Thursday 5/22/25 | Sarah Montalbano on Energy | Robb Myers

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The Michael Dukes Show, streaming live across the world. Oh yeah, live around the world on the internet at... michaeldukeshow.com and live around the state of Alaska on this, your favorite radio station and or FM translator. Hello, my friends, and good morning to it. It is the Thursday edition. thursday how did we get to thursday uh of the michael duke show good morning and welcome Do it. We're ready to go. Well, I mean, kind of ready to go. We'll see what's going on. Full show today.

Full show today, and we're going to be jumping into it here in just a hot second with the lovely... Sarah Montalbano. You know her. Now, I know you're freaked out because it's not Monday. And normally, she's on for Mondays. Montalbano Monday. Which, you know. i'm a genius i came up with that moniker uh but uh we're gonna be you know we're gonna be talking to her today because monday we're gonna be on vacation because of memorial day so i was like i gotta get her

Because we're going to talk about, you know, the Susitna thing came out earlier this week. And I thought, well, I mean, we're going to talk about this. Because, again, this is a project that's been touted in Alaska for 50 years. And, you know, why hasn't it happened yet? And it's probably because of the economics. But I mean, what's going on with that? And we're going to compare that to some of the things that are going on right now in Minnesota. Sarah is working for the American experiment.

She has written several things specifically about what's going on with the Mid-Continental Independent System Operators Report. which has to do with basically energy production in the Midwest. Which sounds kind of dry and boring, but it's kind of freaky when you actually read it, okay, guys? I'm just saying, buckle up, buttercup. This is what's happening. So we're going to talk about that in Alaska and renewables and blah, blah, blah. But it's going to be a lot of stuff this morning.

It's gonna be exciting! And then we're going to deal with State Senator Rob Myers in hour two to get a post-session wrap-up. And at that point, Sarah's going to bail, and she's going to be, thank God I don't have to talk about the Alaska political environment. Or because... I'm sure it's just... anyway so we're gonna you know that's it so what else was there oh the thing i'm off on monday that was it that was it let's do it let's get to it let's just jump in let's let's get it going on

and see what our friend Sarah Montalbano has to say for us this morning. Hello, Sarah. How are you? Howdy, Michael. I'm doing well. How about you? You know, not too bad. It's Thursday. I am awake and above ground. That's pretty much the highlight of my day at this point. You can find Sarah's, by the way. You can find Sarah's. You can find plenty of Sarah's out here. But this Sarah is at Montalbano Monday on Substack.

where she writes all the time mostly about energy stuff, but sometimes about whatever she feels like, because it's her place. She can do what she wants. And she joins us to talk about this. So Sarah... First off, I guess I know that you and I talked right after I read this article about Susitna. And you hadn't heard about the letter yet and everything else. So first of all, can we get your thoughts on this?

180 degree turnaround from the utilities across the state. This was every utility company across the state. Pretty much said, well, by the way, we should just go ahead and get $100 million and restart this whole Susitna Watana damn thing and start talking about it. I'm a huge fan of hydro, but obviously there's some issues here with this because here we are 50 years later. The 10-year-ago price was $5.6 billion, I think, was the quoted price.

10 years ago, which, you know, that calls into question the economics of the whole thing and everything else. What's your thoughts as you look back at this and you've done some reading since then and kind of got up to speed? Tell me what your thoughts are here. Yeah, this is fascinating. I started digging into this and I really think it's an interesting turn from utilities and it's something we're kind of seeing across the U.S. where utilities are sounding the alarm.

about their demand and how they can actually meet that demand. Especially in the Midwest, there's a lot of realization that they simply don't have the firm baselet resources.

uh that they need and i think that's what a lot of this utility letter is is saying is not only do we want to investigate the possibility of being able to do this hydro project this is it not a hydropower dam, but also that we're we're really with our natural gas shortage, we're facing some imminent decisions about resource mix.

And one of the sentences that I just loved from this letter that I thought was really emblematic of the shift in thinking as Most energy decisions have long-lasting consequences and therefore should be based on costs, reliability, fuel diversity, and technology. That's just a 180, I think, from the way that things have been thought about up until this year or maybe last, is really that we need to be prioritizing affordable and reliable energy first.

And we also need to make sure that we have all of these reliability attributes because if we're too dependent on intermittent wind and solar or we're too dependent on natural gas. we are going to face some serious issues with reliability. Yeah, and this strictly isn't an Alaskan issue at this point because across the country, Over the last 25 years, there has been such a huge push.

towards this idea, this perfect utopian evolution of renewables, how wind and solar were going to be the thing that... took us off fossil fuels and everything else. But the reality of that has been... something completely different right i mean it's just completely something and that has to do with what they call dispatchable power Mm-hmm. Absolutely. So dispatchable power is the kind of power that you can turn on and off when you need it.

uh which you think well that's you know very obvious but that's the kind of stuff like natural gas coal uh even to a certain extent nuclear although ramping up and down uh takes more effort with that kind of source Those are the kind of things that we want to see. And hydropower also fits into that. It can provide a reliable baseload. Some technology in hydropower, you can hold this water behind the dam and create a battery of sorts.

and you can save some of that energy for later. But for the most part, what you need are these reliable baseload sources that can produce a predictable amount when you need it, largely with... you know things you can control uh and wind and solar can't do that wind and solar are intermittent they're weather dependent and what we're seeing in the lower 48 which alaska can't do

is that the grids that have made some kind of dumb resource planning decisions, largely forced by state policies like renewable portfolio standards, These grids strengthen their injured ties to other grids that aren't so handicapped by these requirements you know minnesota's importing a lot of electricity from north dakota why because north dakota can actually burn coal and natural gas and they are actually able to just export that to the Midwest and Alaska doesn't have that.

For the most part, we just have the rail belt utilities that can kind of interconnect with each other, but the planning isn't there in the same way that it is for the lower 48. So it's a really interesting predicament we have here. I'm largely encouraged that there's discussions about reliability on the rail belt. And it's the same kind of thing we're seeing everywhere. I just think the stakes are higher. Yeah, I'm just not sure that, and I agree, but I'm just not sure that

the Susitna project was the one to glom onto, right? Because again, 50 years, this has been going on. It's got a huge price tag. And utilities, generally speaking, should be the one to be building out their generation systems. But it looks like they're asking the state to pick up the tab. The state's broke. The 10-year price was $5.6 billion. You could probably double that for today.

you know, from 10 years ago. And that's the biggest part. And there's other things, silt in the water and will the thing ever work? And then you've got the environmental concerns or issues of these environmental groups. As you look at this, what are your thoughts on Sucitna specifically? I mean, maybe there's other. They've done Broadly Lakes. They've got Terror Lakes and Kodiak. I mean, they've got all these different projects that have worked.

I think they're smaller projects, but is Sidney the answer in your mind as you look at this, or is this just the beginning of a sea change? I think it's something to explore. I share your reservations about the economics. It was canceled in 2016 by Governor Walker in response to, I think, $1.5 billion in extensive budget cutting. 2019, Dunleavy lifted the stop order, but it never got funding again, so it hasn't been pursued.

The project is really supposed to have a capacity of about 460 megawatts, which is about. half of the rail belt's peak demand right now. So that would be very significant in itself to alleviate this natural gas shortage. But I also think it's super important to recognize that with the controversial nature of its environmental impacts, we will have to do

serious due diligence in the permanent process here to make sure that we can do it safely. And I think it probably can be done safely, but we would not want to cut any corners in that. And that's going to take years. That's going to take longer than we have to get to the natural gas solution there. But it's definitely something to explore. And I don't think there's any harm in... looking into the licensing for it, I think.

projects like these ought to be able to go through the permitting process to see if it can be done safely. But again, it would rely a lot upon investors and where is the state and federal government funding for it? Because I do think you're right that I'm... I'm skeptical. Once again, one of my favorite words. I'm skeptical that the economics will work out on this. Yeah, I mean, look, I am happy to see that there is a sea change.

uh in the in the direction that they're talking about that all of a sudden they're perking up and saying well wait we renewables are not going to do it for us overall but again just the construction if we had everything in hand and we're ready to go today I imagine that this would probably be a 10-year construction project. Five to 10 years, probably, to build this dam out.

And with, like you said, with vigorous environmental safety standards and everything else, it'll be another five years, maybe ten years to get off. This is a 20-year project. This is not a, we're going to fix this when gas runs out in two years. It's a 15-year long-term project. But producing 50% of the power on the rail belt, that could be a huge deal.

It could be, yeah. And, you know, the way Mat-Su is growing, you know, there's very credible predictions about how much the rail belt's going to need. I think one that I saw in my research this morning is that we'd need 1600 megawatts by 2050. So growing these larger shares of baseload power, I think would be very beneficial. And there's also the fact that these are large upfront capital costs, but they can be. producing energy for a low marginal cost

on the megawatt hour. That's my other concern with it is making sure that rate payers aren't actually going to be suffering the cost of this. You know, I think there's a limited amount of costs that could be. passed to the rate payer here fairly. But this is a huge capital investment. There's no other way to put that. Yeah, no, it is huge. And again, this to me looks like they're coming instead of...

Jenning up, coming together as combined co-ops and looking for their own investments and everything else. It looks to me like they're walking up to the government with their hand out saying, hey, you guys should pay for this, which is not. necessarily the way it's done in other parts of the state, other parts of the country, rather. But this state's a little bit different. And Kevin, who is spending his last few hours in Juneau this morning as a representative, points out that it's ironic.

that do you know what the folks in juno enjoy hydro power because they've got the huge hydro dam there down at the you know again but let's not build another one anywhere else in the state you know everybody they've got theirs nobody else needs it I've never understood why we haven't explored more hydro in this state since it is obviously, in the long term, some of the cheapest energy that anybody enjoys in the country at this point.

Absolutely. And, you know, there are states that have tried to rip out their hydro dams. I think there was one in Washington that they decided. oh wait, we actually can't do this because we would not have enough electricity to meet our demands if we did that.

over environmental concerns. So, you know, obviously making sure we do this right is incredibly important, but I think we can go through the paperwork, go through the permitting and see if it would shake out. Yeah, no, I absolutely think we could. Sarah Montalbano is our guest. You can find her at Montalbano Mondays.

which I just realized that I didn't have that up on the screen for her to see. You can find her at sarahmantelbano.substack.com, and of course she writes for the American Experiment as well. as a genius. She's a genius. And she comes on this program, which shows her genius. That's what it is right there. We're going to continue here in just a minute. I'm going to actually push the right button this time. And we'll be back. It's Thursday. that tomorrow's Firearms Friday

Yeah, I just thought I'd mention that. Oh, baby. I need some therapy this week. Alright, we're going to be back in just a moment. Don't go anywhere. The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense. Liberty Based. Free Thinking Radio. Back with more. Right after this. Running on 100% pure beard power. Oh, also, some coffee. We dip our beard in coffee. Ha, nice beard. The Michael Duke Show. Okay, we're in the break with Sarah Montalbano, who joins us this morning.

