“I believed the best, perhaps the only, way to meet our constitutional mandate to manage our natural resources for the maximum benefit of all the people was to grant each citizen an ownership share in Alaska’s resource wealth to be used as they, not the government, felt was for their maximum benefit. To accomplish this objective, I proposed that 50 per- cent of all mineral lease, bonus, royalty, and severance taxes be deposited into a conservatively managed investment account. Each year one-half of the account’s earnings would be dispersed among Alaskan residents, each of whom would receive, annually, one share of dividend-earning stock. The other half of the earnings could be used for essential government services. While I believed we should have put all our oil wealth into such an investment fund and lived off its earnings, it was obvious the legislature would never forgo the opportunity to spend a sizeable portion of that oil wealth.” ~ Jay Hammond “Diapering the Devil”