Just a short note to report how good, and bad State governments can be. Meet my Representative. I wish he had Presidential hair (lightly silvered, coiffed just so) but He's his own guy. That's gotta' count for something.
Fast forward to 2014. ConocoPhillips just reported $2.3 billion in annual profit from its Alaska operations. BP and ExxonMobil are each suffering in similar fashion. My bleeding heart is practically hemorrhaging with compassion.
Legislative session means upping and moving to Juneau, packing your life into a backpack, a dry bag, and a cardboard box.
Meanwhile, having surrendered billions of dollars of Alaska's oil to BP, Conoco, and Exxon, the State of Alaska is contemplating the meaning of a $2.2 billion deficit. March 6, 2014 (Issue 11)
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The out come of this brilliant manouever :
Fiscal apocalypse. It's that bad.
The vital stats: $5.7 billion in expenditures (the Governor’s current proposal), some $2.2 billion in projected revenues. Those two numbers are very different, in a not-good, very bad way.
Plus, every dollar the price of oil drops adds tens of millions more to the budget deficit. As of writing, the price of oil is $47.28. JP Morgan says oil could go as low as $38. It's like a fiscally unfortunate version of the Macarena.
Horsemen of the Apocalypse
To give a sense of a $3.5 billion deficit, let's play "budget God" for a paragraph: Zero out all funding for University of Alaska ($938 million), Medicaid ($693 million), and k-12 education ($1.3 billion). All gone. Poof. No more public education, no more healthcare for society's most vulnerable, no more support for higher education. We're still $500 million underwater, $500 million from balancing the budget.
That's why we call it fiscal apocalypse. January 20, 2015 (Issue 14)
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Representative Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins is new to politics, hope it doesn't break his heart.