Grab your computer and pull it down just a little bit so that your head is... a little bit higher feeling. There you go. That's good. I think it was, was it Lily Tomlin that was always in the small chair, you know, that would, you know, or she was small. She was in that huge chair, made her look like a little girl. So I said, all I could see was a little girl there.

So here's Sarah Montalbano. It's so good to talk with you. I'm so happy. Thank you for coming on now that you've moved on to bigger and better things and you're a big shot on the internet with your own website and everything. It's good stuff. You know, this is what kills me, Sarah. We in Alaska, and this was Brad Keithley's point. I don't know if you've watched Brad Keithley much or followed him on the program here. Alaskans for sustainable budgets, and he and I had this discussion.

And he's like, look, this is the utility's responsibility. This is the utilities and the RCA. The RCA should be doing its job to basically be holding the utilities accountable for providing, because they have a monopoly, a state-registered monopoly, and they're the ones that are supposed to be doing this. And even though they've changed 180 degrees now, that doesn't alleviate their responsibility. And what it feels like.

is that this is all part of that whole Alaska, what we call, we lightly call the Alaska study industry. Well, we're going to study the study that we studied before to study the numbers, to study those numbers before we study the final study. you know and and and that's and that's that's crazy isn't it i mean because he's right This is $100 million they're asking for.

to study the numbers that they had before, to study those numbers to make sure that they're up to speed to study. We've poured hundreds of millions of dollars into studies. There's probably a room that's the size of the Library of Congress. with all the studies that have been done in this state and show.

Yeah, I mean, it feels like a cop out for me to say, you know, we should be studying it again. But it really is. There's a lot to be done in the intervening decade we've had from the last numbers. And I just, I... to a certain extent i want to see these enormous long-term things we've been talking about since the 70s projects i want us to figure it out um and either do it or put it to bed

yeah really that's a lot of what i feel no i mean i'm with you it's frustrating it's like how long have we been talking about this i mean since the late 60s they've been talking about The Susitna Watana project. I mean, I remember in the 80s, it was a huge, oh, there's Susitna, we get that thing downed up, we'll have more power, we know what to do. And I'm like, here we are, you know, 50 years later, and you're like, okay, guys, seriously.

poop or get off the pot, right? I mean, either put it to bed and write it off as money gone bad or, you know, why not, if it's such a huge deal, Why not get some micro hydro, right? Why not put up smaller dams on smaller areas? I mean, we've got the... i mean hell in in fairbanks we got the china flood control project is there a way to divert some of those you know some of those waters from the tannin on move it to can we do micro you know i mean there are other things to do and that's again

the most sustainable long... I keep looking at Hoover Dam. Hoover Dam has been there for over a hundred years and it's producing power to this day at five cents a kilowatt hour. for the big chunk of the west coast i mean it's a huge it's incredible it isn't cute it's a huge now yeah i mean that was a huge mega project but i'm just saying take that on a smaller scale why are we not Why are we not looking at those things?

Absolutely. No, I think Hydra makes a lot of sense for Alaska. Of course, you know my favorite solution to these things. Oh, you. modular reactors um i think that's a great idea too but um you know hydropower has so many advantages It really does. Yeah, no, and like you said, micronuclear, even small micro hydro. I mean, there's tidal discussions. There's so many other ways that, again, are...

constant, consistent baseline power. That's the difference between a renewable like a high tidal or thermal versus wind or solar is that it is a constant Power. All right, we're going to keep on. We're going to talk about this miso report. And no, it's not miso soup, which now I'm hungry. It is the MISO report, and we're going to talk about that because I think that's the canary in the coal mine. I don't know what Sarah thinks, but we're going to get her take on it here in a second.

And we'll continue on. Please like and share. Like and follow. Send everybody to Sarah's Substack page. Over there, sarahmantobano.substack.com. Here we go. Public enema number one. Oh, wait, sorry. Ah, enemy. Public enemy number one, which makes more sense. On the other hand, he's a little bit of a pain in the Michael Duke show. I... he's right i am i'm a pain in the michael duke show good morning good morning my friends welcome back to the program

Sarah Montalbano, who you can find over on Substack at sarahmontalbano.substack.com. Just look for Montalbano Mondays, and you will find her writings. She writes... pretty exclusively about energy issues across the states. She's writing for the American Experiment. Her latest piece, from, well, I don't know if it's her latest, latest piece, but the one that caught my attention is the one about the Mid-Continent Independent System Operator Report.

Uh, and it's, uh, that's Miso. And it is, Sarah, it's what I call the canary in the coal mine. because this is happening across the country. This report just seems to be kind of at the bleeding edge of what's going on. So we were just talking about hydro in Alaska. Explain to me how this kind of links in with this whole MESO report and some of the problems and what does it mean overall.

Absolutely. At first, if you're thinking you don't want to subscribe to my sub stack because I only talk about energy, I also talk, I wrote a couple weeks ago about Ranked Choice Voting, and that was for the spring edition of American Experiment. magazine Thinking Minnesota. So I'm not only talking energy, I'm trying to dabble a bit. My most recent piece on MISO I think is really concerning because this is coming from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, or NERC.

And the electric in the lower 48 is really kind of a crazy system, especially these kind of monopoly utilities. because NERC is responsible for figuring out reliability standards and how much is going to be okay. MISO actually operates the grid. doing their market-based system to determine who's getting paid what for what kind of electricity generation at what time they're operating that electricity market. The utilities are actually deciding what kind of generation to build.

And then states especially kind of boneheaded ones like Minnesota get to decide their public policies around renewable portfolio standards and you know minnesota has passed a 100 clean electricity by 2040 bill that's in place and that was passed in 2023. So, you know, that's what's going on in the greater landscape. MISO covers most of the Midwest. It covers some North Dakota, South Dakota too.

And what NERC has said in its summer reliability assessment, just looking at the coming months here, MISO is preparing to retire about 1,500 megawatts of natural gas and coal.

And they pull no punches here in placing the blame squarely on wind and solar, which was really exciting to see. The quote that I want to say here is, you know from their report the decline in dispatchable generation and the increasing share that solar and wind resources have in meeting demand is the culprit um they're they're absolutely putting the finger right where it should be on this increasingly variable and intermittent source because MISO is really

Yards ahead, not not miles, but yards ahead of the other grids in doing this to their resource mix. Right. And again, the decline in, again, dispatchable generation, which means constant baseline. You can turn it on, turn it off. you know turn the coal fire up turn the gas fire up turn the gas fire down that's what's causing it and this is again coming from this

what appears to be a suicide pact amongst all the states that we need to get these renewables up and running. And of course, when they say renewables with a capital R, They're only talking about winded solar. Right? Hydro is almost a dirty word because, oh, the environmental impact. They never talk about the environmental impact. My favorite quote is from the show Landsman. I don't know if you've been watching that, Sarah.

You should watch it. You should watch it. You would get such a kick out of it. because he talks about You know, a single wind turbine. You know, three quarters of an acre of concrete beneath this thing. Hundreds of gallons of gear lube that need to be produced into this clean wind turbine. I mean, he just talks about all the things that are...

uh you know kind of ridiculous about it but when they talk about renewables with a capital r that's what they're talking about they're not talking about tidal they're not talking about geothermal they're not talking about hydro things that have constant baselines They're talking about wind and solar. And we've been seeing this throwing standardized dispatchable generation to the wind. And like you said, Minnesota's on the cutting edge.

And the story is, this is not just going to become a problem in, you know, those extreme usages where it's super cold or super hot. This is going to start affecting just regular old peak usage, right? Yeah, absolutely. And that gets at what NERC's warning about this summer is that MISO is at an elevated risk of shortfalls under extreme conditions. That's what they mean by elevated. potential for heat waves to cause rolling blackouts.

What's concerning also is that their long-term reliability assessment over the next 10 years is saying that MISO is going to be at a high risk. of blackouts. And that is, you know, the potential to fall short under normal peak conditions. you know that electricity demand isn't constant through the day people come home from work they turn on their lights they start cooking dinner you know the electricity demand will grow at certain peak times

And there's a possibility over the next 10 years that MISO is going to start seeing normal peak demand problems. And that is pretty squarely on the back of the increasing share that wind and solar have in the generation mix. And yeah, you're absolutely right that we really can't look at other sources for renewables. Hydropower, I don't think there's very much of.

Nuclear is one possibility, but unfortunately, Minnesota has decided to have a moratorium on the construction of any new nuclear reactors. The several that we do have provide about 20%. of Minnesota's renewable, well, entire generation mix, and it's a large portion of the renewable share too.

So those count, but once those have aged, once those are decommissioned, there's going to be some serious problems unless that is lifted. So yeah, it's a real pickle we've gotten ourselves into over here in the Midwest. Yeah, no, and it's kind of crazy, again, because you talk about aging out, and that's, I mean, that's the problem that we're getting right, that, you know, Miser has right now, right, is that they've, like you said, they've aged out.

you know, so many megawatts of power that were created by dispatchable sources, you know, coal and natural gas, etc. And now they're turning to these other things. And as those older things age out, and especially with moratoriums in place, it's just going to get worse. And then you talk about the interconnectivity of all the grids. And, you know, you pointed out that, you know, Texas has got the ERCOT, which is the Texas one. You've got the SPP, which covers a big chunk of the lower Midwest.

and MRO, which is in the upper Midwest. You've got all these other ones, and they're all tied together. And if one domino falls, that could create a huge problem. Absolutely, and it's one of the things that I think will backfire on kind of the renewable plan because so far, What MISO and other grids have been able to do is bail themselves out of peak demand problems by, you know, having power purchase agreements with grids and interconnect.

which means they can get the reliable dispatchable power from their neighbors when they need to. But that, I think, will really have some... unfortunate effects as we're all kind of moving in this direction I think You know, this is largely touted as a solution to the renewable problem because, well, the wind's blowing somewhere. We can shift that around. But what we've seen, at least in Minnesota with... transfers from Canada.

is that the weather is largely the same in your neighboring regions. You're going to see largely the same conditions. And honestly, what those grids need is to be able to keep their own energy. You know, there's a lot of technical problems with shuttling this electricity back and forth with different grid interconnect. And I can't see it as a long-term solution to the problem here.

