A ferry to nowhere?

By TOM BRENNAN

Alaska is now paying the price for the selfish attitude of its people about the Alaska Permanent Fund and its earnings. That price is likely to get higher.

The attitude, directed at the rest of the United States, can be summed up as "What's ours is ours and what's yours is ours." That is, Alaskans want money from the federal treasury to meet their state's many needs, but are unwilling to dip into into their own ample bank account.
    
The state's reputation has been trashed in recent years — and I'm not just talking about the minions of the Justice Department and those whose activities bring on their wrath.

Brennan

Ted Stevens is the most effective United States senator this state has ever had, but his work on Alaska's behalf, at least in the area of earmarks, has brought him a reputation for pork-barreling.
    
The fact that Alaska is very much an undeveloped member of the union, one whose rural people often live in Third World conditions, largely is ignored by its critics. Instead, they focus on the fact that it has nearly $40 billion in the bank and the available earnings from that account are used only to send dividend checks to every man, woman and child who lives here.
    
Not one red cent goes toward the purpose for which the fund was set up in 1976, to help fund the future cost of state government. The future has arrived and still the earnings go only for new cars and winter vacations in Hawaii. After all, why use any of our own money, when we can get it from Washington instead?
    
And then there is the matter of the state income tax, which was repealed in 1980 because it wasn't needed. The flow of oil through the trans-Alaska pipeline was flooding the state treasury with money, so the little pile that individual taxpayers . . .

(cont'd from front page) could contribute wouldn't be missed — and it wasn't.
    
There is still no need for an income tax, though it would have been better to keep it on the books at a very low level. But there is a need to begin weaning people away from the idea of using the Permanent Fund just for free money every October (in the form of those dividend checks.) If properly handled under the formula proposed by the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp., the checks would barely be diminished. Instead they would grow more slowly and, over time, the fund would fill the role for which it was established. And the dividends would still be paid.
    
The relatively free ride (tax and dividend-wise) that Alaskans enjoy has provided ammunition to critics like those who are getting away with branding two major infrastructure projects as "bridges to nowhere."
    
Incredibly, an announcer for a national public radio news service came off with this cutesy line the other day: "First there was the bridge to nowhere, now there is the ferry to nowhere." The woman implied it was ridiculous that Ketchikan might seek a replacement for the aging ferry that provides surface access to the major regional airport on Gravina Island.
    
The tattered condition of Alaska's reputation in Washington and the national political arena will make it harder for any member of this state's congressional delegation to win funding for projects here. And that problem seems unlikely to go away.

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Since I'm on the soapbox this week, let's dive into the issue of paying a "fair share" of taxes. That's what many politicians say when they want to raise taxes on oil and gas producers. And like them or not, the producing companies are the foundation of the state's economy. If their treasuries are unhealhy, so is the state's.
    
Such a notion of fairness grates on the English major in me — and I'm confident that the nation's Founding Fathers would be spinning in their final resting places if they heard it.
    
The state's fair share of the oil and gas bounty here is the royalty share it agreed to when it sold leases on the subsurface rights. Businesses operating here expect to pay taxes, and they should.
    
But the words "fair share" in taxation relate — or would in a world where the language meant what it said — suggest that the companies must pay a fair and equitable share of the cost of funding government. Since individuals pay no state income tax, how can it be argued that the producers are or are not carrying their share of the burden?
    
That should mean they can be expected to kick in for the cost of operating a state government, plus any costs they bring to the state such as the money it takes to monitor and direct appropriate oversight. (That would include, obviously, the cost of cleaning up any spills or other environmental damage, repairing that damage and compensating people who are injured.)
    
But when some Alaska politicians use the words "fair share," what they mean is the old bandido line: "You got, we want it; hand it over."

Tom Brennan is an editor of The Anchorage Times. His e-mail address is This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it