Monthly Archives: September 2013

Click on graph to enlarge.

Let me be absolutely crystal clear about one thing.  The budgets which Sean Parnell has proposed, the legislature has passed and Sean Parnell has signed over the last three years, combined with what he has said on the record about the budgets he intends to propose over the next five years are leading inevitably to one thing:  statewide income or sales taxes, if not both, and use for government spending of a portion of the earnings of the Permanent Fund.  Period, end of sentence.

As far back as 2011, the University of Alaska-Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) had this to say about Alaska’s fiscal future:
Continue reading →

Yesterday I had a discussion about Alaska fiscal policy that brought into the open something that I only had heard murmured about before.  It epitomizes the warped thinking that underlies recent Alaska budgets and explains why this generation of Alaska budget-makers increasingly is likely to be viewed as among the worst in the state’s history by those that will follow, beginning as soon as ten years from now.

The discussion was around the justification for the out-of-control spending Continue reading →

Next week (Thursday and Friday), Joe Perkins and I will co-chair a two-day conference on Investment in Alaska (formally known by its longer title as “A comprehensive two-day conference on investment opportunities in Oil & Gas Production and Mineral Mining in Alaska“).

The conference could not be any more timely. Continue reading →

A piece in the Alaska Dispatch Wednesday on PERS (the Public Employee Retirement System) and TRS (the Teacher Retirement System) caught my eye.  The piece seemed to disappear from the “front page” of the Dispatch relatively quickly, but is still available on the back pages.