[originaltext]M: Did you finish that paper for your political science class? It

M: Did you finish that paper for your political science class? It was on state taxes, wasn’t it?
W: I finished it, but I ended up changing the topic.
M: Hmm, what did you finally come up with?
W: Well, I decided that state taxation was too large of an issue, so I focused on a single state. It turned out that one state stood out from the others in terms of taxes.
M: Which one was that?
W: Alaska. Alaska is the only state that pays its citizens instead of taking taxes from them.
M: What? The people in Alaska are paid by the government?
W: That’s right. Since the discovery of oil there in the 1970’s, there has been enormous amounts of money spent by corporations in order to take out the oil and the state charges the companies such large taxes that the state government typically has budget surpluses.
M: But other states have industries too. They don’t pay the people tax money.
W: Yes, but in proportion to the amount of people living in the state, Alaska receives an extremely high amount of taxes from its industries. In order to correct the budget surplus,it was decided that the people who lived there would get the money back.
M: Wow, maybe I should move to Alaska.
W: Not so fast, the money only goes to people who have lived there for at least ten years. By the time you live there that long, there might not be any money left.