Yeah, we're seeing some good, knowledgeable people in the chat. ERCOT isn't interconnected, and that's created its own problems. ERCOT's the grid that is covering Texas and is pretty much... full on the wind and solar and what NERC said in its summer reliability assessment. And I encourage anyone interested to go to my sub stack and follow the links to it there.

but ERCOT is at an elevated risk this summer because the growing portion of solar in their grid is meaning that there's a very predictable drop at the end of the day and that is creating growing challenges for them. I love that because I'm sorry to interrupt you but

I love that idea that, you know, we're going to depend on solar and everything's going to be great. And, you know, it'll be a thing. And then some guy in the back of the room says, you know that the sun goes down at the end of the day? And do you know when our peak usage is?

You know, from the hours of 5 to 10 at night, that's our peak usage, you know? And there's no sunlight after that. You know, realize that, right? I mean, that's the thing. You know, you would have to cover the entire state of Texas with... with windmills and solar panels to be able to get all of it. They're trying. Yeah, and they're trying. Exactly. They're trying. It's crazy.

Absolutely. And, you know, others would say to me, well, let's build large battery energy storage systems. In that case, we'll save some of that solar for when we need it in the evening. help but it's not also going to be a cure-all because the largely most efficient use of batteries right now is just

to discharge for a couple minutes to smooth over the demand ramp up for dispatchable resources. Those batteries are mostly used right now to make it easier for coal and natural gas to come online and to plug the gap right there before they're just really not built right now for repeated full discharges for a long time. Well, it's a buffer, right? I mean, it's supposed to be a buffer as you switch from one to the other as the wind falls off.

and demand on the dispatchable side comes up. That's what the battery's supposed to smooth out. And that's what somebody else said on some... Oh, well, we just need more storage. Do you have any idea what it takes to build a battery storage for megawatts of power? Do you realize how much... you know, rare earth metals, heavy metals. Do you realize the construction of those and the lifespan? The lifespan of those batteries is pretty short. And when you look at, I mean, when we look at generation.

uh lifespans for net for regular generation you're talking the 20 30 40 year lifespan but these batteries have a lifespan of like 10 years and if you if you if you use them hard it reduces the lifespan of them Yeah, I mean, the lifespan is a direct function of how many discharge cycles it goes through. And if you're discharging it more often, you should expect your lifespan to decline.

And I want to say it's around 4,000 discharge cycles for a lot of these utility scale batteries. Don't quote me on that. But I do think this is not going to be a cure-all for the problem of wind and solar, especially when there are a lot of hazards for the chemicals that are frankly toxic in them. that create fires, all of the risks that EV battery fires pose, that also poses for battery storage systems. There was a California incident at Moss Landing earlier this year.

that 1,200 residents had to evacuate and a lot of them were reporting feeling sick afterward. So this is not an easy solution either. no it's not and i am happy to see at least somebody is starting to talk about hey this is the problem It's not the cure-all. It's not the magic bullet. It's not the solution. And now we're seeing people turn back towards, as we saw in this utility letter, back more towards this dispatchable renewables in hydro, etc., etc.

I want to continue to talk about this with Sarah Montalbano. And I want to talk about the overall plan in general up next. You know, how... Nationwide, they're now facing this problem and how it's going to look. As we move forward. Are we going to continue to push this narrative of wind and solar as the solution? Or are cooler heads going to prevail? We're going to get back to it. Back with more. Don't go anywhere. The Michael Duke Show. Common sense. Liberty based. If you missed the show

Listen to it on your time with Duke's On Demand. Oh, and it's... Like, Americans. Streaming live every weekly morning on Facebook Live and... show.com. Yep. Sarah's a favorite among the guests. right there. Loveless. I know. They love me. They really love me. I know. I've never felt like a celebrity before. Oh, you should. You always bring such good stuff. You take a subject that's pretty dry and you make it educational and entertaining, which I appreciate it. Yeah, I, uh...

This is so mind-boggling to me. Before we get into that, though, since we're in the break, you just went to Washington, D.C. I saw all your pictures. You were having a good time. Tell me about that trip. What was that all about? That was really exciting. I was invited to come to the Women's Mining Coalition fly-in earlier this month and it was really exciting. I met with 20 something staffers I met.

Congressman Pete Stauber from Minnesota. I got to see Nick Begich again very briefly, shake his hand, get a picture. It was just a really fantastic time, and it's really incredible. friendliness and the bipartisanship on mining right now. That's really what I came away with was just the wow. Everyone is concerned about this now. And that's because we're sourcing our minerals from overseas and we now understand that that's not going to be sustainable. Yeah, no, it's not smart. I mean...

You know, anybody with a strategic bone in their body would have said, you know, sure, get it while you can, but you should have a fallback. And that's where we're at right now. It's going to be. It's going to be crazy. You've been to Washington before. I've never been to D.C. Was that your first time? I've been to DC before, but I've never gotten to do the...

Capitol office visits and go tour the Capitol and things like that. So that was extremely cool. The Halls of Power. I was walking the halls of power. They were. I was. It was pretty great. It's pretty great. It's pretty great. Well, I will say this. We do miss you up here. We do miss you up here. And... I'm just grateful that you deigned to spend some time with us occasionally to talk about this kind of stuff because this is important.

this is so much fun i miss you also yeah well and this this this what blows my mind about this sarah is that because of this interconnectivity one I guess I could say bad actor. I mean, just Minnesota, for example. Completely offering a complete moratorium on anything new and nuclear. is that could be the Achilles heel of the whole system if they remain tied together.

Right? I mean, if everybody else gets their act together and is able to stabilize their grids and create enough power, but Minnesota's back here falling behind and they're having to continue to pump energy into that grid. It creates a problem for everybody. I mean, we remember, what was it? 15 years ago, they had that blackout with the NPCC in New York. Remember, there was an eight-hour blackout in New York that was all across the whole East Coast.

And I don't remember what the reasoning, I can't remember why it happened, but that just showed you how closely connected all those things are. And we haven't even touched on potential cyber terrorism or anything else i mean because again i mean that's a whole nother thing right Yeah, so many things to touch on. I think what happens in New England most often is that they're pretty dependent on natural gas too.

And what happens is, you know, natural gas is first siphoned off from the industrial customers to go to, you know, residential stuff. But what happens with natural gas when you're splitting it? Sources. for electricity as well as home heating. Home heating takes priority over electricity. So that was, I think, a large portion of that problem, at least in general. I don't know exactly what happened there.

The other thing I wanted to say, oh, the cyber stuff is very much on my radar right now. And I just wrote on American Experiment about some. rogue that that's the word they're using rogue Chinese communication devices on solar power inverters and the inverters convert AC to DC and DC to AC. That is really concerning. That's really scary because the Chinese government can require their companies to hand over that data.

And if they have that data, they may also have control and they might also be able to shut down these inverters. systems and it's very scary. I'm not well versed on it enough now. Well, yeah, we should have another conversation about that because that was... They had an inverter that they didn't install in California because of that, right? I mean, there was a big deal where they discovered this.

malicious hardware software or potentially malicious hardware software on this huge multi-megawatt inverter system that they were about to install and they were like wait a second wait a second yeah hold up let's not inject that poison pill into our body um and that's uh yeah it's it's crazy

So, uh, all right, well, let's, let's get the big picture here up next, Sarah. We can touch on the cyber, uh, cyber terrorism and things like that if you want. Um, it's, uh, but it is some spooky stuff because without electricity. We got some problems. Let's just put it that way. Sarah Montalbano is our guest. The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense. Liberty-based. Free thinking radio. Like. Share. Subscribe. Ring the bell. Do all the things. The Michael Duke Show. Not your daddy. Wait, sorry.

We were going down. Not your daddy, nor do I play him on TV, although I could. Yes, I could. Welcome back to the program. Sarah Montalbano is our guest. She's with the American Experiment, writer, author. resident genius. Uh, you also find her at Sarah Montalbano dot substack.com, uh, which is where you'll find her, uh, where you'll find her Montalbano Mondays, uh, uh, post.

where she writes about all the things that she's been writing about. It's kind of crazy. Got a little spooky there during the break. We were talking a little bit about cyberterrorism and some of the crazy stuff that's going on there, which Sarah's been digging into a little bit.

and we hope to have her back on that but sarah let's back up and take up the 10 000 foot view here okay because we've got we started off with susitna as the utilities in Alaska seem to all of a sudden have all come together and said, oh, well, maybe we need something more sustainable. We went on to MISO and all the stuff that's going on with the Midwest and the big power grid that crosses the entire country.

and the fact that they're all going to be suffering in one form or another in the near future of problems based pretty much on this drive for renewables. And now we just touched on the whole thing with the cyber terrorism and the... the Chinese parts and software and code and hardware in a lot of these new panels that are being made and interchanges and things like that.

So give me the 10,000 foot view of where you think the American energy systems overall are going to be and what the focus change needs to be. that's a good question i think what we're finding out now is that when everyone is responsible for grid reliability no one really is And when I say that, I'm mostly talking about the lower 48 because of these regional transmission organizations and this multi-layered system that we have on the grid. But what we're really seeing is that States can.

policies in defiance of the fundamental laws of physics. Utilities are sounding the alarm across the country. It's not just Alaska's rail belt utilities. You know, there are very many that are delaying the closure of coal-fired powered plants. There are many that are delaying the closure of gas-fired power plants too. A lot of these utilities are still trying to do what they can towards these various renewables mandates.

But the technical problems of wind and solar are really creating problems for reliability. And that's what this NERC report is really about. And they say... that operators face challenges in meeting higher demand this summer with a resource mix that in general has less flexibility and more variability. And that's a very nice way of saying.

Wind and solar, they are the variable things and grids are struggling now that their penetration levels have reached this kind of critical tipping point. We're definitely seeing action at the federal level that I think is. encouraging towards grid reliability. There was a executive order I think a month ago or so that is specifically looking at grid reliability. And I think there's a lot of good attention on the issue, but the fact of the matter is that if we're not

building the generators that we need now. We're not going to have them in the next five or ten years maybe, and we'll have to work fast with this. growing power demand for the first time in two decades. It's really amazing the confluence of of problems we're starting to face now. Yeah, because again, these are all problems with a very long tail, right? With the solutions has a very long tail on it.

If you started building the generation now, it's a five-year delivery date. For anything that happens, if you started today, it would be five years. for anything new. And yet the problems are going to accelerate as we go on with more generation being retired and more of these other things. And again, the life cycles and the lifespans on a lot of these renewables.

is questionable. What caught my attention in the NERC and in your reporting on this was one of the things that came out that was talking about the... I guess the labeled, I don't know what they call it, the labeled generation, the nameplate. The nameplate capacity. Yeah, nameplate capacity. What was shocking to me was You know, oh, Minnesota, the MISO has 31,000 megawatts of wind capacity installed, but their peak capacity... It's 5600 megawatt.

