Alaskans, what are we doing? We have spent the last decade wringing our hands over the budget crisis and our now almost-gone savings. “Oh please, God, let us have a gas pipeline so we can continue spending money like there is no end to it, or at least drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge!” So, to no one’s utter shock, we get one little surge in oil prices, we get a dose of the old “Uncle Ted” treatment from Lisa Murkowski and Joe Biden, and it suddenly becomes high roller night in Macau again.
To my utter shock, I agreed at least in spirit with Bethany Marcum’s opinion piece of Sept. 18, in which she pointed out that we are spending $16 million on such important state priorities as school athletic facilities in the wealthiest parts of the Anchorage School District. The rich part is, her solution is to give us more gerrymandering, so we can have more “fiscal conservatives” in the House and Senate like the ones we have had while our state goes broke, bringing us more great, well-thought-out expenditures like the Mat-Su rail spur.
You don’t have to go beyond the pages of this publication to see stories of our state crumbling and failing, and yet we celebrate handing out $3,200 like it’s nothing. In the past months, I have seen stories on our schools needing repairs, and years of backlog, our ferries falling apart and being reduced to a skeleton schedule, and now today I see a story where we are No. 1 again — in men murdering women. Where is the money going to address that? Alaskans, you get the government you deserve, and well, we can see what we deserve when we elect people to hand out cash and not fund the basic roles of what government is supposed to be for.
— Shawn O’Donnell
Anchorage
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