OPINION: Alaska must fix the Permanent Fund before our financial engine seizes

To modernize an old expression, Alaskans are fiddling while the Permanent Fund burns.

Not literally, of course. The Permanent Fund’s stocks and bonds, real estate deeds, lease agreements and investment contracts are all safely stored. But the fiddling part, that’s true.

And because it’s an election year, we can expect a lot of legislative candidates to turn up the volume on their fiddles. No matter how off-key the music, no one ever loses an election by playing happy tunes about big Permanent Fund dividends.

Certainly, no one wins an election talking about principal, realized and unrealized gains, spendable and nonspendable fund balances and the fund’s earnings reserve. Though all of that is important for the $80 billion Permanent Fund. And it’s monumentally important for Alaskans who depend on the fund’s investment earnings as the largest single source of state general purpose revenue for public services.

The math is simple. The Legislature cannot spend the fund’s principal. That includes the fund’s share of state oil royalty checks, special legislative appropriations over the years to build up the principal, and earnings on those tens of billions of dollars.

The Legislature can spend for the public’s benefit the accumulated investment earnings not assigned to the principal.

The annual withdrawal from the earnings reserve is limited by law, to protect the fund from excessive drawdowns on political whims.

It all works well if the fund earns sufficiently higher investment returns than inflation. But inflation has been high and there is no guarantee that investments always will be higher, or high enough. That’s the future that confronts Alaskans today.

It is possible that the fund could run short of spendable money in the earnings reserve in the years ahead to cover its annual transfer to the state general fund. That’s the transfer that helps pay for everything Alaskans enjoy, such as public services, no state income or sales tax, and the beloved Permanent Fund dividend.

It’s math, not mysticism. The fund will still be rich, with an estimated $85 billion two years from now and almost $91 billion four years from now. But projections show less of that wealth in the spendable earnings reserve and more in the untouchable principal column on the ledger.

Think of a cash flow problem in the billions. The state would be wealthy, but its checking account would be short.

“Certainly, this is the canary in the coal mine,” Deven Mitchell, CEO of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp., said last month.

The inability to cover the annual transfer to help fund the state budget could come in the late 2020s or maybe early 2030s, Mitchell said. “We have a pretty long runway before it fully breaks. It’s just that, if your car starts making a funny noise, it’s usually cheaper to get it fixed right then than wait until it blows up.”

The fund’s trustees have warned elected officials and the public of the proverbial car problem for years, but Alaskans keep fiddling, placing political gains over responsible public policy while too many candidates pledge allegiance to the dividend.

The Legislature and governor need to stop lighting fires over the amount of the dividend and place a constitutional amendment before voters to eliminate the line between spendable and nonspendable money in the fund. By including a constitutional limit on how much can be spent in any one year, it would more fully guard the entire savings account and protect against the erosion of inflation.

As for the dividend, leave that out of the constitution. Solve the bigger problem first — the one that is smoldering.

Larry Persily is a longtime Alaska journalist, with breaks for federal, state and municipal public policy work in Alaska and Washington, D.C. He lives in Anchorage and is publisher of the Wrangell Sentinel weekly newspaper.

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