You're talking about less than 20% can be generated. The nameplate on the solar is 18,000, but they've only generated 19,000 at peak capacity, which tells me... the efficiency is total dog crap and and how are you you'd have to build three and four and five times the generation capacity to be able to just even cover what you've got going on which to me Seems extraordinarily wasteful.

Yeah, I read this and I had to make the math explicit for the readers because I looked at this and I was kind of taken aback. 31,000 megawatts of wind, they're only generating 5,600. That's 18%. That's really kind of abysmal. Solar is actually doing pretty well if you're actually looking at United States averages, but still it's only producing about 50% of what it could.

at you know maximum technical power that's kind of what the name nameplate capacity is getting at um and that an absolute feature of the system that is not a bug that is just how these things work because they are so low density in their energy source and that multiplies the amount of land that you have to use

Wind and solar take at least 10 times as much land as a coal or natural gas-fired power plant, and that includes the land needed to actually get the coal, get the natural gas out of the ground. That is included and it's even worse if you're looking at nuclear. land density so uh i'm glad you asked because this is a research project i've been working on for a long time you know you know what has great nameplate efficiency Смотрите продолжение в следующей серии. Call.

natural gas. I mean, those have got to be in the high 90s, right? We say we're a 500 megawatt plant, we can produce 498 megawatts of power. You know, not we're a 500 megawatt solar farm, but we can only produce 100 megawatts. That seems ridiculous and yet we poured billions of dollars into this thing saying this is the solution i mean it's that's madness that is total madness at this point

It is. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, coal really only on a nationwide basis operates at about 40 percent of its actual capacity. But that is due to regulatory issues about clean air. clean, you know, particulate issues with the EPA. It could run more often, it could be ramped up, but it just simply cannot because it can't meet these regulations.

nuclear nuclear baby hydro and nuclear those two things right there could make the whole world work a lot better but here we are all right we're down to the last uh just under two minutes here sarah so final thought on where we're going nationwide in Alaska and everywhere else. Final thoughts on this here. I suppose if you don't have a generator now would be a good time to get one. That's my general advice. Watch these things.

see where you can weigh in about public utilities and you know go to your co-op meetings you know do what you can to influence the generation mix in your area toward reliable, affordable sources of energy because we're definitely seeing that this cannot work without a diverse energy mix with reliability attributes. We didn't even touch on the just debacle in Spain, that's its whole own issue. But that's proof that we need a certain amount of dispatchable, reliable baseload power.

The debacle in Spain, apparently I wasn't paying attention to what happened in Spain quickly here. massive blackout across the entire Iberian Peninsula and it is in fact due to the lack of inertia when all the wind and solar tripped off and I'm sure you'll Google this and you'll start reading the reports and you'll find it's not about wind and solar. It's about the management of wind and solar. That was the problem.

Yeah, no, I mean, this is crazy. The TLDR on this, too long, didn't read, is get a generator. That's what Sarah's saying, get a generator. All right, Sarah Montalbano. Gosh, it's always so good to talk with you. These hours always go so fast. Thanks for hanging out with us. We appreciate you being part of it. Hold the line for just a second. Folks, we're out of time. Up next, State Senator Rob Myers. The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense Radio. Yeah.

I hadn't even seen that. I'm so locked into Alaska stuff. A lot of times I'm not paying attention to what's going on around the world because I don't really care. It doesn't affect me. Yeah. I mean, of course it couldn't be the wind and solar. It's just how we managed it. It's like there's never been a perfect form of communism because we just haven't done it right yet. I mean, right? I mean, it's the same kind of argument.

Yeah. Oh, I agree. I'll try to send you that article because I was just rolling on the floor laughing about it it just and there's a lot of good sub stack articles about this already I'll I'll send you some more but yeah it was like a week or something after they shut down their last nuclear plant So it's really, it was enormous. And it was Spain's grid, but it took down Portugal too. Again, because of interconnection.

Well, and that's the thing. I mean, France produces something like 70% of their power from nuclear. And I know everybody's been going, oh, we've got to shut this down. And I'm just thinking, how are you guys going to replace that? How are you going to replace all that clean? consistent, reliable energy. Oh, and then Russia shut the gas line down, right? And then all this other, you know, I mean...

Oh, it is all the do-goodery is getting ready to screw everything. And now GVEA and Fairbanks, by the way, I don't know if you saw this at their last meeting, GVEA has been warning of potential rolling blackout. Geez, yeah, I mean this just isn't a system. Yeah, in Fairbanks of all places. 40 below. Rolling blackout at 40 below, don't worry about it. Yeah, no way that this should be acceptable. And I really can't understate it. Get a generator, first of all, but go to these utilities.

meetings and tell them exactly why that is not acceptable. You truly can't manage it. Even in Texas, Winter Storm Murray in 2021 killed 246 Texans. um this this cannot be understated yeah no and yeah and uh yeah you might want to invest you know that that $10,000 you got lying around that you were thinking about, you know, buying that who's he, what you may want to invest in a home generation system. Just one of those auto generators, seven KW, eight, 10 KW generators. You might just want to.

It's good money. It's good money. At 40 below. Hell, you might be selling power back to GVEA or whoever at the other end. All right. Well, Sarah, as always, thanks. I appreciate it. Let us know if anything else comes up. I will. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you all for having me. I am so blessed to get to come and talk to you all. Oh, so much fun. So much fun. All right. We'll talk soon then. Thanks so much. Appreciate you coming on board.

Sarah Montalbano, our guest. I see that Rob Myers is in the room here. We almost had a three-way conversation. Rob Myers what did you do man you you've you've shorn your power you've shorn your power a little less beard power this morning yeah man what the heck man you've shorn your power i don't know Well, I'm flying home today, and my wife actually prefers it this way, so I'll keep it down for a couple of weeks. Exactly. I can't complain about that. I know how it is.

I got about two minutes here. I know you were listening to the end of that. What are your thoughts on this, man? What are your thoughts on this whole energy generation thing, especially with this push for renewables? Well, you know, we've been having a lot of that conversation up here in the legislature lately. you know i mean the the cooking like gas stuff, I mean, obviously that's a problem in and of itself, but that has just kind of sparked a lot of conversations.

that when it's just okay what we have been doing for 50 years doesn't work anymore what do we do next and so that brings a lot of things out of the woodwork and so You know, we're talking, obviously, the big thing is, you know, the gas line or do we import gas, things like that. But, you know, I'm getting a whole lot of emails from different environmental groups around the state. Hey, no, stop doing this gas thing. We need to do more renewables. That's how we're going to fix this problem.

I don't think that's quite ready for primetime yet, guys. sorry no because again we're seeing exactly how that's playing out down in the states we're seeing you know in that the meso grid urcot all these other we're seeing exactly how it's playing out we don't have to pretend like we know we can see what's going on down there right now

Yeah, yeah, we are. It's been one interesting thing. There was a guy that came to present to us in the resources committee. Oh, what was that? End of January or so. I actually presented to a group up in Fairbanks that I went to back in October. They're doing a pilot project, a demonstration project right now in Anchorage. They're getting close to hitting the one-year mark.

of this long-term storage where you're actually storing energy inside of these little pellets of, I believe it's calcium oxide, which is... More commonly known as Lime. And they're looking at this as, hey, this isn't just energy storage from day to night. This is energy storage of charge it in July and use it in January type situation. stable and so it's just a question of of being able to scale up now um so uh the tech works now our question is going to be cost but

It's lime, actually. You can do some of the manufacturing for it in Alaska, so I'm interested to see where that goes here in the next couple of years. I hadn't heard about that. That's an interesting thing. We'll have to take a look at that. All right, Rob, I'm going to plonk you back in the green room. Do not eat all my virtual donuts. All right, leave me one at least. That's all I'm saying. All right, we're going to continue on. Folks, thanks for coming on board. Would you share the show?

I'm just asking. I mean would you share the show? That would definitely help us out, get more people involved. And don't forget to check us out on the Common Sense Core. If you want to help support the show there, michaeldukeshow.com. Just click on Join the Core. Be part of it. All right, guys. Back with more. Here we go. Whoa, buddy. Put that thing back in its holster. We haven't gone in...

I don't understand. Check out themichaeldukesshow.com for information on how to get access to the podcast. Welcome to the party pal. The Michael Duke Show The Greed And the entitlement is astounding to me. What more could you want from a low-budget radio program? This is a dumpster fire. Not just me. Time to get a new perspective. Clean out. And we've got just the cure. Open wide.

The Michael Dukes Show, streaming live across the world. Live around the world on the interwebs at MichaelDukesShow.com and across the state of Alaska on this, your favorite radio station and or FM translator. Hello, my friends. How you doing? You ready to go for this Thursday? Whoa, this Thursday edition of the Michael Duke Show? Yeah, I'm all ready. I'm ready already. Where today is, we kind of transposed Monday into Thursday because we just finished up with...

Sarah Montalbano from Montalbano Mondays, and we're about to jump into it with Rob Myers from Myers Mondays. It's all the M words. It's all the fun stuff. But if you missed it, Sarah Montalbano just gave us the smackdown on energy. here in the state and across the country. And it was a fantastic interview. And if I do say so myself, and you should go back and listen to it on the podcast.

which you can find wherever you find podcasts. Spotify is the easiest one for me. And go back there. Or you can go back and watch it on Facebook or YouTube or Rumble, wherever you prefer on that one. So Sarah was just on, and Fat Ray, I think, on YouTube makes the best comment. He says, Rob is great. I like him, but if I were him, I wouldn't want to be a follow-up to Sarah. because sarah's a hard act to follow but i think rob can hold his own so let's go over there

and see what he has to say. State Senator Rob Meyer from the Interior about to give us the rundown on, well, the post-session recap, the post-session report. Let's bring Rob Meyer. onto the program good morning sir how are you doing Hi, good morning, Michael. Yeah, you know, I like listening to Sarah too, fortunately.

I don't have to talk about the same topic as her, so I feel a little better about following her. Yeah, no, no, she's super good. I really enjoy talking to her, and it's always a joy to be there. All right, Rob. Well, man, there's so much to cover. I just don't even know. I don't even know where to start. I guess let's start with the elephant in the room. And that, of course, is the veto override. I mean, eight minutes.

