In a letter to constituents, Sen. Lisa Murkowski says “It is now the duty of Congress to define the scope of this conflict and require the President to present his case for this action in full and transparently.”
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Keeping the Permanent Fund permanent means reducing the amount we withdraw from it each year.
Instead of taking our 5 percent a year, put a schedule in place to reduce it to 4.5 percent by 2033. Keeping more money in the fund is the best way to improve the chances of future growth, a lesson we should have learned years ago from the Norwegians.
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Rep. Nick Begich the Third went on at length in his speech to the Legislature about his tax-free dividend bill, the text of which has not been released, without ever confessing that this is a campaign gimmick designed to fool the gullible that has no chance of passing.
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President Trump’s decision to start a war with Iran is a “strategic master stroke,” according to a press release Gov. Mike Dunleavy got the Wall Street Journal to publish.
Right. It was brilliant to go to war with Iran without a plan to deal with Iran blocking oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, starting a regional war with a growing death toll and disrupting the world economy.
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The payments to the four public trustees of the Permanent Fund—$400 for each meeting day—have remained the same for nearly 45 years. This is one aspect of the Permanent Fund structure that needs an examination as we mark the 50th anniversary of the constitutional amendment that created the fund.
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At a 20-year reunion in 1976 of delegates to the Alaska Constitutional Convention, Katherine Nordale asked one of the convention's key advisers, John Bebout, what he thought of the plan to create the Alaska Permanent Fund that year.
She said she was shocked to hear him say, "You are establishing a fourth branch of government."
She later wrote Rep. Clark Gruening, a key legislator who helped create the rules for the new fund, to warn him against allowing the enterprise to exercise too much control over the state.
"Unless it is managed very carefully and vigilant scrutiny is exercised every step of the way, the people of Alaska may reap little benefit, but millionaires may be created to the detriment of the general welfare of Alaska," she wrote Gruening.
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Sen. Dan Sullivan voted last summer for the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act that cuts Medicaid by nearly $1 trillion over a decade and provides $1 trillion in tax benefits to the richest 1 percent of Americans.
A Sullivan support group is now claiming that Sullivan worked to strengthen Medicaid.
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The Pearl Creek charter plan will exacerbate the growing gap in public education between the haves and have-nots.
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I now believe that the $250,000 “independent” study has been kept secret in part because the consulting firm did not denounce the theory that the Red Dog mine and its transportation system might have been built without a state subsidy.
If a subsidy was not needed, that would mean that AIDEA cannot take credit for all of the economic output generated by that mine and that AIDEA’s economic benefits would be trimmed by billions or tens of billions. We will know if I am right if the Senate Resources Committee succeeds in getting AIDEA to release the “independent” 2024 study.
Randy Ruaro, executive director of AIDEA, testified this week that the treatment of Red Dog finances in the 2024 report was a topic that prompted AIDEA to require that Northern Economics revise the “independent” study.
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Northern Economics completed a $250,000 “independent” study of AIDEA in early 2024 and was paid in full, but the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority never released it to the public.
Now the head of the agency says he knows of no reason why it can’t release the report. This is a welcome change and long overdue. The Senate Resources Committee is awaiting copies of the 2024 report.
I began writing about this in late 2024 and have done so many times, but AIDEA claimed the study was a draft and that it was not a public document. Draft reports are public documents under state law.
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