Alaska’s Engineering Colleges Prepare to Slash Programs, Lay Off Faculty
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
The media focusing on Dunleavy wanting to pay residents what is constitutionally granted is a distraction. Alaska is in dire financial straits. Without severe budget cuts or a way to dramatically increase revenue Alaska will be bankrupted.
For clarity, the Permanent Fund (the investment fund), is constitutionally protected and fed by oil revenue. The Permanent Fund Earnings Fund (that PFD checks are paid from) is not constitutionally protected and is what politicians raided.
https://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/state-taxes-alaska.as...
In fact, there's a minor but respectable economic school of thought that property taxes should be greater than 100% of all taxes, and the excess should be redistributed to the disadvantaged. Property taxes disincentivize hoarding and wasteful use of valuable property, which is A Good Thing.
Tourists pay real property taxes because those taxes are factors into accommodation prices, and into the prices of goods and services sold to tourists.
Citation needed. Accommodation pricing is typically set by supply and demand. Which is why, last minute hotel deals at steep discounts are a thing.
> Tourists pay real property taxes
Then states/counties should be recovering delinquent property taxes from them
The tourists in aggregate are therefore paying the property taxes of the establishment.
It absolutely does not follow at all. When costs are disconnected from pricing, the business undergoes a loss. For instance, many rural Texas cities have high property taxes, and low demand for hotel rooms. In many of these places hotels are unviable, because the market would never pay enough to eke out a profit.
In such places, Airbnb is surprisingly effective, as the renter typically sees AirBnB income as a bonus, and doesn't rely on it to make a living.
Obviously, but taxes directly effect supply (supply is not the quantity of units available, it's the function mapping price to the quantity of units people are willing to provide at that price; likewise with demand with “pay for” in place of “provide”; taxes directly paid by the party providing a good or service as a consequence of providing it shift upward the price at which they are willing to provide any given number of units of the good or service.)
Edit: 75% for government not 25%. 25% is for the dividend fund.
This is not true everywhere. Norway has a sovereign wealth fund that is doing quite well. Libya was once the most prosperous African nation before the US demolished their government. Sovereign wealth funds are an effective management strategy for the resource curse, if western nation backed multinational corporations don't find a way to seize control of it and/or block you from accessing the global marketplace.
It is really good to read that there is at least one country that built a wealth fund to provide for the government and citizens.
20% of Norway's GDP comes from oil revenues (the government owns the oil extraction business). It remains to be seen how things would go if their oil revenues ceased.
I think they are incentivized to mismanage money. Voters want low taxes and government programs more than they want a balanced budget.
// (expected - actual) * valid applicants
// ($2,300 - $1,100) * 666,047
PFD withheld 2017: $ 687M
Total state revenue 2017: $1,018M
> the PFD that isn't constitutionally protected
> pay residents what is constitutionally granted
[pfd_applicants] https://pfd.alaska.gov/Division-Info/Annual-Reports
[pfd_projections] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund#Annual_i...
[state_budget] http://www.tax.alaska.gov/programs/programs/reports/AnnualRe...
You also cut my quote in a bad spot. There are two parts of how Alaska residents get a check. There is an investment account that by constitution gets 25% of oil revenue to invest. Part of investment gains are rolled back in to the investment account. The other portion are put in the earnings fund that checks are paid from. The earnings fund is not constitutionally protected.
Correction, the amount of a check is in statue not constitution. The fund itself is in constitution.
[PFD Statutes] https://pfd.alaska.gov/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=KRSQ6VCpO_Q...
Rereading your comment though, it's clear that you're mainly focusing on the legislators not dealing with the budget to your satisfaction. Closing the deficit caused by low oil prices/production will require more revenue or lower expenditures.
However, I would note that governor Walker made a "hard choice" increasing revenue from the PFDs given that it caused voter outrage with people such as yourself. All of the money the legislature manages is the "people's money" since the government should be answerable to, and working for the residents of Alaska.
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Tangent, reading the statutes, it's painful to be reminded that Alaska was the first state in the US to pass a constitutional amendment denying marriage to gay people.
> AS 25.05.013. Same-sex marriages.
> (a) A marriage entered into by persons of the same sex, either under common law or under statute, that is recognized by another state or foreign jurisdiction is void in this state, and contractual rights granted by virtue of the marriage, including its termination, are unenforceable in this state.
> (b) A same-sex relationship may not be recognized by the state as being entitled to the benefits of marriage. (§ 2 ch 21 SLA 1996)
I get that this isn't an ideal situation but it seems like so often whenever anyone wants to cut anything its the end of the world. I mean what would you cut in order to reduce the deficit? Welfare services? Health services? Emergency services?