Right? That's what it was. I mean, the joint session lasted eight minutes and it was done. I mean... What happened? They just walked in and everybody knew what they were going to do and there was no discussion and they pushed the button and they walked out. What happened there? Yeah, I was I was talking to somebody, you know, just before we gaveled in and I said, I hope nobody talks because it's not like we're going to be changing anybody's minds at this point. You know, we've been.

saying the same things for months now. I'm pretty sure everybody's made up their mind. I didn't know what the exact vote was going to be going in there. But, you know, it passed initially with 48, you know, 48 to 11. You had one guy absent in the house on the initial vote. So it's like. Even if you lose a few people, you know which way this is going to go. So it wasn't a huge shocker.

There might have been one or two people that were surprises, but the outcome, yeah, we kind of knew what was coming. So, yeah, we'll... We'll see how it plays out from here. Well, and that actually leads on to my second question, because even though the veto of the bill itself has been overridden, Of course, the funding, the line item funding can be vetoed as well. No word as to yet whether the governor will do that. That's a different threshold. That's a 45. Now they had 46.

So if two people change their mind, it could be a different thing. But do you think the governor, I mean, what's your take? Do you think the governor will, because he's upset. He told them very clearly, I'm in support of your monetary amount. 680, okay. I budget, that's fine. But I want my policy things in there, right? I mean, I want these simple policy things in there. So what do you think? Do you think the governor will say no soup for you and veto it? Or what do you think?

So, I mean, the governor's been fairly clear on threatening a light item veto if the bill passed. And so if that comes, I will not be surprised. The real question is what's the monetary amount of that going to be, you know? So the bill added 700 to the BSA. Does he line item veto back down to 680? Okay.

There'll be a few people outraged, you know, but it'll be largely symbolic. That's not a huge amount of money. And I think most of, from what I was hearing, most of the district budgeted on 680 anyway. You know, so that wouldn't be a big deal. Does he knock it down to 600? Does he knock it down to, if I remember right, the bill he had?

Had it at, I think, 540. Does he knock it down at that number? You know, does he knock it down further? I really don't know. I don't think anybody's got a firm grasp on what that number is going to be. I'm kind of expecting a lot on veto. And then how far down that number goes, I think is going to determine a lot of how the legislature responds. You know, if he knocks it down 20 bucks. Okay, fine. You know, we're probably going to leave that alone. He knocks it down a little further.

you know, we might still leave it alone. If he knocks, you know, let's say he really decides to cut it in half, let's say, you know, down to 350 instead of 700. There may be a push for a special session to override because...

theoretically, we can come back in January and override these things, but when you're talking about school funding, by the time you hit January, the damage is done. Well, that was my next question, because if he does veto it, without a special session and from what i understand talking with people down there and various sources is that

No, nobody's interested in a special session this year. I mean, Forrest Dunbar is going to be in Europe and everybody, you know, people, they're working, they got... And so a special session could be a heavy lift and that would mean they would have to wait all the way to January to be able to override it. Well, you're halfway into the new school year in January. So, you know, how does that, how does that work?

Yeah, and that's really a question, you know, depending on the various line item vetoes. I mean, some line item vetoes for the operating budget, oh yeah, you come back and you overwrite it in January.

continue on as normal but for schools I mean that that's heavily scheduled dependent and so there could be a push to get us back down here now it takes 40 just to call a special session So, you know, whether or not we get the votes to do the special session is going to tell you a lot about whether or not we have the votes to override. I don't know at this point. There's too much up in the air. And like I said, I think the biggest...

piece in there that we don't know about that is going to make the difference is what's that dollar figure that he vetoes it down to? Is that going to be enough to push us here? So I don't know. I think it's too early to predict. Overall, the biggest thing about this whole thing with the school funding is that we know... It's not over, right? Because, I mean, they said the KPB, the ASD, you know, all these different school districts said, oh, well, 700 is nice, but, you know.

I think the Kenai Peninsula School District said, it doesn't make us whole. It doesn't make up for all the loss of spending power that we had, yada, yada, yada. They're going to come back next session. Am I wrong? They're going to come back next session and say, well, we need a thousand more now. I mean, what do you think? Well, the Alaska Democratic Party put out a post on their Facebook page yesterday or Tuesday, one of the two.

that said, okay, we got it. We got the veto override. Thank you. And next year we're coming back for more. So, you know, I... you know this is the thing is that you know part of the Part of the argument behind the way 857 went down is some folks said, hey, we need to take this off the table as an election issue. And I looked at that and I said,

It's going to be an election issue regardless. You can give everything and there will still be groups coming back for more that will still be trying to hit you over the head saying it's not enough. It's not enough. You know? So, you know, if that's your reasoning, I don't think it follows through in the long run. Yeah, no, I think this reminds me of the whole freaking thing.

You don't negotiate with terrorists. Because as soon as you give them an inch, what happens? Oh, the hijackings continue. And that's what's going on. They're hijacking the session every time now. with discussions on oh we've got to have more school money we've got to have more and the problem is $200 million upside down this year with all the cuts, the cuts to the PFD, everything else.

They still didn't have enough money, and they had to go rob the money out of the investment bank, the ADA investment bank, and the higher education endowment fund. They had to take $200 million out. And next year is already projected to be... billion, billion and a half dollars upside down. And the forecast going out from there is even worse. I mean, there is no more money. What happened? Well, I mean, obviously the first thing that's going to happen is the dividend is gone.

you know depending on exactly what happens with oil prices or you know what the feds do with the various programs you know it already looks like They're approving some significant cost shifting for food stamps for SNAP. So the state's going to have to shoulder some of that burden.

You know, exactly what's going to happen with Medicaid is still kind of up in the air, you know, because they've got some stuff in the current bill in Congress regarding like work requirements and things like that. I mean, those are policy changes, but are they going to shift? Some more, you know, are they going to change the cost share?

I don't think that discussion's over. You know, I think you and I talked a month or two ago about, you know, there was talk back in like February about shifting the match for a lot of our road projects. You know, so, you know, we got a lot of these things in question. As I mentioned, there's oil prices, the employee salary study, you know, they released that there in April. And so that's not enough time for the legislature to come back and say, okay, we're going to address this now.

Now, most of that action is going to happen within the executive branch, but you know that based on that salary study, that come next year. We're going to be looking at upping a lot of employee salaries across the state. I think one of the analysis said that's going to be about a couple hundred million for next year. So, you know, and then what's the stock market do? You know, we're on a five year average. I believe this year we're dropping off.

the best year we had there that 21-22 fiscal year, or was it, no, it was the 2021 fiscal year. So that drops off the average this next time around. So our draw off the stock market could go down a little bit. Yeah, we're going to be we're going to be in a world of hurt next year. And, you know, we're looking at anywhere between 500 million to 750 million. So half to three quarters of a billion dollars. in the hall just to start next year as we start working on the following years.

So, yeah, it's going to be painful. Obviously, the dividend is going to be the prime target. That's about $680 million right there. Do you believe like I believe that the dividend next year will be gone? I'm looking at the dividend being anywhere between $400 to gone. Kind of depends on how a lot of those factors, you know. Go, you know, worst case scenario. Yeah, it is gone. to potential where it hangs on a little bit longer, but then probably gone the following year. Yeah.

But that's, I mean, that's the direction that we're headed in. You know, I think we talked about this the last time I was on the show is, you know, somebody says, well, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? And I'm sitting here going. I told you so. These sorts of things, especially when you base your revenue on such volatile things as oil prices and the stock market, it's like, okay, you can't predict.

when these things are going to hit, but you know they're going to hit eventually. Right. We had this same problem back in the late 90s. They were talking about the... the same problems back then and talking about the same solutions you know there was a there was a a fiscal group that got got together back then and they came up with something largely similar they said Okay, cut the dividend down a little bit.

you know, get our spending under control and put in a broad-based tax. And, you know, that was the solution in the late 90s. And what are we talking about right now? more or less the same thing with some of the details a little different. I think we're talking a little bit more this time around about spending cap and a couple of constitution-related issues, which of course have a higher hurdle.

You know, by and large, the structure that people have talked about is basically the same. And it's like, guys, we've seen this coming for a long time. I don't really feel sorry for you that you're so worried. We tried to tell you years ago. You know, it's one thing to be standing outside the train watching him go down the tracks and pointing at the bridge being out and saying, hey, the bridge is out, you guys, oh.

And it's another thing to be in the second train car behind the locomotive saying, the bridge is out. And we're in the latter category. We've been warning you, but we're not going to be able to say I told you so because we're going to be flying off the rails with you. That's what's going on. Rob Myers is our guest. The Michael Duke Show. Common sense. Liberty based. Listened to by more staffers in Juneau than any other show.

Because their bosses told them to. And after what they just heard, oh man, they're gonna be pissed. You're a bad, bad man. The Michael Duke Show. Rob Myers is our guest. I just had to laugh. Sarah Montalbano is in the chat room. You're all making me blush this morning. Oh, thank you. She's a ginger. It's easy to make her blush. That's how she's doing it, you know? She's amazing. She is amazing. I love having her on. So thank you, Sarah, for coming on board and joining us. It was always good.

You know, Rob, that's the thing. And I don't know if I'm just getting older and tireder, but I mean, that's more tired. Tireder is not a word, but I made it up. But I'm like, I've been talking about this for 25 years. And the I told you so is just not nearly as satisfying as I thought it would be because I'm in the middle of it still, right? It's like, who'd have thought that this would have happened? Well, me, because you, we talked about this for years.

And I agree with you. I think next year it will be $500 or less or just gone. And it will definitely be gone by year two because... Again, you can't have a billion and a half dollar shortfall and I think the next one is 1.2 billion dollar shortfall. You can't have a two and a half billion dollar shortfall over two years and think that the dividend is going to survive that. I just can't see that happening.

Yeah, you know, I mean, the interesting thing when you look at the dividend itself, and obviously there's a lot more going on here than just that, but it's like... We keep drawing these bright lines. Okay, we're not, here's what it's going to be. We're not going to go below that mark. And then it just lasts a couple of years and we hit the next crisis and oh, we break that red line. We break that red line.

We're down to the $1,000 now, which is, once you account for inflation, it is the smallest dividend in history since the program was created. You keep breaking all the red lines, you know, and we tried to say, guys, this has to be a constitutional fix. Statutory ain't going to cut it because.

The statutory is not enough of a red line to actually stop us. So, I mean, you know, we knew this was coming. We've been saying it for a while now. Right. Well, I mean, when Gary Stevens stood up and said, yes, our fiscal policy. Yes, we have a fiscal policy, and it's 75-25. It's going to happen. It's our fiscal policy. That was last year. And then this year, it's like, oh, 82-17, sorry. You know, we just, 82-18, we, you know, that's just...

