Tregarrick Taylor wins the 'promise them anything' trophy

Bernadette Wilson with her Permanent Fund dividend gibberish cannot top this.

Even Dave Bronson’s reckless fantasy that we can double Permanent Fund earnings and our financial problems will disappear comes up short.

All hail to Tregarrick Taylor, the undisputed champion of the Promise Them Anything sweepstakes. He promises to unleash big government in Alaska in a manner that will require the importation of untold thousands of construction workers and perhaps the entire contents of the Permanent Fund.

Taylor had a campaign jingle when he ran a losing campaign for Anchorage Assembly in 2016 in which the singer crooned, “He’s fiscally conservative, his budget skills are impressive.”

Taylor, who has a secret attorney telling him he didn’t have to reveal $69,000 in free travel, is promising to build the gas pipeline, the Susitna hydroelectric project and railroad lines to connect the Lower 48 to Nome.

This big government trifecta will make Alaska the “intercontinental transportation hub of the Northern Hemisphere.”

He was too modest to mention the Bering Strait bridge and a domed city on Denali, but maybe those will come in the second term.

“Now this is thinking big, planning big, building big,” Taylor says.

No. It’s really just big talk. No thinking. No planning.

It reminds me of the warning given to Alaskans by Harvard researcher Malcolm Gillis when the state was studying the rules for investments by the Alaska Permanent Fund in the early 1980s.

He told a story about how Dr. Velasco Ibarra, who was president of Ecuador five times and removed by the military four times, was getting worked up in a campaign speech when he shared his big plans with his audience.

“And finally, when I am elected again, we will built the biggest bridge in Ecuador, right here in Dos Gatos,” Ibarra said.

“But Senor Presidente, there is no river in Dos Gatos,” a member of the crowd shouted.

“Then we will also build the biggest river in Ecuador, right here in Dos Gatos,” Ibarra promised.

We don’t need a governor content to pitch empty talking points that will lead nowhere.

We need one who can work with the Legislature, balance state finances, provide essential services and help move the state forward. We need one who will start by fixing the problems made worse by eight years of Dunleavy.

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