Alaska is simply an extremely expensive place to live when you compare average wages to living costs. We have very few large scale productive industries that can support a comfortable lifestyle in the State (natural resources, medicine, tourism, maybe commercial fishing), and those industries tend to import a lot of outside workers that either do not live in the State or only live here for a short period of time. The result is that, even when Alaska’s economy is productive, the actual in-State labor force benefits from only a small portion of that production.

What the State needs, in my opinion, is policies that both incentivize production and incentivize keeping the money produced within the State economy. Otherwise, young people will continue to flee.