A recent letter (Britton Johnson, “Climate Change”) suggested that climate refugees may bring economic benefits to Alaska: “It seems plausible that refugees from climate decay may soon flock to the Great Land … Many of them will be very wealthy and will bring money with them … Perhaps they will finance upgrades in our roads, harbors, arts facilities and so forth.”
Well, climate refugees could potentially finance those upgrades — but only if they paid taxes. Every other state has income taxes, sales taxes or both — so that when their population and economies grow, their revenues increase. But Alaska has no broad-based taxes. Oil revenues and Permanent Fund earnings pay for almost all of our state services. So when our population and economy grows, state revenues per Alaskan go down (as do our dividend checks).
My longtime colleague at the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research, Scott Goldsmith, called this problem the “Alaska Disconnect.” Alaskans don’t want to help pay for our “roads, harbors, arts facilities and so forth” — not to mention our schools, state troopers, and fish and game management. We like getting them for (almost) free. But as long as we don’t ask the people who live, work and visit here to help pay for state services, we can’t expect climate refugees — or any other kind of population growth or economic growth — to help solve our state’s fiscal problems: They will only make them worse.
— Gunnar Knapp
Anchorage
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