61–70 of 134 posts
We are entering a new dark ages ruled by the priests of austerity, unable to value anything but short-term money.
1) Stop importing so many needy people. Do it today. Cut the welfare benefits in half or better.
2) Cut the pension obligations in half or better. The promises were overblown to begin with. Negotiating with pensioners is better than them getting nothing and us getting high taxes and nothing else.
51.4% voted for this governor in 2018, so I have to conclude that this is the outcome that most voters wanted. When you vote for a party that wants smaller government, it should be no surprise when you get fewer government services.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The general austerity theory is contradicted by the fact that government budgets in most of the US haven't been reduced. 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.
Such a big issue. We all see the high healthcare and education costs and want healthcare and higher education for all, but our healthcare (current system) is way more expensive than other developed nations' and college prices have only increased over time, turning student loans into college administrators. We'll have to address this inflation either way.
These are solvable problems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure about Alaska, but if you look at voter turn out demographics in California - it's very skewed by senior citizens. Who, unsurprisingly, aren't that excited about education or higher taxes.
We have systems that give equal weight to a vote made by somebody with 5 years left on the planet and somebody with 50 years left. That's a huge incentive divide and it favors short term thinking. In many ways it's unfair and sub-optimal, but I don't foresee it changing.
This is in some ways a preview of why the theory of basic income replacing other government spending (and therefore being fiscally conservative and libertarian) is false. Alaska is redirecting money from universities to basic income (the oil dividend) and it’s considered an outrage. The same thing would happen for any government program.
I understand a well off nation ruled by democracy due to distributed table-stakes, and a poor nation ruled by a dictator due to centralized table-stakes, but I've never known a well off nation to intentionally sabotage its own table-stakes in order to surrender to dictatorship. Why is this happening? Who supports it? Why do they think it is necessary?
What is kind of interesting is - does it make sense for the environment to actually grow the population of Alaska? Its not like its an easy environment to live in without using an increasing amount of greenhouse gases. 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…
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The Alaska budget cuts are not only to the University. Deep cuts across the board with services Governor Dunleavy feels are unnecessary taking the biggest hit (public health, university, public ferry transportation). However, according to Alaska's constitution the government must come up with a balanced budget. They have failed to do so since revenue shortfalls began. The previous governor used a stopgap measure of u…
While this may be true, Alaska, unlike almost all other states, basically operates without any income or sales taxes. They depend almost entirely on oil revenue and property taxes which obviously isn't sustainable long term. https://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/state-taxes-alaska.as...
Edit: 75% for government not 25%. 25% is for the dividend fund.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That money has to come from somewhere, and it's going to be the voting minority. This is not dictatorship, this is pure democracy in action - the popular vote. Tyranny of the majority. 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.
I agree that there is a lot of regulatory capture in lawmaking. However, this is a case of exactly the opposite. The cuts are happening to a relatively wealthy minority in Alaska (academics, college attendees, the engineering community, and oil corporations that depend on engineering schools) while more popular welfare and training programs go untouched.
This is in some ways a preview of why the theory of basic income replacing other government spending (and therefore being fiscally conservative and libertarian) is false. Alaska is redirecting money from universities to basic income (the oil dividend) and it’s considered an outrage. The same thing would happen for any government program.
Well, in theory, people can use that basic income to pay for school... or they could, if the school wasn't so bloated and overpriced, which the school has been getting away with because the government has been giving it so much money.
https://www2.ed.gov/about/reports/annual/2017report/fsa-repo...