Volume 2 number 2, February 2000 The Twenty-Five Thousand Dollar Squeal of Fortune* *Actually, with taxes removed, this is more likely a $16,000 Whimper of Woe Let’s see...Mackie, I’ve spelled it right this time. A Scottish name, methinks. How ironic that such a good Scottish Republican lad should prey so on our greed! But as I said previously in that other journalistic enterprise in interior Alaska, don’t buy yet! Why not? Because the Republican leadership thinks the Permanent Fund Dividend should be a Constitutional Right, not just a free money giveaway for living here. What the heck was I thinkin’? I really was thinking, though. I’m fairly sure that was my problem. Here I was figuring that the Republicans couldn’t ever be brave enough to simply exercise their power to use Permanent Fund earnings, and so they’d treat us in the most humiliatingly paternalistic way imaginable and give us huge amounts of the Fund itself just to let them escape the Scarlet Letters which spell: You used Permanent Fund earnings to fund the government. This is a Republican legislator’s worst fear: To be labeled a Permanent Fund Raider. My, how awful. To think Alaskans are that greedy and stupid. Again, what the heck was I thinkin’? Instead, they put their best minds together and came up with this. “We’ll just make them yokels think we gave them a lifelong entitlement, a new RIGHT even, to get an annual check from the government. Surely then they won’t notice that we also need to take a bit of the earnings of the Permanent Fund and use it to build roads, fund schools, and keep the felons at bay.” Excuse me, but there’s a little history that most Alaskans today don’t even know about, having to do with Ron and, I believe her name was Penny, Zobel. I’ll give anybody out there a big vote for governor if they can tell me why there was once a famous bumper sticker on Alaskan cars which begged us to “Nuke the Zobels.” You see, the Zobels were newly arrived Alaskans, and they were lawyers (oh-oh), and they didn’t find it equitable that Alaska was planning to give Permanent Fund Dividends based on length of residency (i.e. the longer you had been here the bigger your dividend). So they did that marvelously effective lawyer thing—they sued to stop the distribution. And since they were right (my opinion, so sue me), the state had to distribute the dividends as it has ever since, on an equal share, prorata basis for everybody, truly democratic-like (not to be confused with Democrats). So a Supreme Court has already ruled that you will get your Permanent Fund Dividend on an equitable, constitutionally correct basis. So what are the Republicans giving us? Well, as usual, mostly nothing. Nothing we don’t already have fairly well in hand. These exemplary Republicans want us to buy off on a guarantee that the distribution of Permanent Fund earnings will stay the same as it now is. We just have to put it in the constitution so that legislators of little integrity won’t make off with it in plain daylight (well, in Juneau’s cloudy shadows, perhaps) to serve the public interest. Am I missing something here? No, I don’t think so. How is it necessary or even clever to put this crazy notion in our constitution? Don’t these guys and gals think they can do anything honorable or decent with the Permanent Fund earnings by fulfilling their oath of office, i.e. to do the state’s business? Why is doing legislative duty so hard for these folks? Sam Rayburn, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, once said, “Sometimes you have to do something simply because it is right.” I can’t say it any better than that. | ||
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