Alaska is dependent upon oil prices, the drop in cost hit us hard. So while ya'll cheer low gas prices, we're cringing heh
Also, for the record, Anchorage is actually one of the most diverse cities in the nation:
Most diverse place in America is not where you think - CNN.com
And yep 69% of the state is federally owned; 222 million acres (they say its equal to two and a half California's.) Another 101 million acres are owned by the state, and another 44 million acres owned by 12 of our Native Alaskan groups. They figure only 1% of the state is privately owned.
The reason we take so much fed money is because we're a big military spot and we have a ton of park land, which means a large Bureau of Land Management and Fish and Wildlife (to put this into perspective, 2/3 of all Federal Park land is in Alaska. The breakdown of Fed management is - USFS uses 21,956,250 (US total 192,909,421) - NPS 52,620,512 (US total 79,706,353) - F&W 76,626,272 (US total 300,197,306) - BLM 72,958,757 (US total 247,859,076) and DOD 1,686,371 (US Total 19,514,941)*
* source:
http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc87210/m1/1/high_res_d/R42346_2012Feb08.pdf
We also use up a lot of poverty money for the Native Alaskans; even just getting heating fuel out to the bush is expensive, much less the "other" stuff they qualify for because they largely have zero income in their villages. Though we've tried to adjust their "income" based on subsistence hunting and so forth (since they pretty much live like they did 100s of years ago by choice, the fed is quite finicky about what counts as "in poverty" so the vast majority fall in that category for statistics. They throw welfare money at us and we use it to slowly improve the quality of life for the natives; wells and running water, septic and indoor bathrooms, well insulated modern houses and buildings, even electricity which is oft so far off the grid they have their own grid for 20 people, and of course guns, ammo, and snow machines and 4 wheelers.)
And we're not even in the top 10 states most dependent on the Federal Government (mostly because we've been using oil to pay for our stuff) -
10 States Most Dependent on the Federal Government
We're cutting our spending and are thinking about implementing a sales tax to fix our shortage. There's also some discussion of capping the PFD (which is basically money every person in the state gets paid off oil profits) at $1,000 a year and using the other roughly $1,000 per person toward the budget shortfall (At least that's what Walker has proposed, many in the state think we can cut more spending before we have to resort to such drastic measures as taking money out of the pockets of Alaskans)
Alaska
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