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. That was just BS. It is time to get a new perspective. We know just what you need and we've got just the cure. Open wide and prepare for a steaming hot cup of freedom. I just don't. Fathom it.
The Michael Dukes Show, streaming live across the world. Yep, live around the world on the internet at michaeldukeshow.com and across the great state of Alaska on this, your favorite radio station and or FM translator. Good morning, Michael. friends and welcome to the program it is uh unexpectedly hump day i took
Having taken Monday off, it kind of screwed my—it was like, it's Tuesday. I don't know what day it is. I have no idea what day it is. But it is unexpectedly hump day, and we are ready to go. on this beautiful, beautiful Wednesday, and we are ready to go and do our thing here and get down to it. Lots of good stuff today. Sneak peek of hour two.
State Senator Mike Schauer will be joining us for what we lovingly call the shower hour of power. That's going to be coming in in hour two. Why? Well, because we love. poetry and alliteration. That's why we love rhyming and, you know, it's the little things in life, the little things that keep us going.
And we're going to be talking with him about all the state stuff. So buckle up for that. That's that's coming up in a while since we talked to him. And it'll be good to get a 10,000 foot view from the captain's chair. There, uh, we'll be in the co-pilot seat. He'll be piloting. So it'll be right at home for him. He'll be feeling good about it.
That's coming up in hour two. In hour one, we're going to stick a little closer to home today. And you may have noticed that I'm doing a little more of the stories that are kind of coming down here. onto the Southern Peninsula. But part of that is because I'm just discovering all the things that are going on down here and making... making discoveries and finding different organizations. We talked about the Compass and the homeless.
Outreach Clinic and some of the other things that we've done. And that's simply because I'm interested in what's happening in the community and I want to expose everybody else to it. I'm going to expose all that. to everybody. And so you folks up in the interior who are listing the Fairbanks area and stuff like that, if you have something that you would like to talk about, an organization or an event or something like that, make sure they reach out to me.
I'm not there, so I'm not plugged in as much as I used to be when I lived up there. So feel free to reach out to the show and drop me some info if you've got something going on up there as well. It just so happens that as I my wanderings down here in the cosmic hamlet by the sea that I run into people and talk to folks about things that are going on. And I want to get the word out about all the good stuff. We're all about community here. And that's.
That's the important stuff that I think radio is the glue that binds communities together. Boy, that sounds like a commercial, but I'm going to use that later on. It'll be fantastic. So we're going to get started here this morning. In my wanderings, I bumped into Ashley Moore, who is the development director for the South Peninsula Behavioral Health Services. That's a mouthful. What do they do for over 45 years?
They have been a nonprofit community health center serving the Kenai Peninsula from Nanilchik on southward. They have all kinds of services. including talk therapy, emergency walk-in, counseling services, supported employment, support for individuals experiencing intellectual and developmental delays, supported housing, family mental health services, and peer support.
But they're doing all this stuff with community funding, with private funding. And they're always looking for a little help. And I was having a conversation and they're like, yeah, by the way, I didn't know if you know about this, but I was like, I had no idea. Let's let's get into it and bring Ashley Moore on the program to talk about it and a little bit of Genesis, a little bit of history where it does what what it offers. And again, how we as a community.
can help. And they've got a pretty big footprint from Nikiski all the way on south. That's a pretty good sized footprint. So we're going to talk about that here right now. Let's... Let's get Ashley Moore on the program and get some lowdown here on how this works. He joins us right now to discuss. Good morning, Ashley. How are you, my friend?
Good morning. I'm doing well. Can you hear me? I can hear you. You sound finer than frog hair, so we're all good. Thanks for coming on board and being part of it. So, Ashley, you know, again, I am new to the area here just recently. I've always wanted to get down. Homer was, I used to jokingly say. It was my adopted hometown, and now it is the official hometown. But I'm learning about all these different entities and organizations and things that are going on.
so first and foremost tell us a little bit about south peninsula behavioral health and um you know what what is the mission of this or you're the developmental director so Tell us a little bit about what's going on here and what the genesis of this whole deal is. Well, first, you did a great job nailing it in the intro.
And for the listeners out there, when he says he's out wandering around, the guy was door to door checking out the different businesses in town and doing his homework. And so, Michael, props to you. That's some serious footwork you were putting in. I figured I got to go see it. It's not going to come to me, right? I got to figure out who's...
Who's behind this door? You know, I'm like opening doors and going, who's behind this door? Oh, don't close that door. Don't go in there. So yeah, it's good. It's good stuff. It's good stuff. And also for everybody listening, Awkward had no idea we were going to be both wearing the same little My Little Pony shirt. Yeah, exactly.
The good news is that I'm not wearing pants, so that's the important part for folks on the radio to know. That's the beauty of radio. You don't have to wear pants, and it's actually on my job description thing there. There you go. Perfect. um so yeah you really you nailed it at the beginning um and a lot of people uh in homer don't even know that we're here or uh that we're not connected to the hospital because we have the same
start to our name. So we have South Peninsula Hospital and so people think that South Peninsula Behavioral Health is connected to that, which sometimes makes fundraising a little difficult. But yeah, we are a comprehensive behavioral health center.
that provide the mental health services you outlined that we have the pride program which is dedicated to assisting individuals experiencing intellectual and developmental disabilities we have an on-call service that's available on a walk-in basis monday through friday if you come to our main office at the center we have a clinician who is available to talk to you We have a supported housing program. We have our staff in homes that are owned by Kenai Peninsula Housing.
These homes are designed to assist adults living independently who would be unable to live independently without staff guidance and support. We have our adult rehab services, so outside of the clinic. the Journeys program, which is designed to promote recovery and provide support and transport lives of adults who experience severe mental illness. We have IPS which is individual placements and support, which is a competitive employment program.
That partners with local businesses, and we're talking over 100 businesses, to train, develop, and employ individuals experiencing mental illness. The recognition that maintaining a job is so important. important to your overall wellness and the recovery process. And so these are not jobs that are held to the side for these individuals. These are competitive jobs and we go through everything from.
uh helping them build a resume to prepare for the interview process and then we provide support for the employee but we are not with them at the job and then we have our children's rehab services which this is It kind of ends up being my passion because this is where I started with the agency back in 2012 or 2013 in our children's department. We work in the clinic, we work in the schools, and also in the community and homes.
I'm working with children who experience severe emotional illness or mental illness. It's interesting to see this. I mean, this organization has been around for quite a while. Can you tell us, do you have any knowledge of the, you know, kind of the genesis of it? What got things started and what kicked it off down here in the community? Yeah, so originally in the 70s, we were sponsored by the city.
Initially, and at that point in time, the Homer City Council wanted us to provide services to just the immediate Homer area. And the vision of the leadership here at the time was to serve Nanilchik South. And so the city said, hey, we love that. It's a great idea. However, our resources are. limited. So we will support you until you form a nonprofit. And when that nonprofit is formed, you can separate and then you can cover Nanelchick South. And so that was...
45 years ago. And we started off really with predominantly just a mental health clinic. Now we employ around 60 people. Over a course of about five years, every five years or so, we see about 10% of the population on the lower Kenai Peninsula, which is... fairly significant, but less significant when you consider the fact that about one in four people will experience depression this year alone. And anxiety is a real thing. If you've owned a business, if you've had heavy things to deal with ever.
You've experienced to some degree, pretty high levels of anxiety. And there's times that can be debilitating. And it's nice to have somebody in your corner for that. I have no idea what you're talking about. You know, well, it's interesting, you know. I was going to bring this up because, you know, I remember in the eighties, you know, in the end of the Reagan era when, you know, cause I was in, I was in junior high and high school. And I remember there was the big discussion around.
A lot of the institutionals, a lot of the institutions and mental health facilities that were large capacity facilities that got shut down across the country. And there was a lot of discussion about what that could cause and how that would leave some people behind. And I think we've seen that. In part, I think that's contributed to some of the problems like homelessness and some of the other things. I'm not saying that they were the answer, the big institutions, but...
They were a answer, probably not the best one. And maybe this is the better way to try and pick up some of those pieces. And it's up to the communities to try and help and deal with this thing because we do have. Obviously a mental health problem, you know, in this country. And we could point to all different kinds of reasons, whether it's technology or social media now or just, you know, the breaking apart of the nuclear family. I mean, I don't know what it is.
that everything contributes a little bit of everything to it. But it is a challenge for sure. And as you point out, one in four people suffer from depression and a number almost that high. says that people will experience some kind of mental health crisis in their lifetime. And so there is a lot of challenge. And there's not a lot of times people just don't know what to do or where to go.
Even today, there's still a stigma around mental health issues that we've been fighting. You know, it used to be that, you know, we just didn't talk about it. You know, we were stoicism and, you know, the tougher, the greatest. generation and stuff like that and um you know it's i mean maybe that worked for them but it's not working for us obviously because we're having
A lot of issues with it. And so organizations like yours definitely help in this kind of situation. And you guys depend, you know, depend on a large part from community support to be able to pull all this off. And you mentioned earlier some of the.
confusion around things like the hospital, et cetera. So I want to talk about that when we get back, but we are up against the break. So we're going to continue here. Ashley Moore is our guest. He is the developmental director of the South Peninsula Behavioral Health. health service boy somebody back in the 70s was like this is the perfect name it'll be great so descriptive uh we'll be talking with him here in just a moment don't go anywhere the michael duke show continues
Right after this, don't forget, you can always check us out on Facebook, YouTube, and Rumble. Any one of those three. Facebook is the most popular where we hang out during the show. Hang out with the chat room and come on in and be with us. We are continuing here in just a moment. Don't go anywhere. Common Sense, Liberty Base, Free Thicken Radio. We'll be 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 commercial break right now, along with Ashley Moore. And yeah, I know, Ashley's a girl's name. Has nobody seen Gone with the Wind? I mean, come on. thank you i mean seriously what i mean that's just it's just the dumbest comment of the day you win the dumb comment of the day on the internet
No, look, this is something that, you know, I have family members who've dealt with mental health issues, and it can be debilitating. And it's so... uh it's so frustrating um for other family members not frustrating in a bit just it you helplessness right you don't know how to help and uh
So I think this is an issue that in some ways is near and dear to my heart that I'd like to find ways to help folks. Sometimes it's, you know, it's physiological. Sometimes it's a chemical imbalance. Sometimes, you know, things like that. But other times it's just. You know, we need to work through things and sometimes we need the help out there. You said you got started on the.
on the children's aspect of this was that was that something that was near and dear give me give me your your origin story here your superhero origin story yeah i was um I grew up in a family that had some of its own, has a bit of its own story for sure. But I ended up jumping into this program because I was a music teacher.
at the Harbor School of Music and Dance here. And I thought if I understood how the brain worked better, I could be a better teacher. And this would give me on the job training for learning how the brain worked. And I just fell in love with it. So still teach music, but just soaked up every bit of free education they give me working here. Right. Well, and that's great. And Harold says, don't be in denial.
