Legacy Fund -- Earnings Projections -- October 12, 2019

Legacy Fund. The Legacy Fund is "composed" of two parts:

• deposits
• earnings

"By the end of the next decade, earnings from the Legacy Fund are projected to top $_____________ every two years." [Two years is used because the ND budget is a "biennium" budget.]

Quick: fill in the blank.

By working backwards, and making various assumptions, one can estimate the total value of the Legacy Fund by the end of the next decade.

Of course, "they" assume the next administration won't ban fracking.

************************************

WSJ Writer Out Of The Loop

Two articles side-by-side.

First, the Jeff Bezos article over at The Atlantic.

Second, the "trust-busting" article in this week's edition of The WSJ. The writer of that article completely missed the "Amazon" story. The writer mentioned Amazon once in this "trust-busing" article but it had nothing to with Amazon except as a travel site like Expedia and how Google "maps" a site "like Amazon. Any writer who writes about US monopolies and writes about trust-busting and fails to mention Amazon is obviously "out of the loop.

From The Atlantic article on AWS (Amazon Web Services):

[Amazon] had wandered into the cloud-computing business long before its rivals. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is, at its most elemental, a constellation of server farms around the world, which it rents at low cost as highly secure receptacles for data. Apple, the messaging platform Slack, and scores of start-ups all reside on AWS.

Other Big Tech companies have fretted about the morality of becoming entangled with the national-security state. But Bezos has never expressed such reservations. His grandfather developed missile-defense systems for the Pentagon and supervised nuclear labs. Bezos grew up steeped in the romance of the Space Age, a time when Big Business and Big Government linked arms to achieve great national goals. Besides, to be trusted with the secrets of America’s most secretive agency gave Amazon a talking point that it could take into any sales pitch—the credentials that would recommend it to any other government buyer.

One of Amazon’s great strengths is its capacity to learn, and it eventually acclimated itself to the older byways of Washington clientelism, adding three former congressmen to its roster of lobbyists. (Amazon’s spending on lobbying has increased by almost 470 percent since 2012.) It also began to hire officials as they stepped out of their agencies. When the Obama administration’s top procurement officer, Anne Rung, left her post, she headed straight to Amazon.

If retail was a maddeningly low-margin business, AWS was closer to pure profit. And Amazon had the field to itself. “We faced no like-minded competition for seven years. It’s unbelievable,” Bezos boasted last year. AWS is such a dominant player that even Amazon’s competitors, including Netflix, house data with it—although Walmart resolutely refuses, citing anxieties about placing its precious secrets on its competitor’s servers. Walmart is more suspicious than the intelligence community: In 2013, the CIA agreed to spend $600 million to place its data in Amazon’s cloud.

Further on:

At the heart of Amazon’s growing relationship with government is a choking irony. Last year, Amazon didn’t pay a cent of federal tax. The company has mastered the art of avoidance, by exploiting foreign tax havens and moonwalking through the seemingly infinite loopholes that accountants dream up. Amazon may not contribute to the national coffers, but public funds pour into its own bank accounts. Amazon has grown enormous, in part, by shirking tax responsibility. The government rewards this failure with massive contracts, which will make the company even bigger.