So much for your fiscal policy, right? That's like a statutory spending cap. Lasts for one year and then it's just blown through. I mean, yeah, Kim just said it. Hello, taxes. Not my friend. I mean, that's where we're going in this state. I know everybody's like, no taxes. I had Bernadette Wilson on and she's like, no taxes. And I'm like, okay, but you understand that. And I know you want to cut $1.7 billion out of the budget. I understand that. But it's...

If we don't talk about it, it's going to be slapped down on top of us so hard. You know, we can't just ignore the inevitable. We can't just be like, la, la, la, la, la, la. I don't want to talk about it. We best be talking about it. Otherwise, it's going to be a thing. Especially with all those folks out there saying, Tax me harder, Daddy! Bye! I mean, right? I mean, that's what's going on.

No, no, that's exactly what's going on. You know, and it's like, you know, even even just this year, you know, you mentioned that, you know, some of these things last less than a year, you know, at the very beginning of the year, you know. There were folks that were up in arms because Senate Finance put out another bill saying, you know, for a statutory change of 75-25, and, you know, there was some talk, oh, okay, well, we're not really trying to pass the bill. This is just a messaging thing.

this is what our plan is and it's like okay that that lasted about three months guys you know um you know because again You can't plan the timing on these things, but you know that they're coming. We have the most volatile sources of income, our state revenue. And so how the heck do you plan anything for that? School funding or anything else for that? Yeah, no, exactly. This is what happens when you have a super vol, and it's exactly one of the reasons why, I mean, we should

zero-based budgeting, but that's not going to be appetizing for many people, but at least a five-year rolling average of what our revenue is, so we at least know. I mean, we could at least have a good starting point, right? I mean... You got to have something. You can't just pick this pot. Oh, it's going to be $75. Oh my God, it's 63. What do we do now? shock shock i tell you that that happened for some of these people uh all right rob myers is our guest let's get back into it

Michael, yeah, define benefits. I'm going to ask you about employees here in just a second. Here we go. The Michael Duke Show. versus right. I had to look that word up. I don't think it means what he thinks. I actually didn't know what that word means. It is the left versus right dichotomy. That's what we're splitting here every day on the program. All right, Rob. Rob Myers is our guest. And we just...

If you missed stuff during the break, you should go back and listen on the podcast because there's always good stuff going on during the break. But Rob, you know, we've got more things coming up. And when I mean things, I mean more expenditures that are going to increase. So we know they're coming back for more school funding, but they already said that. It's not even being quiet about it. They're just coming right out and saying it.

We know that the state budget grows just when it has automatic escalators and formulas and things built into it, that it's going to go up $150 million next year at minimum. Just on, on its, even if you walked away and you guys took a vacation next year, it's going to go up 150 million roughly. And then we've got the defined benefits program. That's still waiting in the wings with no real fiscal note on it that gives us a real true hard number.

And now we've got the new employee contracts, which we heard about. Now, I had heard that it was going to be closer to $300 million in increases. Then one contract came out and it was actually less than expected. It was only $50 million. But there were three more. Where are we at on the contracts? Have we all negotiated them all? And what's the final price tag for all the employee contracts for the State Union?

So, oh shoot, because there were two or three others that got, that came out in the last like two weeks of session. I'd have to go back and double check the numbers on that. They were, they were smaller ones. It wasn't the GGU, the general government unit. That was the big one that came out there at the end of April. But, oh shoot, so I think the total between all of them this year was probably a little under $100 million, but about...

Half or a little over half of that was going to be what came out of general fund dollars. The rest of it is either coming out of designated funds or it's coming or you can. Some of that you can pay with federal money for some of the DOT guys and stuff.

So there's, um, you know so when they said 300 million i i'd have to go back and check the conversation again to see what we were talking about either we were talking about 300 million over three years or we were talking about 300 million for a year once all of the unions were taken into account and once that salary study got taken into account.

We're going to be watching that as it comes in next year because now that salary study is out and now people are going to have time to think about it and let it percolate over the interim here. What you got to understand about the employee contracts is we have multiple ones. We have, what is it, eight primary ones that we deal with, and they're all on a rotating basis. every three years. And so every year we've got two or three or four of them that come up.

um so it's not like you know we it's not like we oh you know we had this one come in and we took care of it and now we're safe for a couple years no We're going to have a couple more next year. And of course, the ones this year had, you know, little escalators built in each year, you know, 3%, what was it, 3%, 3%, and 5%. What's the numbers? 11.5% over three years.

Right. You know, so, you know, so, you know, every contract is going to have a little bit of a yearly bump anyway. And then the next contract is going to come up again.

So this, you know, and I think that's one thing we need to clarify. When we talk about the escalators, you know, I get a lot of emails from folks saying, oh, well, you should inflation proof the BSA. We inflation proof everything else in the budget. No, no, no. The only thing in our budget that is quote-unquote inflation-proofed is the employee contract. Everything else we look at on a year-to-year basis. How much money do we have? Where does the money end up?

And, you know, those employee contracts aren't even technically tied to inflation. They just kind of, you know, it's like, oh, okay, inflation went up in the last couple of years. So we're going to ask for a higher percentage in our raise for next year. You know, that's how that goes. Um...

but that's really where the escalators come from. Everything else, you know, if we end up in a, you know, I mean, just look at our capital budget this year. We had, you know, costs for building things have been going up the last few years. we have less money what do we do we're building less it's not like the budget went actually went up not like the total dollar spend went up we're just spending it on fewer things You know, so that's something that I think we need to clarify there is.

Really, the employee contracts are the escalator. Right. A couple other little things here and there, but that's just about it. We don't really inflation proof anything in our budget. That's not that's not how our statutes are. And as these employee contracts come rolling through, we're going to expect probably a $100 million increase every year just based on the employee contracts coming through and going up and up and up.

Man, 11%, I would love to get an 11% pay raise increase. I worked for 20 years for a single company that didn't have a single pay increase over those years other than what I was able to generate my own self, you know, because... because it's private sector they can't just say oh yeah you automatically get it but uh

Michael, you could come drive a truck with me between 2021 and 2024. I got about a 60% pay raise. Oh, well, there you go. Maybe that's what I need to do. I should quit radio and just go start driving a truck. I like a little window time. I do like that for sure.

As you look at all this and you see where we're at, I guess the only bright spot in this whole thing and and again i haven't dug into the numbers this just came out yesterday and it was reported in i think it was the beacon alaska beacon that our overall spend this year, the only bright spot is that it's actually less.

It was $6.4 billion in general funds last year, $6.2 billion this year. But of course, that doesn't account for... the supplementary budget because the supplemental was 6.4 last year plus 200 million so it's actually 6.6 So what is it? I mean, is there going to be some voodoo economics here, some shell gaming?

Are we going to see a huge supplemental this coming year because they were able to pass it so low or with a billion dollar deficit next year? What are your thoughts on the overall size of the budget?

So, well, I'll start with the supplemental part first. I mean, there's going to be a supplemental next year. There always is a little bit. You know, the big thing that we always think about is what do we do about... forest fires you know that's always the the big question is you know is it a bad fire year we're worried that it's going to be a bad fire year and in South Central not as much worried about it in the interior but we're really worried about South Central

So, you know, that's going to be a portion of it. The other portion of it is going to be, OK, well, even if we don't spend a lot more money, how much supplemental are we going to have to pull next year to fund what we already. committed to spending in what we just passed two days ago because oil prices dropped again and now we don't have the cash to backfill. So, you know, that's going to be another part of it.

It's great that the dollar figures actually went down for once. That hasn't happened in a few years. You know, and then, you know, you got to ask yourself, of course, you know, if. you know the app it's not like the appetite for spending went on went down around here it's just that the the amount available to spend went down you know so we saw this you know in 2020 2021 2022.

you know, oil prices bottom out in 2020 and 2021, and we pass this really austere budget. Everybody's complaining it's too low, blah, blah, blah. And what do we do when we come back in 2022? You know, Russia invades Ukraine, oil prices go through the roof. And not only did we kind of return to quote unquote normal spending. but we passed an $800 million supplemental.

to effectively turn the spending in 2021 into the spending for 2022 as well. And it's like, so all that work that we did to cut the budget down, as soon as we got more money, the first thing we did is we reversed it.

you know we went back to where we were and it's like guys you know two steps forward three steps back I've likened this so many times, but every time we talk about something like this, all I can see is that Pirates of the Caribbean where they're running back and forth across the deck. to try and roll the ship back over. It's like we go to one side and then we go to the other side. Oh, we're in deficit. Oh, we got so much money we don't know what to do with it.

I mean, this is where we're at. And this has been going on for 50 years in this state.

it has it has this is this is is one of the primary symptoms of the petrostate is you know your your budget yo-yos uh the uh to some extent um you know spending goes high and it stays high unless absolutely necessary if you absolutely run out of money which is what's happening now uh you know this is this is the petro state you you uh everybody has a need to spend but nobody has a has an interest in saying stop spending because it doesn't come out of their pocket

So, you know, there's not that normal tension between spending and taxation. The tension is between spending more now or more later really is about it. And this is what ends up happening. Everybody wants to spend. Everybody finds their little pet project, whether it's whether it's some infrastructure project that may or may not generate some economic returns, or it's more money on education, or it's more money on social services of some kind.

You know, I mean, child care has been the big thing the last couple of years. OK, that's new. So, you know, this is This is crazy. And, you know, we just keep finding more ways to spend it. I was listening yesterday, you know, when we were talking to Shower and, you know, he brought it up and I brought this up on the floor earlier this year. You know, we passed that one little tax bill, SB 113.

This is kind of the funny part. The projected income from that bill is anywhere between $20 million and $60 million. And they can't even nail that down. And, you know, when we pass it on the Senate floor, the promise was, oh, this is going to help us reduce the deficit a little bit. It's not a lot, but it's a little bit. We need every little penny counts right now. And what did we do? Within two weeks, the house hadn't even passed it, and we earmarked the money.

for more spending right right this this is the this is the problem guys As soon as we get more money, we find somewhere to spend it. And so what happens when the bottom falls out again? We're back to this whole, we're back to the same problem where... You know, and you know, because nobody really wants to cut spending long term. So we don't sit down and do that zero based budgeting, which, by the way, we did get a little amendment on that in the budget. Come back to that in a minute.

But, you know, we don't sit down and actually evaluate our priorities and say what actually needs to happen. What should government be doing? What should we be partnering with the private sector? asking nonprofits to do a fundraise, things like that.

you know we say no no um we're just gonna go through a little bit of slash and burn for now and you know kind of the assumption is as soon as oil prices and the stock market or whatever whatever else comes back we'll just restore that spend you know we'll go back to what we were doing it's like guys this is not sustainable right well i can feel the frustration in you guys that is the problem yeah that's exactly the problem And like you said, the disconnect with people because they don't feel it.