Alaska's environment is nasty for mental health issues well yeah I mean that is true I mean it does contribute the environmental stressors in Alaska being inside in the dark in the cold I mean I'm from Fairbanks you don't have to tell me about being dark and being
cold right so i understand that for sure it's definitely a contributing factor um but it's this is a problem across the you know this is a problem that's going on across the country um is is part of the issue there Yeah, so when we talk about, you brought up trauma and childhood. So the ACEs study, it's been talked about a lot more in the last 10 years, which is the adverse childhood experiences study.
And this is adverse childhood experiences being anything from like a family member, an immediate family member being incarcerated, death. witnessing or being a victim of domestic violence, having your own major injury. They were studying obesity and heart disease, and they found this commonality with trauma. And on average, about 61% of adults experience... cases in their childhood. On the Kenai Peninsula, the change for Kenai survey that was done, I think back in 2020, 2021.
81% of people on the Kenai Peninsula had experienced ACEs, which is 20% up above the national average. And 46% had experienced four or more. uh adverse childhood experiences which puts you just in a whole other category for at risk for long-term health um effects Yeah, I mean, it's a tough situation. And like I said, the Alaska environmental conditions don't help on top of that. So, you know, there is a component of gutting things through, but there's also a time when you can need some help.
And it's good to know that organizations like SPB... Whatever. It's nice to know that South Peninsula Behavioral Health Services is here to talk about it. We can just shorten it up to the center. You can refer to us at the center. Most folks in Homer, that's really how they know us. The center. All right. The center.
All right. Well, we'll continue on with Ashley Moore. Somebody said they like your coffee mug. I missed it. What was the coffee mug? I missed the coffee mug there. Oh, yeah. See, there you go. Kal-El, your only hope. Okay, we got to go here. The Michael Duke Show, CometSense Radio. Public enema number one. Oh, wait, sorry.
uh enemy public enemy number one which makes more sense on the other hand he's a little bit of a pain in the uh michael duke show um yeah a little bit of pain in the i mean i'm trying to be nicer But it doesn't always work out. Sometimes people are just so dumb, right? You can't help but be mean sometimes. Welcome back to the program. It is The Michael Duke Show. We're talking with Ashley Moore, who is the director of development.
for the South Peninsula Behavioral Health Services. Ashley told me during the break, he said, you can just call it the center. That's fine because the SPBH is a lot of, that's a lot of letters and words and stuff. everything else so ashley let's talk a little bit about um you know how you guys do what you do we were you mentioned it earlier that a lot of people get confused because it is south peninsula behavioral health People think, oh, that must be part of South Peninsula Hospital.
even though they have nothing to do with each other. And so you guys are dependent on local support, community support from private individuals, businesses, entities, and things like that. And that creates some challenges when they think, oh, you're with a hospital. You got tons of dough. Nobody should have to worry about it. That's a it's a real issue, right? Yeah. So, I mean, to be completely transparent, we do.
charge a fee for service to Medicaid when somebody qualifies for it. However, the state continues to recognize that we cannot pay what that service is worth. In other words, if you were to, if you were a clinician or a therapist and you're charging for services out of a private practice, you're going to be able to charge significantly more than we can here. And so that means that the budget's going to be short. And so, yeah, we rely on the community. So actually at the spbhs.org on our website.
and you can go to the donate section. We also have some exciting fundraisers coming up this year. I'm looking forward to the... Town Lap Walkathon. So you're fairly new to Homer. You're probably not familiar with what a TL is yet. No, but I can guess because you just said Town Lap Walkathon. Town Lap, yeah. I'm assuming I'm walking down Pioneer and then down the Sterling and then back up Lake and then back down Pioneer, right? Yep, yep.
and so uh we're um i'm working on a a tl walkathon for this spring where it'll be a peer-to-peer fundraiser get get donations and we're going to walk, we're going to do a TL. We're going to try to do one a day for a week. And so that is to be scheduled yet, but it is on the horizon and we'll be announcing that when it comes up. But that's going to be our first major fundraiser for the year. Also looking forward to rebooting our D Stig cinema series. So in the past we've.
partnered with Homer Theater, and I've been fortunate to be able to have conversations with the folks at Porcupine, and we'll be kicking that off again soon. Just for more opportunities to interact with. the public because people are um there is a stigma around mental health and realizing that you get sick with your body and your mind is part of your body And so it needs treatment just like anything else would. So creating opportunities for exposure is huge.
Yeah, we got some pretty exciting things coming up. I'm really looking forward to be unveiling soon. Right. And you guys have got some success stories in the community as well. I'm assuming after 45 years, you've got a track record. You've been able to pull it together. And again, with a lot of community support. I think that's important. You know, you're not you're not solely dependent on the state or the federal or anything else. This is a huge community effort.
Yeah. Yeah. And we've been fortunate to have some really great partners and helping with our helping our purposes. So we get to collaborate with one of the things that's going on right now is Planet Youth. which is the police department, the school system, and we were talking about childhood experiences, adverse childhood experiences on the break.
and Planet Youth is really working on that upstream component. What's making families or making children fall into the system where they get involved with the vision of juvenile justice or they get into a situation where they end up homeless and what this is trying to do is connect children to more resources so that they can be more successful adults. Right. Well, and there seems to be a developing theme here. We talked with...
The folks, Todd Bingham over at the Compass in Nikiski and other things. And I did a lot of work when I was in the Mat-Su. I did some work with my house and Michelle Overstreet and their youth programs. I mean, I jokingly say I can't believe Whitney Houston was such a sage that I believe the children are our future, you know, but that.
That really, I mean, it's really what it's all about. And like I said, there's many components to it. I believe that the destruction of the nuclear family has been a key role in a lot of that, where it's made it harder on a lot of kids today. I think that's... That's part of it for sure. But there's a multiplicity of things that has caused this to continue to go downward.
And we need to be able to engage the kids and to see kids who get involved in different programs, whether it's homeless kids in the Matsu with my house or kids who are looking for. a father figure or some kind of stability or competency with like the Compass in Nikiski. I mean, those kind of organizations definitely help these kids and working with them at that age.
you know, stops a lot of the problems, as you said, that come downstream from that. Yeah. Yeah. Really, if our goal can be as much as possible, be preventative. Set families up for success. So in between times I worked here, I also spent time with the Office of Children's Services.
And a lot of people not realizing our goal was keep the family together, right? The last thing we need is one more family to do paperwork on. So really wanting to keep family together. And what I love about being here. is that is so much the goal of the whole agency, whether it be from toddler to senior adults. Our goal is help people live their healthiest life and your definition of the healthiest life. So I can't be the guy telling you not to drink Monster.
And that's also what's in my coffee mug because I'm going to decide for me what my healthiest life is. And our job is to partner with you to help you reach that goal. Right, exactly. Well, and I think that's, again, I think those are important choices. And having a community organization that's, again, I think an organization, my belief has always been that an organization that is funded by the community.
And is primarily supported by the community through financial means and everything else is the one that's going to be closest to the to the beliefs and the values of that community. And so that's why when we first talked and we were talking about this, I said, well, we're going to.
get you on the program because people have got to know that this kind of stuff exists and that the help is out there and if they want to give support and this is an opportunity for conservatives and smaller government people to put their money where their mouth is i mean i'm a libertarian so you know kind of everybody hates me and i'm okay with that but i mean for smaller government people to put their money where their mouth is and say okay if you don't want you know
big government to come in and try and run everything and depend on them for all the money, then this is where you do it. You give your blood to your treasure. You give your time and your money to organizations like this who are community-based and who depend on that local community.
support to make it happen yeah yeah we um we're looking for partners we're looking for people who want to either join us in the trenches or help us uh get behind us And so whether it be an individual or a business who's looking to sponsor one of our events, we're going to be starting a capital campaign very, very soon. to remodel one of our campuses with the main goal being child and youth in that building there and to be able to provide
Hopefully, we're still in the planning stages of it, but hopefully something like a teen community resource center, something along those lines. But a place where... Again, we can help people just live their most successful lives, but it's going to take our neighbors joining with us and supporting us in that effort.
Well, and again, going back to, I mean, I keep, I keep cycling back to the youth, but you know, it's important. I mean, you know, whether you talked about being a music teacher, you know, whether kids can find their way in something like. The arts, you know, music, theater, you know.
crafting creativity pottery carpentry you know the woodworking those kind of things um or whether it's the you know the outdoorsy stuff you know and being a hunt being into hunting and fishing you know finding something along the path that brings them that peace of mind, takes them closer to...
you know, nature or God or whatever it is that, you know, puts him in that Zen spot. Those are the things that are important. And for some, it was music. I mean, I loved, I did theater when I was a kid. I was also very much into the show. shooting sports, and things like that, and mechanics, and just things that are, you know, we get so stuck up in that, you know, in that little computer, that little phone in front of us that we can't get it, we can't find something else.
We need some of that help. And then sometimes some of these community centers like this, like you or the Compass or whoever, they provide that space where kids can be exposed to things that may be in their own household. they don't have because of whatever the circumstances are, single parent or both working or some kind of busted up environment. This gives an opportunity to be able to do all that.
i love that you bring up the arts connection homer council on the arts just approached us oh in the last couple of months and um we're able to get a grant from the alaska council on the arts for connecting art and wellness and mental health and the homework council on the arts decided to take a youth approach to it and so we're they're working with our art therapist drew smith and we are going to be working at Homer High School, Homer Flex.
and homer middle school to be doing a talking about the connection between wellness and arts and then there'll be when the project is finished by this fall, there will be art installations throughout Homer connected to that, which is pretty exciting. I love getting the community involved. I love the conversation. I mean, that stuff is amazing, and it gives kids a chance to shine in various aspects and to explore.
what they might be good at you know i was never good at drawing i did love to draw but i was never very good at it but i discovered other things that i love to do and That led to me standing behind a microphone in the long run. So that's the fun stuff.
