  their income or their spending.  We at the other end of the
  economic scale depend on the dividend and want it to stay.  Our
  current governor, Frank the Bank Murkowski, ran on promises not to
  touch the Permanent Fund, but he has been weaseling on that almost from
  day one.

  Down here on the bottom of the economic pyramid where we live, that money
  every autumn means a lot.  Many people outside the cities have
  only seasonal work.  That’s how it is for Greyfox, for commercial
  fishermen, and loggers in Southeast Alaska, as well as everyone who
  depends on the tourist industry for income.  This little spike in
  income around the end of the work season helps us get through the
  winter.

  For people without even the seasonal income, it’s even more
  important.  I know families here in the valley who have virtually
  no money income at all other than the PFD.  Alaska has a
  relatively high proportion of its population living a subsistence
  lifestyle, fishing, hunting, trapping, gathering and gardening. 
  My family and a lot of others around here live in hopes that the PFD
  will get us through the winter.  Other families, dependent on
  subsistence, do their best to make it last until next year’s PFD. 
  They buy the supplies and materials they can’t make themselves or find
  in the wild.

  This Matanuska-Susitna Valley area is a poverty pocket, but some of the
  Native villages are even worse.  The last statistics I heard, a
  few years ago, said that in my end of the valley 40% of the population
  lives below the federal poverty line, and in some villages that
  percentage is as high as 90.  A more recent study said there are
  approximately a thousand to fifteen hundred homeless families living here in the
  valley.  I’ve met some of them:  a family camped in an old
  junk car abandoned in a gravel pit, a teenager going from one friend’s
  couch to the next so he can stay in school.  Homelessness in any
  city is hard.  In this environment… I wouldn’t want to try
  it.  I hope each of those families at least has a mailing address so they
  can get their PFDs.

  This time of year the broadcast media are full of ads offering
  “dividend deals”.  You can sign away your PFD in advance for the
  down payment on a new car or a trip to Hawaii.  I know that in
  Anchorage there are people who do that.  Nobody I know here in
  this neighborhood or at Felony Flats where Greyfox lives is prepared to
  blow the entire PFD on big luxuries.  Of course there are addicts
  who will be blowing most if not all of theirs on alcohol and/or other
  drugs.  It has, historically, been a time of overdoses and wild
  binges.  Many people may purchase a few small luxuries they
  wouldn’t otherwise afford.  Doug and I plan to get two of our cats
  spayed, because we can’t afford the luxury of more kittens.

  Sales, swap meets and trade shows are scheduled for PFD time. 
  Greyfox will be working two gun shows in October, and then he’ll have
  scant income until the holiday bazaars.  If the weather isn’t too
  wet for him to open his roadside stand, he’ll make a little money
  selling knives or videos or some of the jewelry I make to people with
  more PFD than they know what to do with.  There will be a spike
  right around his birthday, October 12, because that’s the day the
  direct deposits are made.  Then around the end of October, when
  the paper checks start going out, if the weather is agreeable there
  will be a month or so when there’s a trickle of income from customers
  who have some extra money.

  $845.76… not bad, living in the only state that pays its citizens
  just to live there.  Of course, as Greyfox says, it is the only
  state that HAS TO pay people to live here.
  

  • 7:01 pm
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