Our Alaska Legislature has spent the past three months trying to curb sex education, get guns on college campuses, and find a way to justify staying at the Taj Mahawker. Now it claims there is simply no time left to create the long range plan needed to keep Alaska on a healthy financial footing. Legislative “leaders” say they’ll squeeze this project in next year. Could this have anything to do with this year being an election year?
If JFK wrote his book, “Profiles in Courage”, about our Alaska Legislature, it would have been a much, much shorter book. It would have contained a front cover, intro and back cover. The book would have more spine than most of our legislators.
Anyone who has ever lost a job knows that living off your savings while eating cereal straight from a box and watching The Price is Right is not a viable financial plan. You need to get off your butt, find another job and get back into the game. Our legislators apparently don’t feel that way. They’d rather sit on their butts, drain our savings accounts, and pray for a spike in oil prices so that the whole deficit debacle will just go away before they return.
Alaska is a pawn in an international game of brinkmanship over who will control oil and oil prices on this planet. We don’t get to play on that level. We get to deal with the results. And the results are pretty clear. Alaska can no longer survive by sucking at the teats of Big Oil. We need another boom or we need a sensible financial plan that will take us into a healthy financial future.
In all my years in Alaska I’ve seen legislative session after legislative session go into overtime or special session because legislators find it impossible to get their work done in the time allowed. In the real world, at a real job, they would have been fired years ago. But we keep re-electing most of them which begs the question of who the crazy ones are in this scenario. It certainly doesn’t seem to be the legislators who year after year don’t do their jobs except at extra expense to us and yet never lose that job. So I guess it must be us voters who keep sending the same people back to Juneau and expecting a different result.
The Republicans controlling the state legislature seem stuck in a groove that keeps playing the same tune… no taxes. They have apparently not stuck their heads up out of the sand – or whatever other dark spot they keep them – to notice that the majority of Alaskans are consistently saying that we understand the need for some form of new income to accompany fiscal cuts. Alaskans are saying that they understand the free ride is over and they may have to start contributing to the programs that make this state a good place to live and raise a family.
I understand that many of our legislators are in deep debt to their energy industry overlords and that puts any retooling of oil tax rates and breaks so far off the table even Sarah can’t see them from her house. But if you are going to automatically take a large chunk of potential revenue out of the equation, you have to bite the bullet and put up something else. Every economist who has looked at our current financial situation has said that it cannot be bridged by cuts alone. Any elected politician who would dare say we can cut more because the last round of cuts caused no pain should be run out of town on a rail. He should be run right to the home of the family that now has no income because the cuts created layoffs. He should ask them if those cuts caused no pain.
If I sound deeply disgusted with our current legislature then I am not getting through to you. Because deeply disgusted doesn’t even scratch the surface of my feelings about this group’s apparent inability to face reality and do what’s right for Alaska. But their need to secure their jobs, jobs that will never be cut from the budget, is so desperate that they would rather leave our economy dangling by a string than risk losing that job.
There are a lot of unemployed Alaskans who know exactly how they feel.