Mike Dunleavy will get you Permanent Fund Dividend back, and everything else, balance the budget, and not cut your PFD nor implement an income tax.
Exactly what we all want to hear. Dunleavy, you meet the standard of being a great politician. Thanks for quitting the Legislature to be our next (best) governor. Not.
How is he going to do all this? Not only balance current budget, but pay the funds used for the previous deficit back? He doesn’t say. In his years as a legislator failing to solve the deficit, his plan as a governor is to cut the budget to meet revenue, with no ideas for new revenue other than to hope that oil prices pick up. This means we further cut the state budget, which is already bleeding all of us, no matter where you live, further below the bone.
Does that sound good to you? It doesn’t to me, particularly to those of us that live in Juneau who will be devastated by more cuts and the insidious migration of jobs outside of our closed community (of which we are hostages and virtually powerless to counteract).
Doesn’t sound like a viable plan to me. Sounds like a continuation of Dunleavy’s inaction as a legislator to deal with reality and translate it for political gain. I don’t begrudge his lack of a plan – why not advocate something absurdly “realistic” to get elected – that’s politics!
Dunleavy doesn’t have an equation or a plan to pay for a reasonable level of services. Not only is there not a solution for meeting current demands, but he’s telling us that he will pay us back for previous years’ dividend cuts. He wants to cut us below the bone, and is apparently hoping that oil prices will make everything well. This seems delusional, particularly when piling on prior years decisions that we don’t need to revisit, which will lead us deeper into a bigger hole. Our only solution appears to be to acknowledge the hard decisions Bill Walker made for all of us. While I appreciate the job Mark Begich did as our senator, we can’t afford to split our vote and enable the election of Mike Dunlevy.
Brian Goettler,
Juneau
My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire.