Nothing personal but if Chevron spent the money to extract the oil I have no issue with them or their stockholders as billionaires.
It's a quandry...give cash or cut state budget taxation needs...I prefer the latter...I simply think handouts..to people or business are a bad idea generally.
I think Alaska started this for two reasons:
Huge Indian population that had a reasonable interest in the land their ancestors once roamed and folks figured this was a decent distribution to them...they may get additional on reservations like the Navajo and Hopi do And I think it was an incentive to bring in more workers they needed when the boom took off...it's hard to say..it's not an enormous amount of money...less than an unearned income refund
Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana all have had major oil and gas plays and to my knowledge they never gave out annual cash to folks who lived there for the minimum year with no felonies
I agree with hosepipe though...better to have state control than federal usually...for a myriad of reasons...all of which tilt right..Good Lord for Obama and Bent One grabbed land..whew
We know the oil is there and its a vast resource. We know that developing it is not a mom and pop operation, however mom and pop own it. How do we bridge the gap? We need the oil, but is it fair to take the only resource Alaska has from the Alaskans and just give it lock stock and barrel over to a for profit company? This is not about wealth redistribution, for to give up the oil to company and not make that company pay a cost for the oil lease would be to steal all the wealth from mom and pop.
So, for longer than America has been a nation, the system of Royalties came to be. (The name is a clue) It says, hey, I got a gold mine here, you are a gold miner, if you want to lease the land from me and give me a portion of the gold, then we got a deal. The gold miner is happy, because he moves in and builds a mine and makes profits, the owner of the land is happy, because he is getting some of the gold.
In the case of Alaska, the people OWN the mineral rights, not the GOVERNMENT or the OIL COMPANIES. So in the long run, if you do not cut a check to the actual owner there is this little law thing that kicks in about theft of properties without fair compensation. So the PFD has more than one purpose. Fair is decided by the government and means that mom gets a penny, Pop gets a penny, the Governor gets a buck and the oil company gets a buck.
Please do not forget that MOM and POP own the oil. Now you can argue what is fair till the cows come home, but the bottom line is, who owns it and who is getting paid.
This is not a tax for redistribution scheme, this is a royalty payment that is governed by the government. When it is all over, the gas companies make record revenues larger than most third world countries, the government has a multi BILLION dollar budget paid for and Alaskans get 1200 bucks.
Want to be real conservative? Cut the government out of the deal. They are the redistribution part of the tax, not the PFD.
You own a gold mine, the government decides to manage it for you and sells the rights to someone else saying it would be socialist if we gave you money.
They would be right, they would also be Fascist. Somehow I think that is not a step in the right direction.