And it helps give kids directions and everything else. But again, I keep focusing on the kids because, again, the downstream effect is what's important. But there are adults out there that may need help as well. Some of the services that you talked about included.
essentially assisted living for mentally ill folks. Tell me just a little bit about that here. I got about two minutes. Okay, so we got supported housing, which is slightly different than assisted living. So assisted living would be staffed. all the time and they're completely dependent on our staff. Our staff are there during most of the business hours of the week, but they're there to offer case management support.
um to do scheduling for our individuals living in those in those housing situations to work with their staff members are scheduled with um it's provides an element of supervision that they need, but... There's one of my favorite places to go just spend time as somebody who works here to get to go just hang out in one of our supported housing homes makes my day usually.
i love the people that we have in there and i love the staff that we have who are also just incredibly dedicated a lot of them have been here for over 10 years now which is that's significant but you can't help but fall in love with the people we work with once you start yeah well
People are people, man. You got to see beyond, you know, stigmas and problems and everything else. And you got to love them for who they are. And that's something we've tried to stress on the show over the years, even with all the divisiveness and politics and polarization and everything else. In the end, we're all just people.
And to quote the great sage Rodney King, can't we all just get along? That's what we need to do, right? When it's all said and done. Ashley Moore is our guest. We've got one final segment here with us. I didn't think we were going to go this far with Ashley, but we'll take him for... We'll hold him to his desk for one final segment here, and we will be back here in just a moment. Don't go anywhere. We're talking about South Peninsula Behavioral Health Services, the center.
uh down here on the southern peninsula again if you're up in the interior and you're like but i just fairbanks well Find me somebody in Fairbanks who wants to talk about what's going on up there as well. I would love to have a broader conversation about these issues because I think, again, they're important.
And they could lead to greater positive change down the road if we can bring it forward and destigmatize some of it. Ashley Moore, our guest. We'll return with him in just a moment. The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense. Radio. We're broadcasting live through a series of tubes. Allowing all of these entities to provide streaming stuff going on the Internet. Well, it's kind of hard to explain. Sorry.
Streaming live every weekday morning on Facebook Live and MichaelDukesShow.com. Okay, commercial break time right now. Ashley Moore is our guest. We've been talking about the center, SPBHS. Got it all right. I got all the letters in the right order that time. Nailed the alphabet. Good job. I know. Exactly. It's amazing. I are a high school graduate, so it's all good at this point.
Yeah. Tracer in the chat room on Rumble says my first high school, which I attended long ago in Idaho, offered archery and bowling. I greatly enjoyed them both. I mean, yeah, you know, I remember what I really loved and I was. I was okay at it, but I remember I took a pottery class. I took a class in high school that had to do with pottery, and I took a woodworking class.
And to this day, I still love to work with wood. I haven't done pottery since I was in high school because I don't have the money for the equipment. But it was always... It was just always a cool ability to be able to express yourself in some way and to form something out of essentially nothing, a big lump, and you squeeze it up and you make up.
I had to laugh because when we moved again, I found this big beer stein that I made with a face on it. It has this face making this really fun. And I was just like, I don't know how I still have it, but I still had it. It, you know, I remembered that I remember making it. I remember the time that that was kind of the Zen moment for me during the school day when I would go into that class and just get a chance to sit down and work.
And it gave me some direction and and someplace at outlet, I guess, is what I'm saying, an outlet, which I think a lot of kids today they need. But again, between the over. It's not over excitement. The, you know, the inundation of.
the internet and the phones and the computers and the you know all this other stuff they become passive participants in a lot of this stuff you know they watch youtube for hours or twitch or whatever for hours or And I enjoy that sometimes, but we also need an outlet to be able to go and do things for ourselves. You ought to connect with our friend Chris Story on the whole pottery thing. In fact, I interviewed him for my podcast for my music shop.
We talked in great detail about his start in pottery and high school pottery class and a teacher who like found the spark and helped him get passionate about it. No, Chris is a, Chris is a weekly guest on the show. He's one of my good friends. And, uh, I often tease him that about his start in pot, uh, pottery.
uh but yeah chris uh chris story is you know and i think about him every time i think about pottery i think that you know i think about chris's journey because he took it full bore i just i just dabbled in it for a little bit and really enjoyed it and he went full blown And did well with it. I mean, made a career out of it to begin with and did all kinds of things. So, I mean, there are outlets out there. I mean, again, I did theater.
and choir and things like that in high school. I discovered I really liked performing, and ultimately that led me into radio. um for that because i don't have the face for movies so you know it's just one of those things i gotta be coming i know you knew it was coming you knew it was coming but you know my mom used to she laughed because she said she remembered me with a tape recorder underneath the kit dining room table.
with a tape recorder pretending to be a war correspondent or something when i was like nine or ten years old you know recording my voice into the thing so i mean it you know they're the outlet was there we just need to find it for a lot of these kids and find a way to help them connect to it and And it would go a long way towards that. My life. Legitimately. That was the band and choir.
And then if I wasn't going to become a musician, radio was the thing I wanted to do. The mixtapes that I would make with my friends, we would do KRDM radio. uh and dj our own mixtapes so yeah that's funny yeah that's funny um i uh i love that and you know it's funny because i didn't get so much into the music side of it as i did into the uh
The old time radio. My folks had stacks of records that were old time radio shows. So the performance, the voices, you know, the the different cadences and the sound effects and the storytelling. That's what really got my attention on radio. So. I think it was a natural offshoot of how I ended up here in the thing. Cole says...
Try being a teacher out here nowadays. I have horror stories and should write a book. It's no wonder that now mostly outsourced teachers from Philippines get hired to teach in remote Alaska. I mean, again, yes, you're 100% right. The behavioral issues have... And I don't have an answer for that other than, you know, we need better parenting. But better parenting is also an upstream problem because maybe they weren't parented very well. I was lucky enough to have a couple of parents that were.
Tough on me, but did well, and I hopefully was able to transfer that to my kids. I've had all well-behaved kids, but you're right. There are horror stories out there, and part of that is environmental, and part of that is emotional, et cetera, et cetera. So there's no one size fits all. There's no tweet, 148 character tweet that's going to fix this. It's going to be a big, big deal in the long run. Ashley Moore is our guest. The ding means we're about to return.
And we are ready to go. One final segment with Ashley before we continue. SPBHS.org. If you want to donate, let's get to it. The Michael Duke Show. Seriously humorous with a pinch of intellect. Pinch of intellect. Sorry. That is humorous. Here's Michael Dukes. That guy is so mean. can't believe i paid him to say those things tell you what the life's better with a theme song it is hey my thing dur my theme song is dur uh anyway uh we're talking with with ashley moore
who is the developmental director for the South Peninsula Behavioral Health Services, Inc., otherwise known as the center. We've kind of gone through a big, merry journey here over the last hour, talking about all the different services that they offer.
And, you know, how they're funded and things like that. The radio station here is going to be working with Ashley in the future. I want to help out with these these town laps and some of the other things. So we're going to keep talking about this and being part of. of it. Because again, I think it's important to be part of that and engaged in the community. And hopefully we can raise some awareness.
But Cole or sorry, actually more Cole in the chat room said something here that we talked about during the break. He said, try being a teacher. out there nowadays. I have horror stories and she'll write a book. It's no wonder that now mostly outsourced teachers from Philippines get hired to teach in remote Alaska.
I think part of that is, yes, we have huge behavioral problems in different school districts. I think part of that's part of our scholastic achievement problem is that we have behavioral issues. We have people who are lack parenting skills and things like that. But also, you know, this is this is a holistic. I was just saying it before we came back. There is no magic bullet for this. There's no single issue thing that we could if we did just this one thing, everything would be fixed.
And this goes back to my same issues with things like homelessness. There is no magic bullet that's going to do one thing. It's a combination of things. I mean, as somebody who's worked in the industry and in the field for a while, you've worked with kids, you've done all this.
I mean, what are some of your ideas? Because, again, I mean, I think you would agree that there is no magic bullet. What do we need to do as a community? If you were if you could speak from on high and say, here's how we need to come together and make this work. What are some of the issues that we could address to help some of these things? So what you're talking about is resiliency, right? Because there are.
Things that you're going to encounter in life no matter what. Someone is going to pass away. There is going to be a traumatic event that's going to happen in your life. But our ability to recover from it is based on our own resiliency. And what creates your resiliency is a formula of things that are in your life. And it goes back to that old saying, it takes a village.
It is that having connected, involved parents. It's a family member outside of your home who's invested in you. It's that teacher. who takes notice and encourages and pushes you. It's a coach or an extracurricular teacher.
i get the joy of teaching i teach about a thousand ish music lessons a year and it is such a joy to be able to speak into and be a part of people's lives like that it's having connectedness to some sort of spiritualism or religion these are all things that through the aces study they discovered helped somebody to be able to recover from these adverse childhood experiences. And the more resiliency factors you had, the better your outcomes were going to be. So as a community.
the best way for us to be involved is to be connected to our neighbors right um and then as a parent i got three kids uh and i was doing a uh a toothpick bridge project with my 13 year old last night i got two of my kids playing in a band with me. And I've got my youngest, he and I like constant motorcycle rides in the summertime. In the wintertime, he is my hangout buddy if I'm doing a...
automotive project or something like that. And so it's that being connected to your own children. And these things are going to kill us, man. Your social media, as much as we're all connected to it and we're addicted to it, I got my phone in my hands all the time. That's not what our kids need. And so the more we can create opportunity for them to be away from that, the more we can create opportunity to connect.
the healthier we're all going to be. Well, and I think that you mentioned, it's all, those are all external things. Those are all outside things. And I think a lot of times the kids, you know, get up in themselves and social media is a false connection. I mean, we are connected with people via social media, et cetera, but it's not.
It's not real. It's not it's not a real personal one on one connection. It's not real life. You know what you see through the Instagram filter is not really how things are. And so, yeah. And so, you know, having that connection. with people uh like you said coaches with parents with with uh grandparents or aunts and uncles or other family members or with your pastor or with a youth group leader or so you know or uh you know a club of some kind
You know, those kind of things, those are all those kind of connections are what bind us together. And like you said, I agree. I think that's a that's a terrific description. Resiliency, because we're all going to face trauma. We all at some point there's something will happen, you know, at varying degrees of bad. Something will happen.