It may not be a particularly popular move but I imagine this was part of people evaluating all the places the cuts could come from trying to figure out how to cut things to minimize disruption to existing services and then taking action consistent with a plan.
But I could be wrong, maybe internet commentators that read a 10 minute article actually have a much deeper and penetrating insight into the finances of the state of Alaska then the accountants and budget people that spend their lives doing this? Maybe it is part of an evil plan by the governor to do.... something nefarious. Or maybe it is part of a widespread governmental budget cuts throughout Alaska designed to try and minimize impact while still trying to allow them most essential services to remain intact.
The governor is doing this not to fill in gaps in the budget, but to increase the Alaskan dividend all residents get every year. Crazy stuff.
Who, unsurprisingly, aren't that excited about education or higher taxes.
If you and your friends were trying to decide what to do next weekend, would you give a vote to the friend who was going to be out of town that weekend? People should not have a say in matters they won't be around for. I'm not allowed to vote in Canada, nor should I be, because I don't live there. Similarly if I am near death, I should not be allowed to cast a vote on matters pertaining to the future because I won't be there.
It's also worth noting that short-vs-long-term planning is just a paradigm for thinking about your politics; in practice, absolutely horrible things can arise from both strategies. Long-term thinking can manifest as clinging to tradition (since you now feel ownership over future generations and want to impose your own world-views on them). It can manifest as early optimization. Both of these things can be good (maintaining culinary/aesthetic culture, infrastructure investment) or bad (maintaining brutal and oppressive traditions, prematurely and hence inefficiently optimizing things at tremendous economic/social cost).
I'm not saying the status quo is anywhere near optimal. I think it's a very interesting (read: hard) and probably culturally-dependent question of what age groups are able to minimize the societal happiness cost function (and of what that cost function even is). It's incredibly difficult to say anything generally meaningful about how you might do this well. The one-person-one-vote system is at least a simple solution that seems acceptable to most, which is an important feature (not that each person's vote counts the same in practice in USA, but that's a whole other problem).
We don't let teenagers vote because they're known for being hotheads, but when an 90 year old man forgets the names of his children, we still let him vote. That's nuts, and it shows that what we have right now is not a 1-person-1-vote system. We already have a system of selective enfranchisement, but it's not been configured in a rational way. It's not been configured in a way designed to give good results. In fact, it's proven itself quite harmful. Go ask any climate scientist what our future on this current trajectory looks like. Trying to stay the course is suicide.
How does that show any such thing? Unless you're defining someone with dementia as "not a person".
> Go ask any climate scientist what our future on this current trajectory looks like. Trying to stay the course is suicide.
Ah. You're against old people voting because they don't vote the way you want on your hot-button issue. And you're willing to sacrifice the right to vote on the altar of climate change. No thanks. (But it makes me wonder what else you're willing to sacrifice there...)
Are 17 year old people "not persons"? Of course not. Who is talking about non-personhood?
We currently forbid 17 year olds from voting (while allowing them to sign up for the military..) but where are the objections when a 75 year old with dementia and the mentality of a 5 year old votes? The 17 year old is unquestionably more qualified to vote than a senile pensioner who thinks Jimmy Carter is still in office and forgets to walk to the bathroom when nature calls. That's the case even if you disregard the "skin in the game" argument, or even if you somehow convince yourself that democracy is more important than bracing humanity for catastrophic climate change.
But if you want old people disqualified because you don't like the way they vote, get lost.
Or would it be better to have some of those people, as voters, to be able to say "wait a minute" to some stuff that sounds good to people who haven't been through similar things?
It's almost like black and white statements are just bad stereotypes.
Are they malicious? Maybe, maybe not. But at the end of the day it doesn't matter if they're malicious, senile, or just plain old apathetic.
(Perhaps you can find a political issue for which young people throw caution to the wind and old people exercise appropriate caution, but I can guarantee you that the impact of that issue will not be as severe as climate change.)
And you don't like it when the other side does it...
A revolution could well not go the way you want, and end up in a system where no one can even defend fighting climate change, or worse, everyone has to enthusiastically pretend we're doing a heroic effort that is well on track to solve the problem.
On the other hand, someone over 70 might be more likely to vote for the general good rather than their selfish interests.
Evolutionarilly speaking, the reason humans have old people at all is that they contribute wisdom. Otherwise, people would tend to die soon after their children reach adulthood. There's no incentive for evolution to favor useless organisms that aren't able to reproduce - so old people aren't useless.
Dunleavy promised a $6700 dividend without significantly cutting the University or major operations of the ferry system. Now we're talking about homeless shelters closing and old folks losing their monthly pittance. Believe me, people's minds have changed on this very rapidly.
