Do they pay you to live in Alaska?

Answer 1

The State of Alaska gives a part of the earnings it makes from investing its oil, timber and mineral revenue back to residents of Alaska. Back in the early 1980s, the state put together a "Permanent Fund". The idea was to invest money that it earned from its Natural Resources into investments and then to be able to use the earnings ("dividends") from those investments as the means to fund the state. In other words, the state would have a permanent source of funding revenue (interest from its principal investments) long after resources (especially oil) were no longer generating revenue for the state. Part of the law that enacted the Permanent Fund requires the state to return a percentage of those dividends back to the residents of Alaska. Each year, the Alaska Permanent Fund Division projects earnings from the fund, performs calculations that normalize those earnings over a five year period and then takes a percentage of that calculation and divides it across the number of qualified residents to receive a share of the earnings. That amount becomes the annual share of the dividend that the Alaskan residents receive. This is consistent with a Constitutional requirement for the Alaskan government to extract the greatest benefit of its resources to the common and individual state citizen. This is not the same as paying someone to live there. Instead, it is more of a wealth sharing approach to the money the state earns from selling its resources.