And how we can deal with it is what's important. And, you know, it's the old joke these days about snowflakes and, you know, people, kids having, you know, new workers. Oh, I need a mental health day. And, you know, at some point we've obviously.
We've lost some of that resiliency. We need to go. I don't say we need to go back to the old stoicism. I think there needs to be a hybrid somewhere between the old stoicism of bucking up and dealing with it and being resilient and then also being able to talk about it and not have a stick. I have quotes from Stoics all over my office.
But at the same time, so we'll talk about like emotional budgeting. When your day is hard, but you have things you have to get done, I can feel this. I just can't feel this right now. But I'm going to process this when I get home. Right. And have that person that you connect with where, all right, I'm going to deal with this when I can deal with this. But now is not the moment. But it's still, it's not the never dealing with it. Right.
It's in this moment right now, I do have to persevere. In this moment right now, I do have to get stuff done. I've had horrible news when I was in the middle of a lesson and had to go back into being happy and plucky and... yeah keep this kid excited about music for 20 minutes um and then let myself deal with it when i get home right i don't cry in the shower you cry in the shower exactly i know exactly i don't cry into my beer you do
into my beer which is weird but yeah no i'm i'm exactly i mean i think that's exactly it we i think emotional budgeting i mean we have to because the stoicism obviously i mean it laid it led to some great people But at the same time, people who were severely broken who later on had serious issues and passed some of those issues on, we need to find that middle ground between the two. We don't want to be so soft that we can't deal with anything and we just stick our head in the sand.
the same time we want to be able to work through that stuff i think that's why it's important that a lot of these and you know what and i and as a younger man i probably would never have thought this i would have thought stoicism all the way But again, after dealing with people in my life and loved ones who have struggled with some of these things, I understand now more than I ever did before that there's got to be a middle ground. There's got to be, you know, work through this stuff.
It's interesting. We're down to the last two minutes here, Ashley. So how can people help with South Peninsula Behavioral Health Services? give back of their time or maybe a few bucks or just spread the word? What can people do here to make it happen? So the easiest way to get connected straight up, spbhs.org. uh the link is on the screen for those of you who are watching the stream today um and spbhs.org
You can go to navigate to the donate page. You can donate there. You can either give a one-time donation or you can give a monthly donation. We do have our fundraisers coming up. And if you want to be in the know on what we have happening, you can go find us on Facebook. We're also on Instagram. I run both of those pages. You can also connect with me there if you want to have more information on what we have going on.
All right. So again, spbhs.org, spbhs.org if you want to do it. And we'll keep folks in the loop here. For any fundraisers that you're doing, if you're, you know, again, you're going to do your town loop or anything else. And this, again, the center basically benefits anybody from the Nilchik South. And so the whole Lower Southern Peninsula, it's a big, big swath of people out here. If you need help, reach out to spbhs.org and folks like Ashley and others will.
See if they can plug you into the right services to help. And I just appreciate what you guys do in the community. And like I said, I'm getting the full education down here, Ashley, on everything that's happening. I appreciate you. Coming on board today and sharing with us, thank you for being part of today's program. I really appreciate that. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity. All right. Hold the line for a second, folks. We're out of time for this hour. Hour two dead ahead. State Senator Mike Schauer. Be kind. Love one another. Live well. You got to go. Otherwise, we'll see you for hour two dead ahead. Ashley, I thought I'd give you the final bite at the apple here. Last two minutes here before I let you go for just you and me and 59 of our closest friends on the Internet who are watching right now.
um you know just any final thoughts here before we uh before we let you go uh no i i i really do appreciate you uh um connecting i appreciate that radio has been revitalized on the kenai on southern kenai peninsula um and uh and that you are doing the footwork and you are going door to door and seeing what's there and connecting with your community now. It's an honor to have a platform to get to shout from.
I've been ringing this bell for a while, and it was great to have somebody amplify that. So I really appreciate it. Well, you know, I mean, again, it sounds cheesy sometimes when I hear myself say it, but, you know, I truly believe that radio, especially local radio. at its core is about community. And we can do news talk, which is more right slanted, you know, or we could do music, which is kind of amorphous sometimes or just kind of in the middle or whatever. But really...
At its core, radio is about community and it's about bringing people together, informing folks and doing things like that. And I truly believe in my heart of hearts that radio is, I said it earlier, it is the glue that can hold a community. It's not necessary, but if you have it and it's done right, I believe that it can bind a community closer together, regardless of what our personal...
political beliefs are, religious beliefs or anything else, we could still agree to disagree and come together and all agree that community is important and that we have to support our neighbors. Again, whether we agree with them or not, just because. They're our neighbors and they're our community, and we need to be able to depend on each other. And I'm so sick at heart over the last 25 years of doing a radio show.
I'm so sick at heart of seeing people who I believe are good people, even though I may disagree with them that don't even want to talk to me because they don't agree with me on one thing, you know, or something like that. And I'm just like, I just. I just want to sit down and talk about movies or music or D&D or something. I just want to talk about something. Can we have a beer? Can we sit together and find some common ground?
And I'm hoping that the direction that I'm taking the stations here will help to foster that, because I think that's important. You know, you can agree with me politically or disagree with me politically, but I would hope that you would listen and go. Oh, that's some good stuff.
That's why I want to bring, you know, different folks on in different places, even people that I may be philosophically at odds with. If they're doing something good in the community, I still want to bring them on. Not that you are, but I mean, yeah, I still want to bring them on. And I hate you, but I mean, other than.
that i mean it's fine you know so i have a feeling you and i get along no never never all right well ashley thank you so much for um thank you for coming on i just i saw i saw a uh Where was the comment here? Tyler said, learning about mental health over the last couple of years has been super rewarding. And I agree with that. Again, 20 year old me would have been like, I'm just going to be stoic. And I've discovered 25, 30 years later that that works only up to a point.
And learning about it and destigmatizing it and opening my mind to other options and seeing, like you said, the downstream effect is where it really got me when I started having kids and realizing I don't want to. pass on my hang-ups or foibles onto my kids, that's when I really discovered that that's it. And so we do need a reawakening. Like I said, I don't want to go back to the Reagan era.
full-on mental health institutions but we've got to find a hybrid somewhere in there too we still i think need some larger institutions but they need to be run well to help some of these people in larger quantities because right now it's right now it's quality over quantity before it was quantity over quality and somewhere in the middle is the right mix ashley final thoughts uh well i
I'm excited for the direction that the center is taking right now and the community connections we're making because I feel like we're in a better place to take this on as a community. than we have been in the past, which is good because I also feel like there is more opportunity than ever before, which interpret that how you want, but there's definitely more opportunity for us to do.
uh behavioral health work in this community yeah no and we are we have some great community partners to work with right right well you're right i mean there's more opportunity which It's not necessarily a great thing, but at the same time, as long as we address it and we look at it and we take it head on.
Again, we take it head on and we don't have a stigma with it and we look for solutions instead of perpetuation. I think that's part of the problem is that in some ways it's become almost an industry and it's...
Not necessarily I was looking to fix it as to as to perpetuate it. But that's my own personal hang up with some of those things. But I believe the small organizations like yours that are locally driven can definitely be part of the solution there. So, Ashley, thank you so much for coming on board today. Thanks for having me. All right. Good to talk with you. Appreciate it. Ashley Moore, spbhs.org. Go check out the center. Thanks, Ashley. I appreciate it. That brings us up.
State Senator Mike Schauer is, I believe, on the phone with us right now. I rudely called him while I was still talking. Let's see if he's actually there. Good morning, sir. How are you? You are. That was so rude. Unbelievable. I can't believe you did that. Yeah, I know. And it is what it is. It's what happens when you don't have a producer that can talk to your guests while you're talking to somebody else.
It is what it is, my friend. It is what it is. That's right. Good to hear from you. You all ready to jump in there and get... get dirty uh no that was that's probably not right that's probably not right uh but get down to it i guess get down to the nitty-gritty you all ready
Let's get to it. I like it. There's a song like that. That's right. There is. All right. Hold the line. State Senator Mike Schauer, our guest, The Michael Duke Show, Common Sense, Liberty Base, Free Thinking Radio. Here we go. don't understand. Check out the Michael Dukes show.com for information on how to get access to the podcast. Welcome to the party, pal.
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. That was just BS. It is time to get a new... perspective we know just what you need and we've got just the cure open wide and prepare for steaming hot cup of freedom i just don't fathom it
The Michael Dukes Show, streaming live across the world. Live around the world on the Internet at MichaelDukesShow.com and across the state of Alaska on this, your favorite radio station. and or FM translator. You ready to go to get things ready to rock and roll? Let's do this thing. We are into hour two today, which means we are joined by State Senator...
Mike Schauer, who comes on board with us and hasn't been here for quite a while. He's a busy, busy guy as the new Senate Republican caucus leader. We're not saying minority leader. We're just saying Senate caucus. leader for the Republicans there in the state Senate. We're joined by him today to discuss, well, woodticks, lunatics, and politics, all three of those things. So let's get into it.
Mike Schauer is our guest. Good morning, my friend. How are you this morning? I'm on my first cup of coffee. It's finally raining again in Juneau. The first month there, to be frank, has been actually really nice. For this place, usually it's a dark, cold, rainy, snowy, just a big old mess, but actually it's been clear and relatively cold for a while. So, you know, to be fair, like I said, in the last eight years, we haven't really seen that.
that part's been nice but like you said i'm so flipping busy um you know it's like i'm having to schedule this now work around stuff it was you know i called you and gave you a heads up you know as the session starts and i think my schedule is going to be not quite like in the past i'm going to be having a hard time getting on the you know the radio and doing anything and boy was that that was a foreshadowing of worse than i thought
every day all day um and there are meetings after meetings you know it just comes with the territory but that was uh it's kind of going back to being like a commander in the military again like you know you're you're from early morning till
late at night and frankly if you didn't just you know cut your losses at some point in the evening and walk away you'd be there till 11 o'clock it's funny how it's played out yeah and it just goes and goes and goes you gotta stuff a lot in in a short period of time Yeah. And luckily, we've been able to make some connections with some of the other legislators down there. So it's been good to be able to.
