Part 2:
Note: This was originally written shortly after we left Alaska in 2004, so the numbers given in parts of this essay were from that time.
As of this writing, oil prices are as high as they have ever been—approaching $50 per barrel. This has eased Alaska’s financial crisis somewhat, but it was fairly dire at the beginning of 2004. Schools, local governments, services, law enforcement maintenance—all were facing huge cuts. The answer to this problem was to find more stuff to drill or mine or chop down or kill. Taxes? No way! Reformulating the permanent fund? Don’t even think about it! So there it was—a state sitting on huge amounts of oil money in which there is no state income or sales tax, and in which everyone gets a payout every fall. It was also a crumbling state. A group of parents, teachers and others actually filed suit in the state to try and force adequate funding for schools in August 2004. Schools are simply not the priority. In fact, in the last election, concerned citizens went to talk to a conservative Republican candidate for state senate about school funding. He informed them that he sent his kids to Christian schools and didn’t much care about funding for the public schools. In fact, he thought they got too much money already. He won his race easily. That was not surprising.
There was a real unwillingness in Alaska to face challenges head-on or to deal with complex problems. In the 2002 elections, we had a long-time Republican senator facing off against the lieutenant governor, a Democrat. The governor could not run again due to term limits. He had won a close election in 1994 and then in 1998, the Republican candidate had to withdraw due to some legal troubles. The Democrat was pretty straightforward about the problems faced by the state and she laid out a clear plan to solve the fiscal problems. The plan did include some taxes but did not touch the permanent fund. Her Republican challenger said that there was no problem at all. The answer was to just drill some more oil. This, in spite of the fact that the oil companies came out and clearly stated that they had no plans to drill the fields under discussion. The senator dodged debates, though he finally showed up for one or two. He said that no new taxes were needed. In short, he ran a campaign of “there’s no problem, man.” The polls said it was a close race. On election night we found out it wasn’t. Mr. No Problem won by a sizeable margin.
His first act as governor was to go on a bird-hunting trip in Europe, much to the unhappiness of the people who voted for him. He wondered what the fuss was about. He had to be told that things were no longer like they were in the senate! So he came back and got to work. He had to appoint someone to fill his now-vacant senate seat, so he chose his daughter. He saw that my gosh, there really were some serious fiscal problems here, so he promptly began talking about using permanent fund money (citizens always call these kinds of ideas “raiding” the fund) and he decided to cut off the Longevity Bonus for senior citizens. This was a monthly payment implemented to encourage seniors who had lived in the state for a long time to stay. They had a couple of months notice before they lost the couple of hundred dollars they were accustomed to getting—a serious part of the budget for many. It didn’t take long for the howls of protest to begin. Letters to the editor popped up saying things like, “we voted for you because you were a Republican and look what you are doing!” They were clearly surprised. I was not. It was clear before the election that the guy had nothing to say and was trying to tell people what they wanted to hear. One Democrat running for state senate had a commercial in which he said, ‘I know I am not telling you what you want to hear, but I am telling you what you need to hear.” It reminded me of a parent talking to a little kid. He lost too. Their outrage was somewhat comical, but not surprising.
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