...or how sow few cost us so much and provide so little

Nothing like a good long walk with the dog to think things through.

You here about people migrating to Alaska just to sponge off the government. I’m sure most if not everyone knows or is acquainted with at least one family that seems to make most if not all of it’s income from government services and maybe some under the table work for cash. Anecdotally people say maybe we should get rid of the PFD so these people will leave. The real question is, exactly how much do these people cost us. Let’s give it a go. Let’s say there are 5000 families that fall into this category. I don’t think that’s an unrealistic number, if one member of that family should be in the work force, and our work force is say 150000 people, that makes 1/3% of the workforce. Let’s further say each of these families has three school aged children. Let’s look at one of these families costs the state per year, and we’re not even going to look at how much of our government workforce exists to cater to these people:

$20,000 per student $60,000 for three children
$1000/month for food $12,000 food
$1000/month for medical $12,000 medical
$1000/month housing $12,000 housing

and let’s say between domestic violence, dui, drugs, parole violation and/or child protective services one member of this family tangles with the legal system per year and between police, prosecutors, defense, counselors and judges one of those encounters is going to cost the state and easy $25,000 per occurrence.

So, that means we’re spending $121,000 per year on these families, or $605,000,000. Yup, over a cool ½ billion on these people, not to mention the $50,000,000 they collected in PFD’s last year.

So, while the $1.3 billion PFD payout won’t bridge the budget gab, if doing away with it would cut over ½ billion in social services, if not double that, perhaps we really need to look into how much the PFD really costs us. Not to mention to federal government takes in a significant chunk of the PFD in income taxes.

I’ll gladly give up ~$1000-1500 after federal income taxes, to shave a billion off state spending.

Last edited by 458 Lott; 02/08/16.