Cutting a stem program should not be on the top of any budget cut proposal. That’s the problem.
(We don't even have to imagine. There's an existing example: Norway's socked away $200k per citizen for a rainy day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...)
Unfortunately, his staff doesn't seem to have been educated enough to realize that that spending is on graduate & research programs. Since that's where the money you can effectively cut is, that's what will get cut.
Why would those be untouchable"
This is not driven by accountants and budget people. This is driven by politics. Feel free to read Dunleavy's promises and budgets before election, and what he's doing now. He claimed there was hundreds of millions of easy money to be reclaimed without cutting important services. Turns out he was wrong, so he's going back on everything he said about the University and the ferry system.
He even cut funding to the courts because he didn't like one of their decisions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384388
Didn't click summary: After the cut, Alaska will still spend 3x more than average per student. And tuition rates are comparatively low.
Disclaimer: I am not a Trump supporter.
http://midnightsunak.com/2019/07/10/poll-dunleavys-approval-...
His reputation is utterly trashed across the whole state right now.
This is a little like discussion of frictionless surfaces and spherical cows in high school physics. In reality, a lot of laws are written for the rich minority.
Market forces at work.
The population should migrate toward areas where the temperature/humidity does not require resources just to be comfortable. The population should also migrate toward where energy that is renewable and trending toward free cost/free carbon (wind/solar) is prevalent.
Alaska is part an artifact of the fossil fuel industry and part a need to maintain the US border.
We will all pay a carbon tax and we'll all live with the results of our actions. Let the chips fall where they may.
The stem guys have it good anyways, lets just cut that!
What Alaska needs is a balanced package of raised taxes and budget controls, what we have is political gridlock and dysfunction.
I agree that we need a balanced package, but we also need to stop paying billions a year in tax credits and incentive to oil companies.
https://www2.ed.gov/about/reports/annual/2017report/fsa-repo...
That said - I too see this mindset that a lot that people will make arguments about what is and isn't government's business, but will only stick by it when it suits them. It either shouldn't be an argument in the first place, or it should be a principle you stand by regardless. None of this "small government" when it costs you money but "strong leadership" when it puts money back in your pocket.
The problem is the largest programs that already eat most of the budgets continue to expand to consume everything that's left. We dramatically increase taxpayer-funded healthcare spending while doing nothing about underlying healthcare costs and then wonder where all the money went.
These are solvable problems.
"Monopsony leverage" and "bargaining" is just price controls. You don't even need single payer for that if you want to do it, you can just legislate prices.
The problem is price controls have a long record of being problematic, because everybody wants lower prices but if you set the price too low you get shortages. This is complicated in this case by the fact that most of the cost is R&D, so the thing that isn't supplied isn't pills for already-developed drugs, it's research into new drugs. And then comparisons to other countries fall flat because it's a global market, so as long as anyone (i.e. the US) is paying a lot to create a return for R&D spending, the research gets done and the other countries get access to it.
So one of the reasons we pay so much more than everybody else is that we subsidize medical R&D for the rest of the world. Solving that isn't just a matter of us paying less, it also has to somehow involve them paying more, unless we want a lot less R&D.
Moreover, a lot of the costs basically amount to regulatory capture or drug companies outsmarting the government. It's them finding ways to limit competition for things that should be cheap commodities, or get patents on things that are only marginally better than the status quo, and use that to raise prices. So you have to find ways to distinguish that stuff from real medical advances that are actually worth paying higher costs to get. But if you can do that then you can restrain that type of behavior without actually regulating prices, so that genuine medical advances continue to get the funding they require to be developed. Which is really what we need to do, but easier said than done.
No, monopsony leverage is not the same as a price control. The minimum price that monoposony can give you is the cost to produce the given drug. Price controls allow you to mandate a price lower than their cost to produce, hence the negative effects you mention.
>This is complicated in this case by the fact that most of the cost is R&D
This is also false. Marketing outweighs the R&D budgets at most private pharmaceutical companies.
>a lot of the costs basically amount to regulatory capture or drug companies outsmarting the government
It sounds like you’re advocating for the dismantling of the drug patent system, which is a far more radical proposal. I agree that regulatory/market failure also contributes to high costs, it’s why I believe the free market poorly maps onto the problem of providing healthcare.
But their might be more priesthoods than he thought of.
I always remind myself, when I say "The government ought to X" that is someone else's money that I am using the might of the state to forcibly extract from them and spend on _my_ priorities.
Lack of new information plus grandiose ideological rhetoric guarantees a generic, predictable discussion.
t. born Alaskan