James Brooks did a good job of picking the top 10 state stories of the past year (Empire, Dec. 30). He correctly cited “Permanent Fund Changes” as a top story, but his description of the changes failed to mention the most important change of all: Lawmakers and Gov. Bill Walker gave the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) a big haircut. They reduced almost every Alaskan’s spendable income by over $2,000. (The state refuses to release exact amount of the total reduction since 2015.)<\/p>\n
A family of four is more than $8,000 poorer as a result of the state’s actions. I suggest that the PFD reduction had more impact on Alaska families than all of the rest of Brooks’ top stories put together.<\/p>\n
Readers opposing these PFD reductions may wish to investigate joining the Permanent Fund Defenders: www.pfdak.com.<\/p>\n
Gregg Erickson<\/strong><\/p>\n Juneau and Bend, Oregon<\/strong><\/p>\n • My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire.<\/b><\/p>\n James Brooks did a good job of picking the top 10 state stories of the past year (Empire, Dec. 30). He correctly cited “Permanent Fund Changes” as a top story, but his description of the changes failed to mention the most important change of all: Lawmakers and Gov. Bill Walker gave the Permanent Fund Dividend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":14,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-5298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5298"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=5298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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