Let's roll. Hello and welcome to the Must Read Alaska Show. Here you get relevant and timely content you won't find anywhere else. You can learn more by going to mustreadalaska.com. And this show can be found on YouTube, Facebook, X, and your favorite podcast site. Let's talk truth about politics, the economy, and all things Alaska. Now the host of the show, former state legislator, combat veteran, small business owner, and all-around great guy.
ben carpenter welcome to the mustard alaska show podcast i'm your host ben carpenter where we Intend to bring you information on a regular basis that is both timely and relevant. And today we have Representative Will Stapp with us. He is a representative for the Alaska House. And he is representing the area of the interior up around the Fairbanks area. And I'll give him an opportunity to describe that for the listeners.
Anyway, we just got off a floor session and Will has graciously agreed to join us and talk about what's going on in the state legislature. Welcome, Will, and thank you for joining us. Hey, thanks, Ben. It's appreciated to be on. And for those of you who don't know, my name is Will Stapp. I represent House District 32 as a Republican. That's East Fairbanks, Fort Wainwright and Badger Road.
And, you know, I first came to Alaska when I was in the Army. I served in the infantry. I went to Iraq back in 2007 with the Airborne Brigade in Anchorage. I was also in the Strike Brigade in Fairbanks. And I ended up getting out of the military at the end of 2010 and moving back to Alaska with my wife. My wife's Alaska native. So we have she grew up in Wasilla.
and has family all over the state and ended up working in insurance. And then in kind of by a strange of rather odd circumstances, now I'm in the legislature, so representing Fairbanks. Thanks for having me. Yeah, my pleasure. And I'm glad we get to see each other again. My last two years in the legislature, I served with you. The previous legislature was your first time in the legislature, so I sure enjoyed the time that we had together there.
So the opportunity today to kind of discuss what is happening in the legislature, and I know that the topic of education has been something that is... pretty hot right now and education funding in specific for some and, and improving the quality of education in our schools for others and maybe a mix of the two. for a smaller number. I'm not sure. Maybe you can help me help paint the picture of what's actually, what are the actual conversations that are going on?
And talk us through what happened with House Bill 69. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So I guess the first thing is people got to realize that there is a finite amount of money. I know you're very well aware of that conversation, Ben. that we've had in this legislative body for a long time now. But believe it or not, there's a lot of people in the building who don't actually understand that there's a finite amount of money. And the old adage in politics is...
Try not to promise things you can't deliver, you know. So HB 69 is a bill strictly to increase education funding. The concept behind the bill is basically to take the permanent level of funding that the state last authorized back in around 2014. and then index that to whatever inflationary metric that you want to use to CPI to determine what the belief is of how much money you should be funding in addition to what you currently do in schools.
And if you are to do that, you come up with a base student allocation number of around, I want to say, $1,800. Keep in mind that's around $700 million in new state funding. The entirety of what the state currently spends in the foundation formula on education is around $1.2 billion. So it is a massive increase over what we have done on a permanent basis.
The legislature, though, has always found ways to increase education funding outside the formula pretty much every year since 2014. So the adage that schools have been level funded or flat funded. from over a decade ago is generally incorrect. And I know you and I know that because there's plenty of ways that you can get money in the hands of school districts that are not tied to what's called the foundation formula.
So, you know, HB 69, it was progressing along in the debate. Usually that starts in what's called the policy committee. In this case, it's the education committee. And typically members talk about a. what the bill does and is going to lead to better education outcomes or should there be policies that are enacted that look to change that or increase that or not.
But one of the co-chairs of the education committee is out ill and has been for a few weeks. So that kind of meant that due to the makeup of the committee, you can't really pass a bill out. or have a robust discussion. Can you explain the makeup of the committee so people understand what that means? I mean, I intuitively know what you mean, but help us understand. Yeah, yeah. So, okay. So the...
Every committee has different level of seats that people sit on. Right. And in the education committee, it is a I think it's a seven member committee. Right. And when the House organizes, the size of the seats are determined by how large the minority party is in the body. Right. So in the case of the House Republicans, we have 19 members, which is the largest minority that you can have.
That means that in a seven-member committee, we get three seats and the majority gets four. I serve on the finance committee. We have... five of the 11 seats on the finance committee and the majority gets six. So what happens is you basically have a one vote majority and practically or nearly all the committees in.
the legislative process. So what that means is everybody needs to show up if one side wants to do something without the consent of the other side. I think that's probably a fair way to summarize it. So when a member's out sick. And you have no agreement between the majority and the minority party. And if that member happens to be from the majority, you cannot progress a bill.
in effect. Procedurally, in the committee, if you took a bill to a vote, if you had seven members and one was sick for the majority, you'd have six. A vote of 3-3, of course, is a tie. Under our rules, there's no tiebreaker, so a tie vote just fails. Okay. So just out of curiosity, the bill, if it passes the House and then goes over to the Senate and it goes through its committee process and...
passes the Senate, and then it goes to the governor for signature. The governor has come out and identified some policy changes that he would like to see included in whatever agreement can be made. Do you know if the governor's... what the governor was asking, was included in the conversations on the policy education committee? And were those discussed or amendments considered?