Get more of a cross section, especially from some folks that haven't had a lot of appearances on the program. Speaking of which, by the way, I forgot to mention earlier in the show that tomorrow on the program, Kevin McCabe will be on in hour one to talk about.
latest article in must read about defined benefits and then senator rob yunt will be with us in hour two to talk about his proposed tax bill and some of the other issues as well so uh we're getting you know we're getting a lot more information and it's good to come contact and connect with people down there. And it actually works out pretty well. Mike, my schedule, as crazy as it has been, one of the things we talked about is like, well, you know, I can't get on.
all the programs every week at all um because my scape and actually even if i got holes in it you know the the night before or the next morning i show up and they're like and this and this and this and like there goes that day right like just trying to read you know legislation and stuff going on has been tough but One of the things we talked about, would everybody be willing to help kind of share the load a little bit? One and two, it does give a more unique perspective.
by having you know fairbanks and the mat-su and anchorage and others that are jumping in so it's actually kind of in a weird way although i miss being on all the time because it's fun but um it has allowed us to kind of get more people out in front of you know um alaskans and provide their perspective on things and what they're working on so i'm i'm in a weird way it's been kind of nice to to have everybody be able to to come on every week on different programs to make sure
We're kind of catching the narrative. Well, and I believe that that's a responsibility of elected officials. They should be more engaged. They should be, you know, in front of the public eye and be able to answer questions and talk about things. And so it's good to see some of those things come about.
Mike, of course, the big elephant in the room, the 10 million pound elephant in the room is the education funding. Although maybe I should walk that back. The really big elephant in the room that everybody seems to try to ignore. is the fact that we are broke. That we went into this legislative session with a depending on who you talk to and how they account for it somewhere between a 300 million and a 1.2 billion dollar deficit and that's really
That's the elephant that everybody's ignoring. The one that they're paying attention to, of course, is the education funding where they want to add. $800 million in spending over the next three years to the budgets and everything else, meanwhile ignoring the other elephant that's taking up the other half of the room, which is we've got no more money.
Give me your thoughts on these two things, the juxtaposition between those two things, and what is going on right now. That's why I'm kind of glad to get back on the radio. Hopefully next week I can get another program or two, and it's going to be another. I would imagine I'm going to schedule back in in a couple of weeks. But if we get some late breaking news, I'll try to find maybe I can even pop on for a short time in the next week or two. But regarding that one, because that's kind of the.
there are two parts to it but the budget's going to be a little bit further down right later in the session just based on how it's working out and if that's pretty normal um but the education one started off and i will start all the way back to when the governor
and his team and i will give them credit for this they were thinking out of the box i wish we had a little more of that down here and they were like hey we propose um let's have a special session and the special session idea kind of fizzled out The four caucus leaders were talking together. They pulled us in and said, hey, we'd like to try this, you know, do education. Fascinating idea. That's new. We're different, right? And so we're all at the table where we can talk freely and quickly.
kind of like a labor negotiation almost you could sit there and throw the ideas around and that lasted a little bit and then but the special session thing kind of fizzled out which you can do constitutionally inside a regular session but they didn't like the idea some people didn't the different clocks so we that went away and just had the negotiation and what was interesting about that battle and i'll go you know it's this will probably take up half the program but
um i'll talk a little bit about education then we'll spiral back to your bigger question which is really the bigger one of the fiscal thing but we'll get the education one off the table um there's two kind of thoughts down here michael one of them is there are people that just want the bsa they just want the money and don't worry that will take care of itself well you and i know and i think most your audience and and frankly a lot of the legislative building um
including and i can't speak for them i'm not going to speak for the minority or the you know republican caucus members but i will say generally speaking there is an acknowledgement of the two problems. One, there is some funding needed, right? Some stable and some increase with inflation and other things. And you and I both, you know, because you've been there, it's not just the money math problem, right? It's also a political problem.
that there's going to be some funding required some funding is going to be a part of this no matter what there's also another side that's not being represented as well it certainly hasn't been in years past but it's fortunately picked up steam this year is that there has to be policy Because just throwing money at the problem, no matter what it is, rarely fixes it. And as you and I have discussed on the program in the past many times.
that you know since the early 2000s you know the state of alaska has increased education spending on k through 12 by about a third and yet our scores have hovered near the bottom and i have learned to not broad brush all school districts
right all all teachers because there are some that are doing really well the governor in his state of the state address talked about how we're number one in charter schools in the nation our charter schools are smoking it some school districts are doing a pretty good job some are struggling
The cost of things like, you know, when you add rural land, right, because of transporting food and fuel and they're way out in the bush, it drives up the overall cost. There are things that it is harder than just saying one broad statement necessarily. That being said. sending money to the same system that in a lot of ways has eaten up that money. And you see, I think we have a flyer from our caucus that was showing
I think for every new school teacher hired, there's been like four administrators in that last 20 years. I mean, numbers that go, where's the money really going? We have a legislator right now in the building, a Democrat, that was part of repealing the 70-30. statute that directed 70% of the money had to go to the teachers and the kids in the classroom. So policy-wise, we've thrown money at it and it hasn't really solved any of our major problems.
There's been this acknowledgement now in the building as well that if you're going to do that and provide a BSA increase, it cannot be just money because the system will take it and do what it wants to do and it's not necessarily going to fix the problems. The governor talked about read by nine and his address. We're already seeing turnaround, which many other states across the nation. That's why we modeled it. So we need to do read by nine.
Because that forces kids to be able to read by that grade level and the whole system has to adjust for that. And we're seeing scores improve. What a shocker, right? And so there's the other half. here in the legislature, I say half, the other acknowledgement that there must be policy. We must take care of brick and mortar schools, but we also need to take care of charter schools and correspondence, i.e. homeschool parents. Things like CTE education, right?
um and other things that you need to drive and make sure that there is a broad range of educational opportunities in the state for parents and students not just brick and mortar schools and So in this negotiation, if you will, this, I don't know, I don't hate to call it a battle, but in this battle over education funding, there is pretty general acknowledgement there will be a BSA increase. There will also be policy. And if there are not both.
Nothing will happen and we will be right back at square one. So if I was to summarize the entire last month, it is about there will be policy and there will be a BSA increase. The BSA increase will not be what some people want, which is way beyond what we can afford.
And the policy may not be as much as we all want, but we're going to have policy or the governor is just going to veto it. Right. And we're going to be back. Well, that's that's kind of where we are. That's the definition of a good deal. Right. Where nobody gets exactly what they want and everybody's pissed at the end. I mean, that was kind of the you know. kind of thing but you're right because there's a whole contingency out there that has uh essentially said give us our money and shut up
That's the crowd that I've been talking a lot about. They're ones that are just like, shut up and give us our money. And then we'll talk about policy down the road. And that never works. That's like, give me the dessert first. And if I'm still hungry, I'll eat the rest of the food. It just it does.
It doesn't make any sense, especially in light of the fact that we've poured ever-expanding gobs of money into this behemoth and are still getting, I wouldn't even say substandard results. They are abysmal results. When you're 51st out of 53. And you've been shoveling money into it like it's a furnace eating coal. You just can't keep doing that. So there has to be some kind of compromise discussion in there. And I'm wondering.
I know that there are some proponents out there of just shut up and give us our money. Are there are there people who are willing to come to the table on the other side that are willing to at least talk about policy? Well, that's why I said there's the other portion that's really taken root this year in the legislature with how this is playing out. Like I said, I'm going to go back to give the governor a lot of credit here.
his team came up with the idea his team pulled everybody together his team threw some stuff on the table and so did some and i won't say it's all republicans there might be a few democrats but generally speaking if you're looking for the most part
It's the Democrat side that is in line more with, you know, just the BSA increase. It's the Republican side, by and large. That's a little more about policy. That's not across the board. There's some back and forth and some people mix. And I'm one of those that's in the middle. I get it.
there's going to have to be some bsc increase i acknowledge that right that's the compromise right cool it's fine is what it is but i'm also one of those said but there has to be policy in that i'm not going to demand just policy and i'm not going to be part of just throwing money at the problem There is a blended solution here in the middle that will do both.
that will provide some stable funding to the schools you know with whatever level we can afford and that is an issue we're going to talk about here in a minute and i need to see policy right and i think obviously that's probably most people in the building now in the middle that are going we we're going to have to do both for this to work and by the way if you don't the governor's been crystal clear if he doesn't get enough policy in this with the money that we're spending
then he's just going to veto and we're going to be right back in the same battle we've had year after year after year. There won't be a BSA increase. They won't have the stability they want. We won't get the policy improvements like three by nine that we already have, but we need other ones. We won't get anything done. So why in the world would we do that? Why would you fight a reasonable compromise that will do both?
Right. And in this case, I think we're actually getting close to maybe getting that solution. Oh, well, I mean, look, I hope so. And I hope that in the policy side that there are metrics that are also milestones that, I mean, I think those things need to be tied together.
I think that future funding needs to be tied to the metrics in a way that that rewards or penalizes. If you if you can't deliver, if you don't just give me pie in the sky words of we're going to do this and that as far as policy. goes and then never deliver because we've heard a lot of those promises before. And yet this is where we are.
And so it's got to have it's got to have teeth. It's got to cut both ways. If they do better, they get more. If they do if they do worse, they get less. That should be. that should kind of be you know if they do better republicans and fiscal conservatives should be upset because we're spending more money
But if we do, you know, we go the other way, then the other folks, the education lobby folks should be upset because it's motivating. Right. That's the meritocracy part of this. We need to get it to where we're delivering a finished, a good. valued finished product at the end with what we get. But before we go into that, I think we put the cart a little bit before the horse. So I do want to come back to the...
To the budgetary issue, and I know you said we're going to talk more about education, but I think we put the cart before the horse by talking about this before everything else because... That is the cornerstone. And if we don't fix the cornerstone, it doesn't matter what else we do in the rest of the session. It's going to be a problem. And we've got to work through that. So State Senator Mike Schauer is our guest. We're going to continue.
