Dunleavy continues $6 billion con job on Permanent Fund 2020 growth

This line in the Juneau Empire Thursday caught my attention: “But the Permanent Fund grew by $11 billion in 2020, and the state should use at least some of that money to help struggling Alaskans, Dunleavy said.”

It’s unfortunate that Gov. Mike Dunleavy is continuing to repeat the lie that the Alaska Permanent Fund grew by $11 billion in 2020, a lie that still finds its way into news stories.

Either Dunleavy is deliberately misleading Alaskans to try to sell his plan to take an extra $3 billion from the fund or his staff fed him some bad numbers and he refuses to give up his talking point in the interests of accuracy.

Below are the relevant portions of the Dec. 31, 2019 financial report of the fund and the Dec. 31, 2020 report.

Nowhere in these reports, covering the entire calendar year, is there $11 billion in growth.

That the state’s highest official is off by billions of dollars on the performance of the major source of state income should be cause for worry. The discrepancy makes Dunleavy the biggest threat to the future of the fund.

The fund ended 2019 with a fund balance of $66.9 billion.

The fund ended 2020 with a fund balance of $71.7 billion. That is growth of $4.8 billion in one year.

Dunleavy is off by more than $6 billion.

The governor and his administration should start dealing with this in an honest manner and correct the figures.

So far, it appears that the Cordova Times is the only Alaska newspaper that has made an attempt to correct Dunleavy’s false claim about 2020 results, a lie published in nearly every Alaska newspaper in December.

Dunleavy and his publicity staff want Alaskans to think that 2020 began at the end of March, after the worldwide pandemic panic had temporarily sent the fund value plummeting by billions of dollars within days, the worst period in its history.

The fund lost nearly $7 billion in the first three months of 2020. Most of the gains later in 2020 simply made up for lost ground.

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