The governor’s recent opinion, “A path forward for Alaska,” cherry-picked and deliberately misrepresented the Permanent Fund’s performance and value for the purpose of advancing his large-dividend agenda. Specifically, he claimed the fund grew by $11 billion in the past eight months. While technically correct, this is very misleading, as the fund, like most other investment vehicles in 2020, suffered enormous losses in March.
The fund’s value was reported as $68.4 billion on Dec. 31, 2019, and is $72.4 billion as of Dec. 15 this year. This is a growth of just more than 5%, and sufficient to fund the statutory percent-of-market-value draw — but not, as the governor would suggest, an $11 billion increase.
— Dan Miller
Anchorage
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