In just a moment, The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense, Liberty-based, free-thinking radio. Back with more right after this. Listened to by more staffers in Juno than any other show. Because their bosses told them to. And after what they just heard, oh man, they're gonna be best. You're a bad, bad man. The Michael Duke Show. OK, State Senator Mike Schauer is our guest as we continue on here in the break. And we're going to go back to this. Harold says.
that 70-30 regulation went into my trash can in 1998 i said your schools will falter and they faltered in a big way You get what you pay for. Is that too much of a concept to understand? I mean, I think really that was the beginning of the end. I think even before that, Mike, their definition of what classroom spending was started to expand so much that it almost became irrelevant.
at that point as to what they were counting as actual classroom spending. But I mean, I think this is a key component. I mean, you pointed out the fact that in that study. that for every teacher hired, they hired, you know, three administrators, four administrators. You know, some districts, Sarah Montalbano had the statistics showing that most districts had at least a two and a half to one administrator to teacher.
to actual classroom teacher uh ratio some of them as high as four four and a half that's a problem um and and that's something that needs to be addressed but nobody wants to because there's real people involved oh people might lose their job and nobody wants to talk about that i think i think that guy right i'm i don't have the emotional energy to worry about some of these people anymore that
are nothing but bitter naysayers on everything everything you ever say and do it's just not worth my time life is too short but i will say this that guy missed my point entirely what i'm driving at with that point michael is there are people in this building ideologically that all they want is the money
And there are people like that one Democrat that repealed that, but then all of the money just goes through from the state to the school districts and they spend it however they want. No accountability, no transparency, no anything. Just give them the money. And for him to say that completely misses my point, which is that's what I'm saying about how some people are approaching this problem. Oh, just give us more BSA money. That'll fix it. Well, that's not how it works.
In the real world, you need policy with the money and a lot of things to drive it, or certain school districts, certain schools will do something different than what you want. And the state's ultimate hammer is what? It is money. And so if it's going to be money, then the policy that's tied to the money is what's going to make them do certain things. Like you said, or you withhold funding or you change how the funding is.
used, what the requirements are with it. And when somebody says something, well, I threw that in the trash in 1998. Well, you're missing my point. The point is what we're dealing with as far as the ideological stances and viewpoints of people in this building and why it has been so difficult to achieve some blended compromise that will at least try to take a step forward. Because some people are of that mindset, not just give us the money.
Well, that doesn't work. We've proven that for decades that's not going to work. But we do know, following the example of other states and not reinventing the wheel, that they have tried different programs that have really worked. Read by Nine, again, a perfect example of that.
And there are other policies for things. We know charter schools are just smoking the program. We know homeschoolers are right at the very top as well in national scores. That's why the military academies have brought this up in one of the debates.
The military academies used to look at homeschoolers like, nope, don't touch that. I don't know where those people came from. Now they actively recruit them. Why? Because their education at home and what they're getting and their test scores and their performance is proving the value of that. type of schooling system, not just a brick quarter school.
I know that's my point. Yeah, no, I hate I and I hate for you to put me in a position to have to defend Harold. But he was making that point that he he was criticizing the 73rd when the 7030 reg got removed because he said that's part of the problem. He's. Okay, if that's it, then I have to apologize. The way you said it was like he tossed the 70-30 in the garbage in 1998 because that went away in 2016, I think. Yeah, no. 2017.
He said that, you know, when he was part, because he was part of the school district's budgeting stuff at that point, and he said that was a mistake to get rid of that because then it just opened the floodgate to spend it on other things. You did that. It's my fault. That's your fault. You read it the wrong way, and I apologize to Harold. The way you said it, I thought he was saying that's garbage. However, the point stands, even if it's not him, because I'll give him kudos for that.
in that statement then back to but that is what we're dealing with in the building no exactly people are looking at it with that type of attitude and it's been very difficult to get past that step Yeah, it has. No, it was, again, and it just opens up the floodgates for runaway spending on things that have nothing to do with actually teaching the children. And that has been a key point that Harold and I have agreed upon for a long time.
It's getting there. It really is. We're looking in the right direction. Hold the light. Don't go anywhere. Shut your pie hole. Here we go. We're going to make this happen. The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense, Liberty Bay's free thinking radio. Like, share, subscribe, ring the bell. Let's do this.
The Michael Duke Show, proudly splitting the left versus right dichotomy. Yeah, I had to look that word up too. I don't think it means what he thinks it means. There he is though, that guy, Michael Dukes. The one with the show. All right, we're continuing now. State Senator Mike Schauer is our guest. We started off with the two elephants. One that everybody's focusing on, the other one that nobody seems to be noticing.
And even Mike wanted to talk about the education first, but I think that that's putting the cart before the horse. I understand that we're probably going to end up with an increase in education funding with some kind of policy changes, et cetera, et cetera. The big one, the big one that's going to smush us all is the elephant of is is the element of the fact that we are broke.
We're busted. We are upside down in spending. And that even the legislative finance office said that based on the current budget and what they've got right now, it would take 98 percent.
of the pomv draw to pay for state government at this point based on what's going on which means as we predicted on this program that the p that the pfd will be gone um and that only fixes the problem for a year or two And then any additional spending, whether it's education or defined benefits or some other program out there that increases those costs, then push us into the territory of being upside down again and not having any revenue to cover it.
Mike, this is the thing, you know, it's not the thing that will kill you. It's the thing that kills the thing that kills you. I don't know, whatever the phrase is. We're there, right?
Well, there's a reason why I want to do education first. So within the first segment, we could clear it out and I could just tell everybody, here's where we are. No agreements yet, but we're moving. And there's some hope here. There's some possibility of a compromise. It's done. We've talked about it and it's off the table because. I do think for the rest of the program, we're going to talk about this and we're going to easily take up this time and still need more. But I can baseline it for you.
And you and I and your listeners have been talking about this for years, right? I've been warning you for years now that the PFD is on its way to extinction. I have been saying that. You know that. We agree because of the... the spending when you have certain people around the state and then state government going, oh, we haven't increased spending, it's been flat. If that's the case, then explain to me why we have to take virtually all of the permanent fund earnings through that POMB draw.
and include more and more of the dividend being taken every year to pay for government. The reason you're doing that is because you're putting it either into inflation proofing. more than we needed to over the last few years in cases and or you're spending more right there's a combination of things so the reality is the
As you and I have been talking about for years, trying to warn people, the PFD is on its way to being used up, to be gone. Statutory is not even a thought. It's a distant speck on the horizon. We've blown past even the 50-50 of what was left to split. And we're down to a 75-25 at best, right? Kind of a mindset right now. And there are some in the building going, that's the best we're going to do.
is hold on to that before there's nothing left, right? I mean, and it's just going to be gone to the dustbin of history. We're on a vector for that right now. And so you don't have to listen to or believe what I say. Listen to... the finance co-chair that's been in the building for 40 years last year at the majority press conference. He said it right there for everybody to listen to. So let's go through that press conference because I think that tells the story really well if you listen to it.
kind of where we are he said in that press conference he's like this is the worst fiscal crisis he has seen in 30 years based on where we are for the spending and what what taxes are available to spend how much is coming into the state versus what it's obligated to Worse than he's seen in 30 years. And he also said, hey, we're trying to protect a 75-25 dividend, which is about $1,400 a person average. So that's probably going to be about $850 million.
In the conversation, Naresh, my chief of staff, who does finances here for decades in state, and he's really good at this, says we have about a billion to play with, maybe a little under that. And we're not starting with.
like the PFD, like the governor had the statutory PFD in his budget, $1.7 billion, I forget what it is. Just take that off the table for a moment and go, what's left to work with? After all of the current state obligations are there, including every... penny that we have for contracts and operations etc so just what we have to spend right now what's left about a billion dollars ish right well if you do a 75 25 pfd
Call it 850-ish million ballpark, 850 in there. Well, you've already eaten up most of that for a 75-25 PFD. He also illuminated the fact that, well, we're probably looking when you add all. obligations that are upcoming, right, including the supplemental, we're probably at about, oh, I think he said 400 something million. So getting close to half a billion deficit right now, right now, knowing what's coming up this year.
They don't want to draw from the CBR because that's savings. That's an option. But you do have a cash flow thing because the state does have to have a certain amount of liquid cash available to operate and pay its bills on a recurring basis throughout the year.
And then you transfer to other members where one of them said, and I want the defined benefit plan. But we know that the first year won't cost us anything to implement it, but then it's going to be like 60, 70 million is an estimate I'm hearing. But we also have been digging behind it and realizing that, you know, when you see some departments that have massive, because they don't tell you about that, right? It's not included. They have massive overtime.
that's going to cost us millions or tens of millions of dollars more. So you may be at $100 million a year. Who knows, right? We don't even know what that's going to cost. Then you go to another member of the majority press conference, and we need to significantly increase the education spending. Some people want to spend...
They want a $1,400 BSA or a $1,900 BSA. I mean, numbers that approach a half a billion dollars. And then it goes back to another majority member who says, well, we're just going to have to tax. they say revenue all the time but i don't like that word because it makes it sound like we're a business we're not a business creating a product and generating revenue we're a government that takes taxes out of people's pockets period dot that's what it is so call it what it is
So in that press conference, Michael, right there, you get the most experienced person in the building telling us we have a fiscal crisis. Here's where we are in debt and deficit spending already. We'd like to protect at least some modicum of a dividend. but to do all those things you've already eaten up and then some like you said every bit of available income this state has to it to spend it's all gone before
You do everything else, which would be add defined benefits, add education spending, whatever. So I'm sitting there watching this press conference going, do you hear what you guys are saying? The math that you're producing here does not add up. You literally cannot do what you're saying you want to do here. And to their credit, a couple of the press guys actually asked some good questions like, well, based on what he just said and what that one just said, those don't reconcile.
Right. And, you know, they're like, oh, you know, we're just going to have to look at revenue, you know, taxes. You know, they never say the tax word. Nobody ever wants to say the tax word. I will. That's what it is. But all they really got to was that, well, we're going to have to look at new taxes.
There's another interesting part to that that nobody mentioned and none of the reporters asked. I'm like, I have heard throughout the years here, Michael, that a number of legislators said we're never going to tax just to give a PFD. Before, it was always the supersized PFD, right?
It was actually following the statute, but they didn't want to do that. So it was like, we're not going to tax to provide a supersized PFD. Well, why would we tax to provide a PFD at all? Because the misinformation, if you want to call it, that's what it is for years being driven in this body.
you know, for a lot of people in the state has been, well, the dividend is just socialism. No, it's not. The PFD is pure capitalism. We take our resources, we send it to the stock market, to Wall Street, we invest it, we get earnings from that.
And then we turn around and we get dividends and we spread them amongst the people. That is capitalism. That's what you do with your own account, right? You put money in a 401k or you go out and invest in stocks, get something for it. That's capitalism. You want to know what socialism is?
