The Fund at its full potential
Protected and grown, the Permanent Fund could do far more than write an annual check. Here's the future it could buy — if we choose to safeguard it now.
A bigger Fund means more to share — forever
The Fund is a money machine: the larger and healthier it is, the more it produces every year, automatically, without touching the principal.
Today the state draws about 5% of the Fund's value each year. On an ~$89 billion Fund that's roughly $4 billion a year. Grow the Fund — by protecting its real value and drawing sustainably — and that yearly stream grows with it. A Fund twice as large produces twice the annual benefit, year after year, for generations.
The exciting part is what comes next: Alaskans get to decide what that growing stream does. It doesn't have to be only a dividend. It could reshape what it means to live in Alaska.
What it could become
Six futures a protected Fund could pay for
These are possibilities, not promises — choices an informed public could make with a larger, well-managed Fund.
A bigger, steadier dividend
A larger Fund supports a larger dividend — and a more predictable one. Imagine the PFD paid quarterly instead of once a year: a steady income that helps families budget, smooths out spending, and works more like a true basic income.
Free or reduced tuition
The Fund could underwrite tuition at the University of Alaska — keeping young Alaskans in-state, building the workforce, and turning resource wealth into human capital that pays dividends of its own.
Government without new taxes
Alaska has no statewide income or sales tax. A strong Fund could keep it that way — funding schools, troopers, and roads from investment earnings instead of from the pockets of working Alaskans.
A cushion for the automation age
As automation reshapes wages, a permanent, broad-based payment becomes a safety net everyone shares — the dividend evolving into a genuine universal basic income, owned by the people, funded by the people's capital.
Investing in every community
Earnings could help close Alaska's hardest gaps — affordable energy, broadband, and infrastructure for rural and Native communities the rest of the economy often skips.
An endowment beyond the oil
The oil will run out. A Fund large enough to run on its own returns means Alaska's prosperity no longer depends on the next barrel — the founders' dream, finally complete.
Why it's within reach
Small discipline, enormous payoff
The difference between a Fund that shrinks and one that flourishes isn't luck — it's whether we protect its real value and draw within its means. Want to see how far it can go? Run the Fund-future simulator and watch a protected Fund climb.
An honest word about choices
Every dollar can only be spent once. A dollar for tuition is a dollar not in the dividend; a dollar funding government is a dollar not paid out. These futures aren't free, and they aren't all compatible at the same time — they're a menu, and Alaskans get to order from it.
Our position is simple and nonpartisan: protect and grow the Fund first, so there's a bigger menu to choose from. What Alaska orders is up to Alaskans — but only if the Fund is still strong enough to serve it.