The joke has always been that Alaska is so wealthy it pays its residents to live here. : The joke has always been that Alaska is so wealthy, it pays its residents to live here. But those yearly checks have gotten smaller, and could undergo a massive change, as Alaska struggles to pay state troopers and fix roads amid years of low oil prices. After oil started flowing from Alaska's North Slope in the late 1970s, so did the checks, which eventually were paid with earnings from an oil-wealth fund that's grown to about $65 billion through investments.