That would be taking money out of one person's pocket and handing another person a check. I listened to people on that table basically say that because we don't have the money. That's what they just said. We want to still spend more money than we have. And by the way, we still want to give out that dividend, which means we're going to have to tax to do it. They're literally talking about, Michael, taxing people and corporations, businesses, and then handing people a PFD check.
That's the level of where we are in the conversation and how this is working out to be a math problem. And so that's kind of laying out the whole criteria, if you will. And I'm looking at this and going. We have solutions. The Republican minority caucus in the Senate, look at Senator Kaufman on. He's got almost every part and piece of the fiscal policy from the working group from years ago.
He's got the spending cap type thing. Senator Hughes has the sunset commission for trying to figure out when you would get rid of different agencies and things to try to bring them down to save money over time. I mean, there's these different, you know, all of this stuff.
We've known it's coming for years and we've got solutions that are out there, including our minority members have the parts and pieces of the plan to put this out there. And I hope the press will be listening and asking those questions because. Those are the sentient questions to what we're talking about here. We are on a trajectory right now to exceed the money available to us without doing one of two things, really.
it's either draw down from our savings and you and i both know that's a bad idea right because the next year there's less and the year after that there's less because you keep taking more away or you never face the problem and you never face the problem because that's where you just keep on spending
And that's what we've been able to do. You and I have been talking for eight years now. One of my biggest concerns about allowing us to go after the PFD and reduce the size of it meant you got to just freely spend that money on government. And that's what we've been doing.
And even more so than the PFD and what it matters for people as far as the middle class and the poor, how it helps them is that we've allowed the expansion of government to a point that we can, we're almost there. We just simply can't afford it with what we have available. That's a big problem, right? Right. And so. add that to this this thing now that's your other your you either draw from savings or you start taxing more to pay for it and then why would we ever agree to tax people
and then hand out a dividend check. What are we doing? That's, that's, we've, you know, that's baseballs, my friend. We've officially reached ludicrous speed. That does not make sense. Not only does the math not work out. but it doesn't make sense to tax people just to hand somebody else a check that is pure socialism this is that's what i heard
Yeah, well, this is a condition of trying to be all things to all people. You said it earlier. They want to do all these things and they want to keep doing all these things. And there is no concept of no more money. That's not even on their radar.
They're like, no, of course there'll be money. It'll be fine. Well, yeah, kind of. But, I mean, I will say this. I mean, there is an acknowledgement. I mean, listen to the finance co-chairs. They're trying to sound the call right now. Tell everybody, guys, we don't have money for this.
They're trying to set a baseline for what we can spend. Not, you know, 400 million. We don't have it. They're clear on it. So I will give them credit. They're not, you know, the finance coach here in that press briefing was pretty clear. We're in a crisis. We don't have the money.
And he acknowledged the problem. He said, the only way you're going to do this is you're going to have to draw, basically, you're going to draw from savings, which they don't want to do, or you're going to have to tax. I mean, so it's not like everybody's saying it. There are people that acknowledge the problem, but there are other people that just either.
or you know sticking their head in the sand on the problem or they don't really care and they just want to tax anyways because they want to spend it on their various government constituencies for lack of a better term whether it be education or
defined benefits for all state workers you know whatever their thing is they want that thing and when you combine all of those together that puts us with where we are because it's not like it's you know it's not like everybody agrees right there's 60 different opinions in that building
But those that may have the power or the votes to get certain things are looking at programs that are going to cost us money. And then it ultimately comes down to the finance table, right? How are you going to pay for it? They're asking the right questions. They know the problem. They see it. They're like, how are you going to pay for it? And the reality is we are about to run headlong into that brick wall.
of having to tax what you and I have talked about again for years on this. So it's interesting to see you and I've been talking about this for years and it's actually coming to a head now. We've been predicting this, just waiting for the time, and we're pretty much at that time. And they're going, okay, well, what are you going to do now? How are you going to tax? You have a small population. You have a pretty anemic business.
you know background in the private sector if you will right you got some big oil companies but we have a tax structure for that now some may want to tax more or all s corporations or whatever the thing may be right so that's That's going to – it always does. It will have some tampering effect on our private sector businesses, which is where a lot of the rest of our money comes from, right? If it's not the stock market, 60-ish plus percent.
from the earnings of the permanent fund through the draw, then it is taxes and royalties, mostly on the oil companies. They're about a third of the taxes we get. So if you tax them too much, well, they're going to... probably reduce some jobs they're going to probably you know invest a little less so you see the problem right here we go this circular thing here and that's where we that's where we are michael i mean i knew it would take this whole segment we'll keep talking about but we are at
a fairly critical juncture that we are about to exceed the available tax revenue this state has for what we're going to spend. And I don't know what you do after that, because taxes is always the answer for some in that every for every action, there is an equal and opposite. Right. Well, and again, like you said, it's not like we didn't see this coming. We've been talking about this for 10 years.
15 years on this program. And, you know, we could see it coming. And the I told you so is not nearly as satisfying as we would hope. We're going to continue here with Mike Schauer, The Michael Duke Show, Common Sense Radio. If you missed the show, you can listen to it on your time with Duke's On Demand. Oh, and it's free. Like America used to be. Streaming live every weekday morning on Facebook Live and MichaelDukesShow.com.
OK, we're in the commercial break right now. Mike Schauer is our guest. I mean, I just you know, again, I just said it. The I told you so is not nearly as satisfying as you would hope it would be after 20 years of telling people, hey, this is what's going to happen if we don't stop. you know the the runaway spending and the appetite for you know all this stuff the you know if if we don't stop the greed
And the entitlement is astounding to me. I just don't fathom it. I mean, if we don't stop that, and so we know that this was the inevitable outcome. And all of a sudden, everybody's acting like, well, I haven't seen this. This has been 30 years since I've seen it this bad. We've been sounding the warning bell.
Just, you know, welcome to the party, pal. You're just noticing it for the first time that this is going on. If you've been looking at the governor's 10 year forecast, you knew this is coming. And the worst thing is, Mike, it's it's just projected to get. That's the, you know, when you look at the 10-year forecast, you realize that this is, we're on that tipping point of kind of that downward spiral, that self-feeding loop that just the worse it gets, the worse it gets kind of thing.
Well, why do we have a fiscal policy working group? You may remember a few years ago, I threw it down on the Senate floor. during the budget debates, I put out a plan that I worked out with our legislative finance director at the time. And I said, you know, here, we're going to have to have, we got to do something about the PFD, right, to get this off the table.
protect it and at the time it was a 50 50 i was arguing for you know so just so we would have it locked away and be done arguing about it i had a sales tax because that was the softest approach you can come up with really not an income tax doesn't work
And I had a small oil tax credit change and I had something else. I forget what I had on the plan, but I put it on the Senate floor on everybody's table and I argued for it. And, you know, there's people, we don't need to do that or we don't like it or whatever it was. I just looked at everybody and go, guys, this is what's coming. The math, you can see the trajectory we're on is crystal clear. And it was after that debate that that's when they came up with the Fiscal Policy Working Group.
I'm sure it wasn't just my, you know, speech on the floor, what I put out, but it was starting to gain traction, that idea, which is why I did what I did. I said, oh, here's the Republican conservative from the Matsu, and he's even talking about taxes. Yes, I am.
Because I don't want to wait until it swims up and bites us in the rear end. I want to handle it now. Well, we still have some room to maneuver. And then we had fiscal policy working group. Why do we have that, Michael? It's not because nobody sees the problem coming. It's that they just don't.
It's easier to deal with this when it's a crisis, right? I mean, it is because otherwise people just think everything's fine or they just keep doing things the way we've done business. And we wait until we have to do something often.
Well, the fiscal policy work group was our chance. That was our chance while we still had room to maneuver to lock something in and everybody be a little bit unhappy and everybody have to give a little bit and we could have achieved the solution. And we blew right past that. And so now we're getting into the real crisis mode where it's like, yeah, we are really about to hit that wall. We're really going to run ourselves out of money and we can't even predict.
I don't see how you get to a 75, 25 PFD at this point, $1,400, 800, 850 billion. You can't, I don't know how you don't have the money. If you also pass 200 million of education spending and another 70, 80, 90, 100 million of a defined benefit and the known contract increases and operating costs that we know are coming already, which I've heard 40, 50, 60 million dollars every year because it goes up, you know, by.
about 100 plus million every year anyways that's been a known quantity for some time so add all those together yeah you can't do it i think that's what the finance coach here was trying to tell everybody's like guys we can't do this We don't have the money. It's not a problem of want. You simply don't have the money anymore to do it. So what do you do?
Yeah, except they're not being as plain about it as they should be. I mean, that's really they should be saying we're broke. We're busted. This is what it's at. And like you said, even a 200 million dollar increase in the education funding, plus the new contracts, plus. We haven't even talked about the supplemental budget from last year, which I understand is somewhere in the $200 million range on top of that.
I mean, you've already sucked away half the remaining PFD at this point. Just with that alone, even if it was a minor $200 million, and I hate to say minor $200 million increase in education, you're already at half the PFD. let alone what they're asking for. I mean, it's, again, this is not sustainable. And I know we hate using that word, but it...
You just pencil that out and put it on a graph and see what it looks like in 10 years. It's gone. Well, if you look at what the finance co-chairs are telling us, clearly, plain language. of what they are, where we sit with the current deficit, and you add defined benefits, and you add education packages here, and you add the normal operating increases that are coming no matter what.
And I remember I started this off by saying you had about a billion dollars to play with. If you add those things plus the deficit that we're at. you've already taken up almost all of it. In other words, there's nothing left for a PFT. 98%. That's what Ledge Finance said. 98% of the draw would be gone, which basically leaves pocket change.
To be used as cash flow buffer. That's it. There is no PFD at that point. All right. Let me tell you. Oh, we've got a break. Six seconds here. So we're going to keep going. The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense. Liberty-based. Free thinking radio. Like, share, subscribe, ring the bell. Let's do this thing. Here we go. The Michael Duke Show. Not your daddy.
Wait, sorry, not your daddy? Ooh, not your daddy's talk radio. Phew, I was scared for a second. Thought we were going down. Here's Michael Dukes and the show. OK, we're continuing now. State Senator Mike Schauer. I rudely interrupted him at the end of the commercial break there. He wanted to go on about something else. But we're talking about the budget and how just with the normal.
