Rep. Zack Fields and I agree: We should be the most prosperous. I’ve actually been to the most prosperous place on Earth that is literally a mirror image of Alaska. It’s called Norway, and if all Alaskans visited and saw how Norwegians live compared to us, they would vomit. The highlights are: the nicest infrastructure I have ever seen in 54 years of travel; education paid for all the way through university; excellent health care for everyone; full employment; and a sovereign wealth fund that makes ours look pathetic. Mind you, their sovereign wealth fund is much younger and growing every day; they even have a webpage where you can watch it grow.
They don’t have crumbling schools or communities with no clean water or waste water, they don’t have a high sexual assault rate or need to debate about law enforcement because they are prosperous.
So why the divide? It’s simple: Everyone in Norway pays taxes, they demand and receive adequate royalties and taxes from their resources, and they actually invest in their people. Their elected officials don’t try to buy them off with a Permanent Fund dividend and they didn’t sell them out; if you want to look at the event and time Alaska began its epic slide into decline, it was the signing of the SB21 oil tax law. Let’s be more like Norway and less like a resource colony.
— Shawn O’Donnell
Anchorage
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