Why didn't we invest in housing when we could?

Predictions can come back to smack a guy. Think about all those people who wrote John McCain off before the New Hampshire primary. But this one was even better. In anticipation of the 50th anniversary of Alaska statehood, every month the Anchorage Daily News has been printing a page from the corresponding month in 1958. Today's page has the usual: Eisenhower signed the statehood act, three people were lost in an earthquake-wave at an island on the outer coast. But, way down in the right hand corner, a small story quoted a Chamber of Commerce type looking forward to life as an official state in the US of A. Among other things he predicted Alaska would have a population of 30 million by 2008. Ummm looks like we came up just a little short -- by about twenty-nine million, three hundred thousand or so, depending on how the bears did over the weekend. The census bureau estimates there were 670,053 of us in 2006. Even so, Alaska seems so full.