Automatic increases already baked into the budget with the BSA increase that's being proposed, with the defined benefits that's being proposed, with the new employment contracts that are being negotiated right now. It essentially consumes... Everything. 98% of the draw of the POMV would be gone, leaving nothing for dividends. And that's kind of where we sit right now, Mike.
That's correct. And the point I was going to make as well when we had to go into the break is that you have, even with all of that, I want people to consider, and I've been trying to prep the battlefield for this one. is that Trump is probably going to be really good for the country, right? Economically with the policies and things that are happening and ultimately will probably be good for Alaska. Hold on a second.
So, what you have is, right now, him turning on the spiciest down south. You know that the businesses are going to go crazy. Fracking is going to come back online. In other words, the United States is going to go back to be an energy. dominant net exporter, right? So what does that mean for us? Every time that happens, that means the price of oil goes down. What's a third of our taxes we're getting every year to pay for this government?
oil our own actions as a state government and what we're doing we are also we are also going to see i believe over the next two to four years some significant headwinds so-called in our budget as well because i predict the price of oil is going to go down and people need to prepare for that everybody i'm talking to mike when the boroughs and cities come for you guys be looking at your austerity measures because the state's got no money
and that's going to get worse before it gets better i predict based on what's happening with that um and i think that you know four six eight years down the road we get projects moving uh more more resource development oil gas mining etc maybe logging comes back i predict that alaska will benefit from this someday but the problem is we don't have someday anymore um we're there
And we don't have two or four or six or eight or 10 years to get to that point, Michael. We're already at a point that we're in trouble financially now. And unfortunately, the way we're setting up, I think it's going to exacerbate our problem.
Good and the bad. The bad is it's going to exacerbate a problem. The good is we're going to have to deal with it. You and I have been talking about this again for eight years. We're going to have to deal with the problem. I said sooner or later, we either deal with it early.
or we're going to deal with it in a crisis mode well we've pretty much put ourselves where we're going to have to deal with this so that's you know i guess if you want to be the guy with the silver you know glass apple what's the silver lining
We're going to be forced to deal with the problem now. And it's not going to be the best solutions anymore because we passed that window. And frankly, a conversation I had with some of the, I would call them the old guard that had been around building for a long time. We're kind of saying, you know. We passed the window for a 50-50. They're acknowledging that. We're about to pass the window for even a 75-25 PFT. That's where we're at. So I...
Boy, I wish I knew a way to solve it at this point, Michael, and I don't. But the PFD, people just need to hear it. It's gone. And I'm not saying there will be no check, no money at all. I'm saying the statutory, the 50-50, we're gone on that. that program is about to cease to exist.
There may be a move to protect the ERA, put the whole thing into one silo, and then look at the draw. I mean, there's different ideas out there. I don't know ultimately what the best one is. That's got danger in and of itself because I think, and Brad Keithley and I have been talking about this a lot,
that really is the poison pill. That's what the next step will be. I don't think that they'll necessarily talk about taxes next. What they'll talk about is moving the ERA into the corpus of the fund and opening up the entire fund to the draw. which has been their ultimate goal since I started this program in 2000. That was when they started talking about the POMV to begin with and creating all this thing. And the bottom line is they want access to the corpus.
Because if they have access to the corpus, then their money problems are over. They can adjust the draw by statute however they want to do it. And if they need more money, they'll take more money. And that will eat the seed corn, and we will be even worse shaped. That is a poison pill, and you can see it being set up by the Permanent Fund Corporation, by members of the Finance Committee. You can see them talking about it. They ignore the fact that we transferred four.
Four and then two and then a total of eight billion dollars into the corpus of the fund over the last half dozen years. And then they're saying, well, we just don't have enough in the ERA. It's because you transfer all this out and you're double counting the inflation proofing. And the ultimate goal is to get your hands on the corpus.
of the fund for some people i think that may be true and here's what i would say to that is that if it's statutory then I would agree that that is not a good plan because any legislature can, has, and will blow past statutory limits and do whatever they want to do, especially if you get a... let's say you get a more um democrat majority or a more moderate government governor that is willing to do that that would be an option if it was going to be protected and i'm not saying
I'd have to, what's that old saying, devils in the details? I'd have to look at the proposals. But if it was not protected in the Constitution, so it's not just, oh, go out and get a simple majority vote to take money. I couldn't agree to that either because you're not wrong on how easy it would be to get that money, have access to it. So if these things line up with constitutional protections under amounts that can be drawn and the different conditions.
I don't know, Michael, maybe that is a path we should look at if it's going to be protected constitution because the bar is so high. As you know, it's nearly impossible to jump over a constitutional hurdle, which is a good thing, right, in our government and how it works.
at this point when people say yeah but you know the era and the pfd just forget that forget it it's going we're already taking it you don't make the argument that oh well you know we're going to protect the pfd if we keep their earnings no you're not Right. They've already said it. That's become. Yeah. So how do we protect any? First of all, how do we keep ourselves from taxing and how do we protect the corpus itself? So we have something moving forward for the future.
And honestly, Michael, we're kind of in that upside down right now because I don't know exactly what to do. Two minutes remain, Mike. Final thoughts here for today's program. It went quick. Well, boy, lots of gloom and doom, huh? But I don't mean to be, but I mean, that's the big ones, right? Education right now, if this works out, maybe we can get that one off the table for a while.
and stop fighting about it that would be great um you know at least we have something and we have some metrics for moving forward on policy the the budget debate is finally you know that ship has finally hit our shores We're going to have to deal with it, which is fine, you know, is what it is. But here we are. And I think that's where after this education debate kind of clears the, you know, clears the dock, so to speak, clears the tower, then.
That's going to be maybe where most of the rest of the folks, I'm still working on an election bill. I'm kind of doing the bipartisan thing. We'll see how that goes. Maybe have an option to get some. step forward on things that are important. But really, I think, Michael, after this is done, most of the pivot, most of the conversation, like I said, the elephant in the room is going to be the budget.
um discussions and how do we solve this and how do we prevent ourselves from going further upside down and i would imagine that's where a lot of the conversations will be moving forward so um it's it will be interesting to watch i'll come back on
if we get some uh good education um you know movement i'll come back on and you know maybe get uh cronk on because he's you know a former educator he's really smart on the the issues uh and make sure we're telling you guys what's happening with it but it's going to be an interesting time my friend we are uh we are at that point where you know
There's no denying it anymore. There's no sticking our heads in the sand because we've got to pay the bills. And it's going to be tough to do so. There's no more road to kick the can down. We're out of road. Although they're going to try and build one, I'm sure, one way or the other. And it's not doom and gloom, Mike, if it's the truth. And that's the problem. problem. We need to face it. It's not being negative.
Well, it's not being negative when you acknowledge it, and you've got to acknowledge it to admit that there's a problem. We can't keep papering it over, and that's what we've been doing. You're not wrong. We've been trying for years, but I'm just a happy guy. I'm a glass half full, and sometimes that's frustrating. You want to have good news, and it's frustrating when we can't do better than what we are.
Exactly. All right, Mike Schauer, our guest. We're out for today. Kevin McCabe and Rob Young tomorrow on the program. The Michael Duke Show, Common Sense, Liberty-based, Free Thicken Radio. Be kind. Love one another and live well. That's my exhortation to you. We'll see you.
All right, Mike, final bite at the apple here. I mean, I understand you don't want to necessarily, we don't want to just bring everybody down. But part of the problem was, is because we refuse to face these issues because they're negative.
This has been part of the problem. That's how they've hid a lot of this from us over the years is because nobody wanted to talk about the doom and gloom. I've been talking about the doom and gloom for 25 years, not in a negative way, but, you know, started out saying we've got to. spending problem not a revenue problem and now we've created it to where the spending problem has created that revenue we have both at this point you want a solution
Cut back to all only basic essential state services. That would fix it. But there's no political will to do that. So we're going to keep going down this track. I know. And I hear this from people all the time. Just cut, cut, cut. I get it. I would, if I could have a doge up here that would look at it seriously and would have the authority, you know, and the mandate to go do some of that, I would be a fan of it. I sometimes believe the easiest answer is just rip the bandaid off.
Let it bleed out, and then you'll find your solution, right? But again, like you said, people say that, but then you don't understand the reality of this building. You have to get it through the building, and there is no political will for that. It doesn't exist. So you can say it all day long, but it just doesn't. So let's not deal in fantasy. Let's deal in reality. If you're not going to be able to cut, then we have to find a way to cap.
what we spend moving forward to try to prevent us from just completely running the titanic into the iceberg and sinking it right and that's kind of where we are we're past the point of just being great we're going to have to figure out how to stop the Well, because they can't be trusted to control themselves. We saw that in the early teens when they blew through 16, 17 billion dollars in savings and didn't change their behavior at all. That was part of the problem.
Right. I mean, that was the whole thing of we had that we have a problem. We have the money to fix it in the short term. It would have been fine to draw some from savings and then come back to it. But instead, they drew it from savings and didn't change anything else.
And did they think anything different was going to happen? Apparently not, because that's where we're at today. They can't be trusted to be responsible. There's got to be some speed bumps in place to hold the legislature and future legislators accountable.
yeah that's the thing michael is we do have uh you know it it as much as it pains me to say it that's why i believe in the fiscal policy type solutions that are going to make sure that we have to live within those constraints because if we don't force ourselves to or future legislatures, then when the desire comes to spend money on education or whatever the topic of the day is, then we won't.
and if we don't constrain ourselves that way then we end up where we are today so that's why i think constitutional limits i think that structures that are hard to get around um are very important for us but like you said we just don't typically do that in government until it's crisis right what's that what's that old thing like the what's the the mother of invention is
crisis or i don't know there's a good saying for it necessity is the mother of invention but that's the one that's the one necessity isn't yeah but necessity crisis never let a crisis go to waste we'll marry those two up together all right well mike Mike Schauer, State Senator, District O, thanks for coming on board. Give me a heads up if you want to come on for a few minutes to discuss anything hot. You know where to reach me.
Will do, my friend. Appreciate it. Sorry we're not on as much, but I'll do my best. Nope, you're doing great. Thank you so much for joining us. We're out of time. All right, folks, got to go. Be kind, love one another, live well. The Michael Duke Show, Common Sense Radio. you Radio Skin. And now we are slimy lizard internet people. It's the Michael Duke Show.