49th state near last in “independence”
No matter how much some Alaskans might like to think of their state as a stronghold for the conservative virtues of individual effort, hard work and personal responsibility, the data-crunching website WalletHub just rated the 49th state as the nation’s top sucker on the public teat.
Utah ranked as the most independent with the website observing that this was due “in part because very few people receive government benefits. Utah has an extremely low percentage of people with public assistance income (1.6 percent) or who receive SNAP or food stamps (5.3 percent). The state ranks as one of the least dependent on federal funding, as well.”
Alaska was pretty much the opposite, although it did rise to number 46 in the overall accounting, pulled up from the bottom by rankings of 15th in “Financial Dependency” and 25th in “Vice Dependency.”
Financial dependency scored states on the medians for credit scores, household incomes and debt versus income, along with the rates of home ownership, the existence of personal rainy day funds, the size of savings for the college education of children, bankruptcy rates, “seriously underwater mortgages,” and more.
In terms of finances, Alaskans were actually reported to be doing better overall than the residents of Utah and almost as good as the citizens of sunny California. Can the Permanent Dividend be thanked for this?
And Alaskans were doing better than many might expect in “vice dependency,” an estimate of a state’s number of regular drug users, drug and gambling addicts, alcoholics, binge drinkers, smokers and people spending more than they earn or spending disproporitnate amounts of time watching TV, videos or porn.
Amazingly, despite Alaska’s sizable substance abuse problems, it ended up smack in the middle of the national rankings for that category overall.
The rankings for financial and especially vice dependency are undeniably subject to the big problem involving any self-reported data. This being that people often lie, especially when it comes to their drinking or drug-use habits, how well off they are financially, or the job they’re doing in providing for the future of their children.
The metrics for government dependency are much better. It can be pretty well tabulated in the number of public employees in a given state and how much public money is being spent on such things as public assistance, SNAPs (formerly food stamps), and subsidized housing.
Alaska loses
In this category, Alaska was in a battle with famously poverty-stricken West Virginia for number one with New Mexico and a host of southern states – Mississippi, Louisiana and Kentucky – in the hunt.
These could be described as the dependent versus independent states.
New Mexico is reported to have almost 369,000 people – about half the current population of Alaska – living in poverty. Its poverty rate of 18.1 percent ranks it third nationally behind Mississippi and Louisiana, and it is far worse off than Alaska at 36th with a poverty rate of 10.1 percent.
Government jobs play a big role in lowering the rate in Alaska. More than one in every 14 working Alaskans is reported to have a job with the local, state or federal government, putting Alaska second only to Wyoming in terms of per capita government jobs.
Alaska was number two with 23.8 percent of its $48.7 GDP going to government jobs while West Virginia won the honor of the “most socialist state” with 35.1 percent of its GPD commited to government workers.
Ironically, some of the states most often thought of as socialist – for instance, California and Massachusetts – were spending significantly less of their GDP to support local, state and federal bureaucracies.
On a per capita basis, both of those states have less than three-quarters as many government employees as Alaska, and because their private economies are doing much better and employing many more of their citizens, far less public money is being spent on public assistance, SNAPs (formerly food stamps), and subsidized housing in those states.
WalletHub ranked California as the state seventh most dependent on government spending with Massachusetts at 12th. Those states are not, however, saddled with large rural areas devoid of jobs and occupied by residents with no easy way to relocate to where jobs are available.
This is a problem largely unique to Alaska despite the belief of some that the rural part of the 49th state is home to a huge and productive wilderness where people can live on a subsistence diet of fish, wild game and berries. The reality is that the state’s rural population long ago outgrew the limited carrying capacity of the land and thus the people living in rural areas are now hugely dependent on government support, either in the form of jobs or handouts.
Many of the state’s rural Natives live in jobless areas with little or no hope of future jobs other than working for the local, state or federal government, or for a tribe funded by the federal government.
Alaska is home to 40 percent of the nation’s 574 tribes, thanks to a 1993 decision by the Department of the Interior to list all state villages reconized by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) tribes with “all the immunities and privileges available to other federally acknowledged Indian tribes by virtue of their government-to-government relationship with the United States as well as the responsibilities, powers, limitations and obligations of such tribes.”
Because of the economic situation in rural Alaska, some are now hoping to retribalize parts of the state although the idea of creating such reservations in Alaska was supposed to have ended with ANCSA’s declaration that the agreement negotiated with Alaska’s Native leaders was a “fair and just settlement of all claims by Natives and Native groups of Alaska, based on aboriginal land claims.”
The government paid nearly $1 billion for that settlement, set up 13 Native corporations, and granted them title to approximately 44 million acres of land as they deemed fit. The corporations have done extremely well
But the financial trickle down from that success has little benefited Natives in some rural areas. And they now see the expansion of tribal powers as one of the few ways to bring in more money to create more jobs in places where jobs are now available and where environmental fears lead to opposition to any sort of development likely to create local jobs.