They don't see the tax. They don't see the spending. And maybe that's part of the problem. I've talked about this and people get mad at me because they're like, oh, you're just in favor of tax. No, but I am in favor of people understanding how the money's being spent and having some kind of connectivity to it.

Maybe that would help. I don't know. We'll get your take on that, and we'll talk about the zero-based budgeting here in just a moment. Rob Myers is our guest. We're going to continue with him here. We're going to see what he has to say in this final segment of the Michael Duke Show. Common sense, liberty-based, free things. If you missed the show, you can listen to it on your time with Dukes On Demand. Oh, and it's Frank. Like, American.

Streaming live every weekly morning on Facebook Live and MichaelDukesShow.com. Okay. Rob's getting ready. He wants to get out of Juneau and get back home. That's got to be good, yeah? I mean, it's got to... It's always nice to get back home. I was just talking to somebody a couple of days ago about this.

you know doing this job coming down here for four months a year yeah i get i get home a couple of times during session i mean the anchorage guy a lot of them get home like every other weekend that's a little harder for me coming from fairbanks because you know i've got that extra leg and so you know i start having to make that trade-off between

Okay, do I want to go home and not get a whole lot of sleep and it doesn't feel like I'm worth it? Or do I go home a little earlier and I start to actually miss things happening in the capital, making that trade-off? But it's almost like having... two separate lives two separate families in different cities almost you know i've got the one life i live down here that i'm you know largely a bachelor and then i go home to a wife and five kids and a day job and you know that feels normal

You know, this just feels strange. You know, I like the work. I, you know, I'm happy to continue doing this job. But yeah, the lifestyle behind it is just weird. You heard it here first, folk. Rob Myers lives two lives. He's got a family in every port. That's what it's all about. No, it's got to be crazy. I can't imagine spending that kind of time.

I mean, I leave the fam here in Terry and go to do something in Fairbanks for three days, and I'm like, I want to go home. I mean, I'm just like three days, and I'm like, I'm done. I can't imagine three months. It's crazy. It's crazy. All right. I'm just looking to see if there's anything else. These people...

Fat Ray says, these people that don't have much, they feel these cuts. The legislature doesn't care about them, though, probably because they can't help them pad out their retirement like rich people and lobbyists. I mean, supposedly that's what they're doing it for, right? All the people that can't take care of themselves.

unfortunately yeah so but if you watch really what what drives the process down here it's you know we can we say all the nice things about oh well we have to help out these poor people and stuff no the things that we do You know, especially cutting the PFD, but even some of the other things we do, yeah, they do end up hurting the folks on the lower end of the income scale. We do hurt.

the folks that are you know a little bit above that that are just you know working and you know good blue collar folks and things like that that you know just just trying to make a living and stuff What really drives processes down here? Okay, what makes the state money so we can spend more? What can I spend that money on to help me in my re-election?

You know, those are the types of things that have to do, you know, that drive our process down here. You know, stuff about, okay, well, the legislators are getting fat on these things. Maybe in a couple of cases, but by and large, no, that's not it. We're thinking about our re-elections. We're thinking about where do we get our campaign donations. We're thinking about what can I do to get my name or face out on a ribbon cutting, things like that.

Those are the types of things that drive a lot of the decisions around here, you know. And if we don't acknowledge that, then, you know, we're going to be lost and shocked when, you know, these. these sorts of things happen with with how we spend our budget and how crazy it is because it's like guys you got to understand what are our incentives down here as legislators our incentives

have to do with getting reelected. And for that, you need money and votes. And so what am I going to do? Well, I'm going to do the things that get me campaign donations and votes. And yeah, it's a short-sighted process, you know, so that, you know, and that's part of another part of our problem besides the disconnect is we thought we think about a one-year budget cycle, we think about a two-year election cycle, and we don't usually think a lot farther ahead.

Right, well, and we've done so much to create a dependency state here that everybody is connected at one point or another to the government. um you know in the form of you know some kind of you know welfare or benefit or our business right our business is tied to it and so we got all those government contracts that we need to have And the people who, it's the people in the middle who keep getting squeezed.

Right. You got everybody who's on benefits on the lower end of the scale. You know, they're getting some kind of benefit or payment or welfare. And then on the other side, you got all these corporations, the GCIs, et cetera, the world who are.

you know, multi-million dollar contracts from the state, the construction companies and everything else. And yet in the middle are all these people in the middle who are just getting squeezed. And that's why the out-migration has made it predominantly of those working class. young to middle-aged people in the middle working class because they're like, I can't do it anymore. And it's just going to accelerate.

You know, I've been watching this dichotomy this year between just contrasting the farming. You know, we had the whole agio at the beginning of the year, and we were talking a lot about farming and what we can do to help that in the state. fishing, the approaches that those have taken this year have just been a huge eye opener, I think. And they haven't made the news a lot. I think we should talk about.

okay well we got a lot to talk about here in the last 10 minutes so we're going to talk about agio farm we're going to talk about zero-based budgeting I can't remember what the third thing was, but we'll come back to it. I think that was it. Oh, and commercial fishing. Commercial fishing. All right. Here we go. Rob Myers is our guest. The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense. Liberty-based. Free thinking radio. Like, share, subscribe. Here we go. Let's do it.

The Michael Duke Show. Seriously humorous with a pinch of intellect. Sorry, that is humorous. Here's Michael Dukes. Rob Myers is our guest. One final segment of the show. Rob, you mentioned that you got a little bit of an amendment in there because I was saying that the dream, the dream is zero-based budgeting.

Because that would help a lot. Because for those of you who don't understand what zero-based budgeting is versus what we do, what we do now is we say, what did we spend last year? Okay, let's add to that, essentially, is what happened. zero-based budgeting starts out with we have zero dollars now stack everything that we need to spend it on starting at zero and go up from there um and so it's a it's a little bit cleaner and it allows you to look at things that you know like

500 empty employee seats that are being funded but not filled, and some of them haven't been filled for 10 years. Should we really be putting money in there on that? So tell me a little bit about the zero-based budgeting thing that you guys were working on. Yeah, so this was actually started as a Will Stapp thing. So he got an amendment passed on the House floor that said OMB, Office of Management and Budget, and the guys in the governor's office put the budget together.

zero-based budget between one and five departments next year. And you're going to tell the legislature which ones you did and why you picked that one. or those ones and I brought it up in the Senate and it didn't go anywhere but in the conference committee they actually kept it. Now they whittled it down a little bit instead of saying one to five they just said one department. The executive branch has 16 departments total.

I don't know which one they're going to pick. Hopefully it's one of the larger ones. It needs to be one of the larger ones to really make a difference. Department of Health, DOT, corrections, something like that. Those are your biggest ones. And we really need to get into one of those. And the hope is if we can start zero-based budgeting one department, then maybe we can cascade that down over the next few years and get some more of them in there and really start making that.

a dent. Now, the problem is, of course, this governor is only here for one more year. So how much longer is this actually going to work? Are we going to stick to this under the next administration? Who knows? And we got a long way to go until then. But, you know, we at least put some intent language in there to get it started. You know, I think everybody agreed that, OK, the situation is too messed up and our government is too big.

to zero-based budget all of the departments all at once we don't have the personnel for that we don't have the time for that but if we can start doing it department by department we can get some Well, let's hope that that's actually the way it plays out. But like you said, one year, we don't know what's going to happen next year. And if they pick the smallest department, that's going to be disappointing, obviously, for that to say.

You also talked about how earlier in the year they were talking about agriculture and commercial fishing, and these are two big industries and two big things in Alaska that... I mean, Alaska, especially in the South Central area or in the Matsu, you know, agriculture and farming, that's how they got started. And we used to be a big agricultural state. We used to do a lot of different things.

But things have changed. And you're saying we're taking a look at a different... Tell me what you're talking about here with these two things.

so over the last couple of years we've had a couple of big task forces going on there was a food security task force that was looking primarily at homegrown agriculture but it was also looking at some some things like you know how is food transported and brought into the states and stuff like that But they came up with some recommendations, and the biggest one was create a Department of Agriculture instead of just a division inside of DNR.

And the interesting thing is if you look at the report that came out, we largely ignored it. Now, the other one that happened is over this last interim, there was a legislative task force. on commercial fishing.

seafood and that task force produced a half a dozen bills that have been introduced and are working their way through the process and I think we are we've already passed I think three of those bills One or two of them I don't think are going to go anywhere because they're requiring the state to give up money, either send more money to fishing communities and community assistance.

or it would require us to create some tax credits for the commercial fishing industry. We're probably not going to do those right now because we're broke. We don't have the money to give up. But, you know, we're already passing some of these bills on the commercial fishing industry. And I'm looking at that and saying, OK, major dichotomy here between.

One industry that is huge in certain districts, you know, in those coastal districts, and another industry that used to be big, kind of fell apart, you know, decades ago, and is trying to grow back. that is going to be important for just about everybody in the state, but as of right now is really small. And so the difference that I'm seeing is What is the difference in how those two industries are being treated by the legislature and who's got the political pull?

When we start talking about that economic disconnect that I've talked about so many times, that disconnect between what the state cares about and what the private economy is doing. you know we've got these two different pieces here where i'm like okay both are important we should be talking about both but the only one that we're talking about is the one that's got political pull

It's the one that can actually determine whether or not you get elected as a legislator. The other one, it doesn't have that political pull, and so it gets ignored. And, you know, I'm just using this to illustrate one of the problems that we have in our state is, again, the legislature does not care about. so much of the private economy. What they care about is what brings money into the state.

you know in a state government you know what brings money into campaign donations for legislators what gets me is a large enough employer in my area that it becomes a significant block of votes for my reelection. Those are the things unfortunately that we care about right now.

And that dichotomy there between agriculture and commercial fishing, to me, is just emblematic of that. Both are important. We should be talking about both. We should be addressing both. But we're only addressing the one because that's the one that's got the political pull. And that's, again, just another example of not caring about what's going on in the private economy, which takes me back to the question that I did forget.

which is where you were saying people, you know, they just don't feel it. They don't feel the size and scope. They're like, oh, sure, spend it because I'm not feeling it. I don't see it, which raises the question of, Should there be some kind of connectivity? Should there be attacks where people feel like they're contributing and also when the state starts to run amok, they go, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second.

