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Not to cast a shadow over this effort, but it sounds like rural Alaska could use some well-planned gov't programs to reduce the basic cost of living for everyon

Not to cast a shadow over this effort, but it sounds like rural Alaska could use some well-planned gov't programs to reduce the basic cost of living for everyone. Is anyone here familiar, to comment?

klardotsh 1mo ago
The problem with doing that in Alaska is that there is not really a funding source for… anything. No income tax, typically little to no sales tax, low property taxes… the state’s other income source is a tax on the oil companies that drill and export from Alaska, which gets turned into the quasi-mini-UBI Public Fund Dividend.
walrus01 1mo ago
Alaska has generally two categories of places. Nome, mentioned in the URL, is a fly-in community that can receive barge shipments on the ocean during a short summer season. There is literally no road that goes there. Not that cost of living is cheap in the rest of Alaska but the fly-in dependent communities are a whole other thing than the places that have a road ultimately connected to the Yukon, BC and the rest of continental north america by road. The transport costs to get just about anything to the fly in communities is similar to Nunavut. Plenty of examples in Canadian media of $29 bottles of orange juice and similar.
rahimnathwani 1mo ago
Or the people who don't like living in a remote area with high prices could choose to move somewhere else? The US is huge.
- downrightmike 1mo ago
  But there are people there
- walrus01 1mo ago
  Nome, Alaska is a majority indigenous community as are many fly-in towns in Alaska, so you're basically saying something as tone-deaf as "why don't the indigenous people just abandon the place they've lived for thousands of years just because "modern" settled life showed up in the form of the United States of America". Yeah, it's costly and difficult to live there, but that's their home.
  - rahimnathwani 1mo ago
    These teenagers aren't thousands of years old. Neither are their parents. The folks suggesting that other people should pay to improve things for people choosing to live in that area seem to simultaneously believe that these people: - have a right to the benefits of what you call '"modern" settled life', AND - cannot be inconvenienced by the things that make that life possible (like density)
    - walrus01 1mo ago
      > The folks suggesting that other people should pay to improve things for people choosing to live in that area If the United States federal government wants to maintain a legitimate claim to sovereignty over much of rural Alaska, which is very sparsely populated, it needs to maintain an actual population there and provide basic services to it. It's a fairly well established geopolitical principle. Similarly there's something like 41,000 people in Nunavut, and the Canadian government spends a shitload every year subsidizing all their communities' existence. But the alternative is worse, if you remove the population there's a danger that other interested parties might try to lay claim to it for themselves. It seems we're already seeing that with the US trying to claim Greenland for itself based on the concept that nobody is doing anything useful with it.
      - rahimnathwani 1mo ago
        "it needs to maintain an actual population there and provide basic services to it. It's a fairly well established geopolitical principle." I don't think that's true. See the middle paragraph of page 46 here: https://icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/permanent-court-of-international-justice/serie_AB/AB_53/01_Groenland_Oriental_Arret.pdf https://icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/permanent-court-of-i... The ICJ said that sovereignty over "thinly populated or unsettled countries" can be sustained with very little actual exercise of sovereign authority. It upheld sovereignty over unsettled portions of Greenland. They later used the same principle talking about islands that were "uninhabited or not permanently inhabited". You seem to be saying there's a general requirement that every part of sovereign territory must maintain a resident population AND that the government must provide certain 'basic services' there. But that doesn't seem to be true, at least according to the ICJ. If what you said were true, then no state could claim sovereignty over an unhabited place. But that's not true. The ICJ ruled that Malaysia had sovereignty over Ligitan, even though the island has a population of zero. https://www.icj-cij.org/node/103163 https://www.icj-cij.org/node/103163

Not to cast a shadow over this effort, but it sounds like rural Alaska could use some well-planned gov't programs to reduce the basic cost of living for everyone. Is anyone here familiar, to comment?

klardotsh 1mo ago

The problem with doing that in Alaska is that there is not really a funding source for… anything. No income tax, typically little to no sales tax, low property taxes… the state’s other income source is a tax on the oil companies that drill and export from Alaska, which gets turned into the quasi-mini-UBI Public Fund Dividend.

walrus01 1mo ago

Alaska has generally two categories of places. Nome, mentioned in the URL, is a fly-in community that can receive barge shipments on the ocean during a short summer season. There is literally no road that goes there. Not that cost of living is cheap in the rest of Alaska but the fly-in dependent communities are a whole other thing than the places that have a road ultimately connected to the Yukon, BC and the rest of continental north america by road. The transport costs to get just about anything to the fly in communities is similar to Nunavut. Plenty of examples in Canadian media of $29 bottles of orange juice and similar.

rahimnathwani 1mo ago

Or the people who don't like living in a remote area with high prices could choose to move somewhere else? The US is huge.

downrightmike 1mo ago
But there are people there
walrus01 1mo ago
Nome, Alaska is a majority indigenous community as are many fly-in towns in Alaska, so you're basically saying something as tone-deaf as "why don't the indigenous people just abandon the place they've lived for thousands of years just because "modern" settled life showed up in the form of the United States of America". Yeah, it's costly and difficult to live there, but that's their home.
- rahimnathwani 1mo ago
  These teenagers aren't thousands of years old. Neither are their parents. The folks suggesting that other people should pay to improve things for people choosing to live in that area seem to simultaneously believe that these people: - have a right to the benefits of what you call '"modern" settled life', AND - cannot be inconvenienced by the things that make that life possible (like density)
  - walrus01 1mo ago
    > The folks suggesting that other people should pay to improve things for people choosing to live in that area If the United States federal government wants to maintain a legitimate claim to sovereignty over much of rural Alaska, which is very sparsely populated, it needs to maintain an actual population there and provide basic services to it. It's a fairly well established geopolitical principle. Similarly there's something like 41,000 people in Nunavut, and the Canadian government spends a shitload every year subsidizing all their communities' existence. But the alternative is worse, if you remove the population there's a danger that other interested parties might try to lay claim to it for themselves. It seems we're already seeing that with the US trying to claim Greenland for itself based on the concept that nobody is doing anything useful with it.
    - rahimnathwani 1mo ago
      "it needs to maintain an actual population there and provide basic services to it. It's a fairly well established geopolitical principle." I don't think that's true. See the middle paragraph of page 46 here: https://icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/permanent-court-of-international-justice/serie_AB/AB_53/01_Groenland_Oriental_Arret.pdf https://icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/permanent-court-of-i... The ICJ said that sovereignty over "thinly populated or unsettled countries" can be sustained with very little actual exercise of sovereign authority. It upheld sovereignty over unsettled portions of Greenland. They later used the same principle talking about islands that were "uninhabited or not permanently inhabited". You seem to be saying there's a general requirement that every part of sovereign territory must maintain a resident population AND that the government must provide certain 'basic services' there. But that doesn't seem to be true, at least according to the ICJ. If what you said were true, then no state could claim sovereignty over an unhabited place. But that's not true. The ICJ ruled that Malaysia had sovereignty over Ligitan, even though the island has a population of zero. https://www.icj-cij.org/node/103163 https://www.icj-cij.org/node/103163