Alaska’s Permanent Fund
The state of Alaska has one of the longest-running and most successful basic income programs in the world. The Alaska Permanent Fund delivers around $1,600 a year to every resident in the state and has done so for the past forty years. It does this by divvying up a certain percentage of the proceeds from surplus revenue derived from one of Alaska’s most vital resources: its oil and gas reserves. This dividend, as it’s called, is then sent unconditionally to state residents on an annual basis. UBI proponents contend that this model—in which a valuable resource is treated as a shared economic asset—is one of the more promising methods by which basic income could be scaled up to provide for a much larger, national system.
