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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

> The people of Alaska asked for this

Well, kind of. I know this is more of a meta-question about government and democracy, etc., but this was a unilateral action by one elected official:

> Gov. Mike J. Dunleavy shocked the state last month by using a veto to cut much deeper, taking away $130 million more from the system that gave him his master’s degree.

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They elected him based on his promise to massively increase their dividend payments, major cuts were baked in from the beginning.

If you vote for a budget hawk, he wins, and then he does budget hawk things, in my book, that's getting what you asked for. It's true that you don't get to choose the exact shape of what you are getting, but you do get to choose the general direction. The people know or should know that, and vote accordingly.

It would be different if, for example, they voted for a tax and spend Democrat and then, when elected, that official had made deep budget and tax cuts.

There's "budget hawk things" and there's "burning down the university to make a point." He was offered deep cuts by the University itself: "Mr. Johnsen, fearing that the governor might not stomach the Legislature’s plan, met with Mr. Dunleavy in late May and quietly provided him with a written plan that he regarded as a drastic alternative: A $49 million reduction spread over several years, with significant cuts to personnel and “a reduced capacity to serve our students and our state.”"

This was much more than the legislature passed and budget-hawkish enough for him to claim victory. Instead he just went nuclear and zeroed out $130 million with no warning. That's beyond ordinary budget hawkery and into batshit land.

145,000 people voted for this governor, 125,000 people voted for his opponent. Now all of those people are going to be impacted by these huge cuts to the university system. "They voted for this" ignores that many people voted against it and will be harmed nonetheless.

On the other hand, the 230,000 that didn't vote....

Sorry, but that's how democracy works. Do you have any suggestions for a political system that somehow lets a minority of voters get the executive they want while the majority simultaneously gets the executive they want? It just isn't feasible to have different executives, with different agendas and budgetary goals, running the same region. Maybe if the two groups of people want to move to separate sides of the state and split the state, they could be happy, but that's not realistic; most likely the two different groups of voters are all living among each other.

Will he get re-elected?

He is just in his first year of office. 3 more years after this... yay!....

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