Semi-Daily Journal

This exposes privatization for the sham that it is.

So, you really do not want Citigroup running the United States Treasury?

- Sorry - I own the stock.

60 Minutes had a story last night on how unnecessarily big federal subsidies for a natural gas pipeline in Alaska are being included in the energy bill. Even the president opposes them, but thanks to powerful members of Congress like Young and Senator Ted Stevens, chairman of Senate Appropriations, Alaska will get its way (Bush is unlikely to veto the energy bill over just this). Others in Congress don't want to piss off the powerful Alaska pols, which accounts for the state's disproportionate influence in certain areas.

Residents of Alaska--those rugged individualists-receive more federal dollars per head than the reseidents of any other state..

JD's question - "So, you really do not want Citigroup running the United States Treasury?" - is of course the wrong one. Citigroup is regulated by the Treasury. That would be akin to having one airline running air traffic control. But privatized air traffic control has worked so well in so many places now that it seems rather strange the US, of all places, hasn't implemented it.

Of course, the banks do nominally own the Federal Reserve, and that seems to work well for everybody..

"This exposes privatization for the sham that it is."

Um, no. All this "exposes" is the hypocrisy of one Congressman.

As a member of an endangered species...a Democrat from Alaska, I'm long used to the antics of Don Young.

My guess is that for Young it's about control. As head of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee he can crack the whip and bend the FAA to his will much easier then perhaps some large multinational contractor that no doubt has many other political protectors (think Halburton). There's nothing that Don Young likes more than to crack the whip over Federal agencies. Ask the Forest Service about that when he was head of the House Resources Committee.

Regarding per-capita Federal spending in Alaska, the statistics are a little bit misleading. I don't have an exact outlay of Federal dollars going to Alaska but my understanding is that a large percentage of it goes towards resource management, native groups, and military. Not a lot of Federal dollars are spent in ways that directly benefit the average white Republican from suburban Anchorage.

Look at a political map of Alaska and you'll see that vast areas of the State are Federal lands and a whole host of alphabet agencies spend millions managing these lands. The NPS, USFWS, BLM, USFS, NOAA, etc. Then you have the millions that are spent by NMFS and the Coast Guard managing fisheries and patroling the Federal waters and coastline off Alaska, which far exceeds the combined coastlines of the other 49 states. Just maintaining the navigation buoys and markers given Alaska's ferocious winters is a huge task for the Coast Guard. The weather service spends a fortune tracking Alaska's weather, sea conditions, and ice conditions compared to what it spends in say Delaware. Even the Post Office spends a fortune to deliver mail to rural Alaska compared to what it spends per capita in the lower 48.

Then you have the native groups. Hundreds of millions of Federal dollars flow into the hundreds of tiny native villages that dot Alaska's coastline and interior. Welfare, medicare, medicaid, etc, etc. Without subsidies, the native communities of rural Alaska would vanish because they suck up a lot of resources but barely pay into any of these programs given that native rural Alaska is largely a subsistence economy.

Finally you have a lot of military spending in Alaska due to its strategic location next to Russia, China, Japan, and Korea. I expect that with SDI this has increased greatly. While some of this trickles into the local economy, a lot doesn't as a lot of the spending is at remote sites with no connection to local populations.

In the end, my guess is that the average middle-class suburban resident of Anchorage, Fairbanks, or Juneau doesn't benefit disproportionately from Federal spending compared to equivalent middle-class suburban residents of other states.

What conservative Alaskans will tell you in a heartbeat is that they will happily exchange control over Federal lands in Alaska for every cent that the state gets in Federal dollars. And they would probably be right in their assumption that the state would come out ahead in such a deal given the state's vast oil and mineral wealth. And then you would see drilling in ANWR the next day.