I can't afford any more. I mean, is that going to be the solution? I mean, I think it's inevitable. I think a tax is inevitable in the state. but do you think it should happen sooner rather than later? Would people, because some people say, well, look at California. They got plenty of taxes in there. Yeah, but people are leaving.

i mean people are moving they are voting with their feet um and so eventually it's coming here do you think it would make a difference so california is an interesting one because they depend primarily on two things a very very progressive so it's really targeted at the high earners and a uh and a regressive sales tax so it ends up you know targeting the low earners and it's like so they have done the exact opposite of spread the burden

you know and if we're going to have that connection there if taxes are inevitable that is something that we're going to have to talk about is do we put that connection back so that everybody has to think about hey, some of my money is going towards this spending. I need to demand that my legislators are spending that money wisely. Or, well, I'm not really contributing, so I'm going to demand that they spend more because that's how it benefits me.

you know that's that's that's one of the problems that we've been in and i pointed this out a while ago is that The taxes that we're talking about this year in the Senate, that Internet tax, the Hillcorp tax. the the oil tax credit change all of those taxes in my mind are are designed to keep the costs hidden from the residents.

They're designed to make sure that we don't have pushback against the spending. And if we don't fix that problem in the long run, we're making that cliff higher before we jump off it again. Yeah, well, and I think that's the thing, hidden the tax. We already have the highest hidden tax in the country. Right. Because every bit of oil royalty and revenue is going straight to the state. That's our money. That's our.

and we should get it and then be taxed on it. Because like I said, if they wrote you a check for $20,000 for every person in your household, And so you get this $80,000 check, but the following week they issue you a bill, then for $16,000, $17,000 for every person in your household, the spending in Juneau would come to a screeching halt. Yeah, the last number I saw was from 2023. We are spending just a hair over $21,000 per person in this state from the state government.

And we have to ask ourselves, why is that so high? Some of the reason for that is going to be because we have structured it in such a way as to encourage people to ask for more spending, not ask for less. Yeah, no, no, absolutely. It's a problem. Rob Myers, well, welcome home. I mean, or welcome home when you get to home. And thanks for all you do. I appreciate your hard work down there. Thanks for coming on board this morning. We appreciate you being part of it.

It's I don't know man. I don't know how you do it. I'll be honest with you like I said I'd be throat-punching some people. You're a much better man than I am in that regard. All right, Rob Myers, our guest. Thank you, Rob, for coming on. Absolutely, Michael. Always good to be here. Hold the line for a second. Folks, we're out of time. Tomorrow is Firearms Friday We will be off on Monday for Memorial Day Don't freak out We'll be back on Tuesday Love one another. Live well. Common Sense Radio.

All right. Final bite of the apple wrap. I mean, it's kind of, I know it's, it's kind of sucks because I'm, I mean, I'm asking the question. That's a hard question because the second any politician says, well, taxes will help you feel the pain. Well, you're in favor of taxes. Well. I mean, I'm not in favor of taxes, but I also understand the literal reality that taxes at this point, based on everything I'm seeing,

are inevitable. And if we don't talk about the type of tax that are at least the most palatable, the least poisonous of all the taxes, we'll get whatever they want on us if we don't talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's that's accurate. You know, I think, you know, one of the things that we're fighting here is, you know, this is something deeply ingrained in the Alaskan culture is we are deeply anti-tax. You know, I remember going reading.

Hammond's, what was it, Bushrat Governor, his autobiography. And he was talking about one time when he was mayor of the Bristol Bay Borough. And he said, yeah, we put in this fisheries landing tax at 97%. of the tax was going to be paid by folks from out of state only three percent of the tax was going to be paid by by in-state residents the way they structured it and what happened the voters voted it down because they didn't want to pay that three percent

And it's like, oh, man, if that that is part of the the political climate that we're dealing with here. And I mean, taxes are inevitable at this point, but the direction that we are going is we are going to continue to structure the taxes. in such a way as to hide them as best we can because Alaskans are so tax adverse. that that is the only politically palatable way to do it. But then what that does then on the other side of it is that then the more you hide the tax,

the more you hide the true cost of government from folks and you just push the spending higher. And again, we talk about that. That fiscal cliff, you know, that's been the term for a few years now. You make the cliff higher before you jump off.

That's the direction we're going. Exactly. You're piling it higher and higher. Oh, we can stick this landing. We're now a mile in the sky. You're not going to stick the landing. Well, you might stick it, but you'll just be a greasy stain instead of the 10 feet you could have jumped before. And that's the thing. If we don't talk about it, if we don't at least have the discussion,

we're going to get the worst of all possible choices because the politicians will do it to benefit what they want, not what's best for the people. Let me float another possibility as to what might happen. So we're talking about gas lines. Sure. Let's say it happens. Let's say it goes into operation and starts exporting gas around 2031-ish, give or take a year.

At the rate that we are going because of the financial pressures on the state, we are going to end the dividend. We are going to potentially. increase a couple of taxes here and there along the way. And then we're going to have no back to, you know, no connection except for the oil industry between the state and the private economy. And then. The gas line is going to go into operation.

And then the money is going to roll into the state. And then, Katie, bar the door. Here comes the spending again from the early 80s. And we're back at it. And we have. No controls, no connection to the private economy. And because the dividend is now gone, no way for that money to get out to individuals. You are, you know, now we have just pushed the dependency on government even higher. because oh shoot, we don't get any of that money out to individuals.

So we don't have that little bit of leakage that then can help try to build a private economy on the side. No, we're going to put it all into government. We're going to put it all into government spending. We're going to encourage people to become more dependent on government.

In my mind, that's almost the worst case scenario. Part of the reason that I think that getting a fiscal plan in place is so important right now is because if the gas line does happen, We have to be in a spot where we can... properly manage that money as it's coming in so that we don't yet again dig ourselves a bigger hole right leverage it properly and and and plan for the future i mean it reminds me of the old bumper sticker you know

Lord, give us another oil boom. We promise not to piss this one away. I mean, it could be a gas boom at this point. And if we do more of what we did before, we'll be even... a deeper chocolate mess than where we are when it was all said and done. I mean, these are the kind of conversations that we need to have. And we have a fiscal plan. That's why I don't get the governor, you know, oh, we need to come up with. We have a fiscal plan.

It's already laid out. It's not palatable to everybody, but that's because that's the art of compromise, right? Nobody is happy. So there are a couple of pieces in there, and this is a couple of reasons that I think it is worth coming back to revisit. One, and there were kind of timing issues, okay, from the Fiscal Policy Working Group in 2021.

The special session to deal with all this stuff had already been called before the Fiscal Policy Working Group had been put together. And so they sat down and they worked hard for six weeks and they came up with a good framework. What they didn't come up with was Bill.

for us to pass and so a lot of that following special session we sat here kind of spinning our wheels going okay we've got this framework now we need to come up with the actual language of the bills that we need to pass and how do we structure this stuff to make the nitty-gritty details of it work so that's problem number one

Problem number two was we had the Fiscal Policy Working Group, we had that framework, and then we almost immediately lost the will to enact it because what happened six months later? Russia invaded Ukraine.

and oil prices went through the roof we said we're saved we don't need no fiscal plan we're fine oh 75 25 is a great fiscal plan we're fine we're all out of the woods because russia invented ukraine and that destroyed any motivation that we had you know you go back to august of 21 you had probably 50-ish legislators that wanted to get that fiscal plan in place, that recognized that, okay, this is going to be painful, but it has to happen. We don't have any other options.

And that will got shipped away because all of a sudden now we have more money than we know how to spend. And there's no reason for us to enact a fiscal. Yeah. No. I mean, I see that exactly. Again, this is, again, that crisis of, oh, we're in crisis mode. What are we going to do? Oh, we're saved. Oh, we're in crisis mode. Oh, we're saved. This is the history of this state. We run from one side of the boat to the other. from feast to famine, and when we have the feast side, we bulk up.

you know we bulk up the spending to where the famine side becomes worse and worse every time ever since 1969 man yeah no and it just it it can't it can't continue the math doesn't work That's the thing. Arithmetic don't lie. And you're 100% right in that. History don't lie. You can't predict the timing on these things, but you can predict they're going to happen. And we refuse to plan ahead for it. Yeah.

Well, the fact that the public and the private sector are so deeply disconnected and have no control of anything. It's so telling. And I guess it comes down to, do we just let it all crash and start fresh? Or do we try and save it? I don't know if there's the will to save it, Rob. That's the problem. I mean, you and I, we're all about saving it.

But that is the question because, you know, to use your analogy of the bridges out, you know, it's like, OK, you have two options here. You have you can switch track. and avoid the bridge that's out. Or two, you can continue down the same track that has been your bread and butter for 20, 30, 40 years. And yeah, you know that bridge is out.

somewhere oh we'll deal with that but i'm too busy sitting on the gravy train right now that i don't want to go to you know austerity to something that's going to hurt me now even though it's going to save us down Maybe we just need to wait for all the current...

multi-decade legislators to time out. Maybe then it'll be the time. Well, see that's the thing i mean that'll probably help but it's not just the the multi-decadal legislators that are the problem here because you know going back to We have so many companies in this state that are dependent on that You trade out one legislator that was helping to funnel contracts to that company. You get another legislator that's going to continue to help funnel contracts to that company.

We've got a lot bigger problems to deal with here than just one or two individual legislators. In my mind, that's kind of a symptom of what's going on. the deeper problem itself. True. It might have some help, but it's not going to be the ultimate solution. The dependency on both sides of the spectrum, welfare, corporate cronyism, that's what needs to be addressed in the state. And until we get to that point, I don't know.

I don't know if we can pull back on the stick. I just don't know. Our problems in the long run, I mean, it's easy to point the fingers at individuals because we don't like any one individual's actions. But our problems in this state are not personal. They're structural. And until we fix those structural problems, you can change all the legislators you want, and it won't fix anything. Yeah, absolutely.

All right, Rob. Well, thank you, my friend, for taking this last day out before you go home. I appreciate it. You guys have a safe trip. Enjoy yourself. And we'll catch back up once you get, I know you're going to get into the groove here and get working. Maybe we'll revisit sometime next summer and this coming summer we'll revisit and see where you're at and see what you think the next session looks like.

it ain't going to be pretty. Let's just put it that way. Not going to be pretty. All right, Rob, thank you for coming on board. Appreciate it. Absolutely, Michael. Always good to talk to you. We'll see you in a few months, probably. All right. Thank you, my friend. Appreciate it. Rob Myers, our guest. The Michael Duke Show. All right. Well. That does it for us for today, tomorrow, is Firearms Friday. And we look forward to having you come on board there. We'll be doing all our good stuff.

That's right, we'll be talking about... firearms and gun rights and everything else. All right, my friends. Well, we gotta go. Love one another. And now we are slimy lizard internet people. It's Tom Michael.