"It was destroyed by a socialist weasel." - Intelligence, Team America: World Police

Denali, the Chairman of the Board, at sunrise. It's a good one to click on for larger mountainy goodness.

The Mrs. and I have decided to chuck all of this cold Alaska life! We’re picking up and moving to Los Angeles, where I’ll be a talk show host for Air America.

Okay, that was the April Fools part. You couldn’t blow me out of here with explosives.

I really can’t imagine anything farther from reality – Los Angeles?? Paris Hilton and other germ-carrying rodents live there.

The Mrs. and I were driving home from the store (after having both Boys doted on by the clerks) and we remarked that this was the first time since, say, October that we had seen liquid water outside. It was 41ºF (which is 86ºC) and people were wearing shorts. I didn’t think it was possible for skin to reflect more light than snow.

It was also a nice day for another reason: I had submitted our Permanent Fund Distribution (PFD) applications. The Permanent Fund Distribution is where the State of Alaska sends an annual check (generally $800-$1,000 per person) out to people who have lived here all year.

What is the Permanent Fund?

The Permanent Fund is the result of pumping oil from the North Slope down to Valdez for these last thirty or so years. The money that came from the state’s royalty was stuck away for a rainy day when the oil and resources of the state ran out. If you have a nagging feeling, that’s just jealousy that your state government didn’t think beyond the next election like ours did.

Originally the PFD was to pay out on the basis of how long you’d lived here. So, if you’d lived here 20 years, you’d get 20 times as much as someone who lived here one year. There are people that are still irritated that the Supreme Court ruled that unconstitutional (equal protection clause). Since that decision, everybody gets paid the same.

The PFD is a double-edged sword, or a cat with scratchy parts in all directions (but I guess that would be a porcupine). It has upsides and downsides.

First the upsides:

• It gives me money to buy beer.
• It gives me money to buy anything.
• It provides the citizens of Alaska a reason to counter to special interests that would loot the cash for their own benefit (The Society for Scruffy Puppies can get paid only if the people of the state deem that more worthy than an extra Andrew Jackson in their wallet – which is unlikely).
• It gets people more interested in government, which is okay as long as their name isn’t Garafalo or Franken.
• It pulled enough cash out of the system so Alaska’s economy didn’t hyperinflate like a typical resource boom-town, and hence will be more stable when the resource is gone. Consequently, there’s less governmental corruption.
• It's money.
  

Then the downsides:

• It’s kind of icky and socialist.
• It’s an entitlement, and as such is not good. The entitlement mentality, fortunately, is counter to much of the Alaskan mentality, but the PFD has caused some people to expect government to take care of them.
• It’s made the citizens look with envy on the oil producers, and think that by increasing the tax, they’ll not hurt themselves by killing additional investment.

So, am I gonna take the money?

Duh. It’s money. But I won’t like it.