David Reaume

A silver dollar is sitting on the table. You wish to know if it is fairly balanced or not. If you toss it into the air 10 times and it comes up heads seven of those 10 times, what does that tell you about the coin?

Alaska's three urban populations are becoming ever more deeply divided. There are the "Job Secure," meaning those who work in the health care industry or for the state and federal governments; the "Job Tenuous," meaning those who work for virtually any other employer including local government; and the "Job Less."

Many will not believe it, but it is a fact that the state of Alaska's record on controlling government spending is exemplary compared with that of the federal government and the majority of the other 49 states.

Tier I research universities such as Harvard and Stanford are notorious for having mega-sized undergraduate classes and also for having relatively untrained graduate students carry too much of the teaching load. Even so, Harvard, Stanford, Duke, the University of Chicago and the other top 50 or so research universities continue to turn out top-notch graduates.

On Sept. 29, exactly one week after it had been introduced, the U.S. House of Representatives hurriedly passed H.R. 6160, the Rare Earths and Critical Materials Act of 2010.

My Sept. 12 column described just how hard it is to get a grip on where the Alaska economy is and where it is going. The fundamental problem highlighted there was that 2009 preliminary employment numbers showed significantly more job growth than has proven to be the case.

The most reliable of the state Department of Labor's three sets of employment numbers tells us that Alaska's current economic performance and outlook are not quite as benign as many people have been led to believe. Instead of employment growing by 0.5 percent in 2009 as had been reported in the least reliable numbers, it actually fell by 0.5 percent (1,600 jobs).

The U.S. economy, the world economy and, yes, the Alaska economy are perched on a knife edge. No one knows whether to expect rapid inflation, destructive deflation or continued malaise. So what should you do? What should policy makers do?

One of the threats that both business and government decision-makers face today is excessive caution caused by the current epidemic of excessive criticism.

My May 23 column argued that the Obama administration's goal of having every child graduate from college was out of touch with reality and did a disservice to a great many of our students. I took that position because anywhere from one-sixth to one-half of elementary and secondary students are too far down the bell curve to reasonably be expected to succeed in college.

What is the most pressing problem facing public education today? Is it America's need to continue to increase math and science standards so that every child can "graduate and succeed in college"? Or is it the fact that year in and year out about one-third of every eighth-grade graduating class either settles for a GED or drops out of high school before receiving a diploma?

Alaska's energy needs are too important to allow decisions to be made without careful consideration of the alternatives. With that thought in mind, will everyone who cares please sit tight and wait until all of the alternatives are reasonably well understood before urging decision-makers to plunge ahead and build an in-state natural gas pipeline.

How good or bad is the Social Security retirement benefit? How does it compare with a hypothetical 401(k) plan with identical contribution rates? How does the Social Security retirement benefit compare with the retiree's immediate pre-retirement annual earnings? Is Social Security a welfare program or just another regressive tax that bears more heavily on low income folks than it does on high income folks?

One of the ironically perverse products of the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 is that once the economy has recovered we are almost certainly going to have to raise federal income taxes.

In my January column I went on record with a forecast for Alaska nonagricultural employment, down 1 to 2 percent in both 2010 and 2011.