Gregg Erickson

Permanent Fund money is required because Alaska, alone among the 50 states, has no general tax. Or maybe because Alaska has an excessively expensive state government. Or maybe both.

It’s no surprise that AIDEA doesn’t like our report. We found that Alaska would be $10 billion richer if the state’s appropriations to AIDEA had gone instead to the Permanent Fund.

Ninety-six percent of all public comments opposed lifting the Rule on the Tongass. None of these comments seem to have mattered. Why?

Best way to support Alaska's economy is to keep Permanent Fund dividends going to households -- and that's also the best way to protect the fund.

State's real problem is the loss of the petroleum economy that provides most of our economic base -- and the fact that we can no longer sustain the Alaska we know today.

OPINION: King Cove's public health pleas, while genuine, provide cover for legislation opening refuge lands to developers.

A couple of years ago I paid an emotional and disturbing visit to an old air base near the southern tip of Japan. Kamikaze pilots received training here and many were launched from here for their one-way attacks on American ships.

I had a quadruple bypass at Anchorage's Providence Hospital in October.

Did you know that the arrival of the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend increases the death rate? That's right, the PFD could be implicated in your premature death later this month.

Four and a half years ago I wrote in this space about the coming economic crisis. I said it could be worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Gov. Sean Parnell faces tough issues. On the energy front, a gas shortage threatens the Railbelt. Competing plans for hydropower and a bullet gas line contend for massive investment. Court fights over development of the Point Thomson oil and gas field will also demand decisions.

Gov. Sarah Palin leaves office today. The reaction to her resignation among Alaskans has been strangely contradictory: People criticize her for being a quitter, yet in the next breath say, "good riddance."

Could my governor, the charismatic Sarah Palin, be the leader Republicans are desperately looking for to lead their party out of the wilderness in 2010?

The main job of Kim Elton, the top Alaskan on the Obama team at the Department of the Interior, is to make sure his boss, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, knows the political lay of the land in the last frontier. He is also the department's Alaska ambassador. A bulletproof vest might be helpful for the latter duty.

Fifty years ago 381 classmates and I collected our Anchorage High School diplomas on the stage of what is still called the "Anchorage High Auditorium" even though the school was long ago renamed West High.