I want my, I want my, I want my PFD.
With apologies to Dire Straits, the demagogues in the Democrat ranks are back in their comfort zone after dismantling oil and gas tax credits they once championed under ACES by winning over enough squishes among a Republican-led Majority that now exists in name only.
Alaska has a new House majority full of Garas and Guttenbergs that are apparently capable of coming up with an endless series of convoluted matrices of tax levers creeping ever upward but who can’t or won’t read the daily production report from the Department of Revenue.
Most of the public obviously doesn’t know it — and Gov. Bill Walker, his commissioners and his fellow Democrats sure aren’t going to point it out — but North Slope production increased this fiscal year for the first time since 2002.
With the fiscal year nearing its end June 30, production will be in the range of 520,000 barrels per day compared to 501,500 barrels per day in 2015.
In calendar year 2015, the state collected $715.3 million in royalty payments (plus 5.1 million barrels of royalty oil) and for fiscal year 2016 will collect some $1.1 billion in petroleum income from an industry that is losing billions.
It is patently dishonest for Democrats and Walker (but I repeat myself) to continually assert that the state is losing money from oil tax credits when the state is taking in more than a billion dollars this fiscal year.
Walker won’t stop his mantra that the dividend checks are going to go away without adopting his plan to tap the Permanent Fund Earnings Reserve, but that’s exactly what’s going to happen to the PFD if the Legislature elects to fund it according to his proposal with royalty income from a resource destined to decline more rapidly under their assault against the industry they demand pays the state’s way.
[Read the Full Source Here]
Read More: Alaska needs to act now to resolve budget, and all Alaskans need to pitch in
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