"Alaska has already struck a deal with the oil companies under which each resident receives about $1,700 a year," Eric Dregni writes. Above, the Trans-Alaska pipeline snakes it way across the tundra north of Fairbanks, Alaska. (AL GRILLO/The Associated Press)

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President Donald Trump has finally had a good idea: a sovereign wealth fund just like Norway. The problem is the U.S. has debt, not credit. The solution is to follow Norway’s lead and nationalize U.S. oil companies: ExxonMobil, Chevron, etc. This would produce about $250 billion a year for the American people. Alaska has already struck a deal with the oil companies under which each resident receives about $1,700 a year.

I talked to friends in Oslo who told me that the Norwegian government made a conscious decision to keep the oil money for the country rather than letting companies pocket the profits. My friend Knut Bull in Oslo told me that Norway’s oil fund is thanks to Farouk al-Kasim, an oil engineer from Iraq who married a Norwegian. He knew Norway had to get foreign investment to establish the drilling technology but knew not to sell it to a foreign country and plan wise investments early on.

My friend’s wife, Inger Brøgger Bull, chimed in: “This was a stroke of luck. We could have handled the wealth in a different way. In Africa or other places, they sell their resources and then it’s privatized.”

The idea of a few entrepreneurs becoming super-rich and then stashing their cash in Swiss banks didn’t fly in Norway. Instead, the ideals of social democracy pushed for the wealth from the huge oil reserves found in the North Sea to be redistributed. A nationalized oil company — Statoil, now called Equinor — was set up with the revenue going into the oljefond to support the government rather than the Rockefellers.

“Norway is rich not only because of Equinor,” Knut told me, “but also because as a country we’ve made a decision to share our resources with each other. Like Sweden and Finland, we’re founded on a fusion between social solidarity and a democratic ideal. Therefore we don’t have the poor like you do in the United States — or the crime, for that matter.”

If Norway’s $1.7 trillion oil fund was distributed across the 5 million inhabitants of Norway, this would mean $340,000 per person. This money would swamp the economy, so “the government is only allowed to use 4% of the oil fund every year to balance the budgets,” another friend, Sissel Robbins in Trondheim, told me.

“We’ve had a system of public trust,” Knut added, “We’re not like Saudi Arabia that just kept the money and hired slaves.” Foreigners do fill about 10% of Norwegian jobs, and about half of all janitorial and maid jobs are held by non-Norwegians, but those workers are entitled to many of the same benefits as Norwegians.

Norway went from one of the poorest countries in Europe to one of the richest. Trump could make America rich by keeping our natural resources for the people rather than letting the corporations pocket the cash.

Eric Dregni, of Minneapolis, is the author of “Vikings in the Attic,” “Never Trust a Thin Cook” and “For the Love of Cod.”