to include what the governor would like? No, they weren't actually. So, you know, as Ben, you know, that typically the people in charge are the ones who dictate the tempo. In the Education Committee, the argument about the bill was initially, well, all we want to do is pass a funding bill first, and then we'll talk about the policies later. So when our members from the House Republicans look to add policy to the funding bill, they had several amendments. They offered one. It was voted down.
you know on caucus lines immediately so there weren't any real attempts to make from that.
after that point but the policy items that the house republicans are are talking about are different from those in the governor's bill right and it's not that we don't support the policy items in the government bill just we have our own ideas you know of how to improve education outcomes that are different that the governor would probably like and other people would probably like to and we just kind of want to have the opportunity to talk about them
And, you know, normally that takes place in the committee, as you know, like you have all those discussions and you have debates. But again, the majority wanted to fast track a funding bill. But there was a little problem with the funding bill. Will you tell us what the problem with the funding bill is? Yeah, the problem with the funding bill is it creates a billion dollar liability for education and I don't have a billion dollars, right?
So the majority, for whatever reason, decided to use a procedural motion on the House floor to discharge their own bill from their own committee. Which is very unusual. And just to be very clear, this is because they didn't have the votes to pass their version of the bill out of committee by themselves.
Yeah, exactly. Which, you know, we'll get to later. And when they you know, I had heard rumblings of the people in the majority were upset that they couldn't move their own bill out from their own committee. And I asked them at the time and I said, well, you know, if you want me to discharge that bill for you, I'd be glad to help you. All you got to do is ask and I'll get into the logic behind that later.
So the majority made a motion on the floor and they talked about how the most important thing to their caucus was... rapidly expediting that bill to be able to be passed to the Senate because it was critical that education funding be increased by a billion dollars over the course of the next several years. including the adjustment to inflation or CPI.
So they were successful in that because they did have, you know, it's a 20 vote threshold. So, you know, there were enough of them present to be able to move that bill to the next committee of referral, which is finance, which is the committee that I serve on. I know that your crystal balls is cloudy as the next guys, but if the education committee.
So they were short a member and couldn't pass the bill out. If they had compromised with the minority, would they have had the votes potentially to move the bill out? Well, you know, I can't speak for other people, but I mean, generally, that's kind of how you do things, right? And you know that, Ben. I mean, if they had had a conversation and then maybe had more hearings and actually talked about some of the policy proposals that people were interested in.
I don't think that there's, you know, an issue with getting a compromise. I think everybody kind of understands that. Hey, you know, and, you know, the when. During the Biden administration, everyone has seen their fixed costs kind of go up dramatically. I know you and I know that when we go put gas in our car or buy groceries or something like that. So it's not unreasonable to think that. School districts may need more funding in certain areas of fixed costs like energy and that type of stuff.
But as Republicans and conservatives, we want to ensure that, hey, our funding mechanisms have... positive outcomes in the kids who actually go to the school right so we don't want to just give money for the sake of money we want to ensure that people kids in school are actually having the ability to achieve their goals in life and be productive members of society and not be laughed in every category, reading, writing.
arithmetic you know now they used to just do it amongst the 50 states and now they've added the territories so the last name score were ranked 51st you know Yeah, that's pretty incredible. So the bill went to the finance committee in the purview of the finance committee of the responsibility. The finance committee is kind of focused towards the budget, balancing the budget and putting a budget for it every year.
So they've got this spending bill for education sitting before them, and they know that they are going to need the governor's signature on a bill that's going forward. So the. The majority members on that committee then discussed the cost of the bill and other asks that the governor would have in order to... you know, maybe reach a compromise and pass legislation in a responsible manner, right? That is not what happened at all, but that would be, yeah.
Now, you would think that we would have that discussion about how to have a responsible budget and to have a compromise on policy positions. But what happened, you know, we gave a presentation and the presentation was basically, hey, these are the troubles that school districts are in. And this is why we need to give them the money, which is, again, it's a billion dollar bill over several years. And I asked the. you know, the presenter of the bill.
Hey, you know, I think the PowerPoint slides great, but the problem that I have is I don't have a billion dollars to give schools and none of the folks in the majority, which is nearly all Democrats, are proposing. taxes or reductions to other areas of the budget or really any solution whatsoever to pay for that bill. So I asked that question on the record. You can go back and find that at the committee hearing.
And the answer I was giving was it's important for the kids that we pass this bill. So it's OK. So then I asked the question again. I said, OK, well, I understand. I'll see to you that it's important. Education is a really important issue. It's certainly one that I care about. But again, the problem is I don't have the money to fund the bill. So what do I do?
And the answer was, well, we'll just figure it out later. And I said, OK, well, I mean, if your plan is to try to tell people that they're going to be able to get a billion dollars that the state doesn't have to put in the education. system and that you don't want to tax anybody and you don't want to cut spending anywhere. That's an unworkable problem. But hey, if you really want the bill.
then I guess you can have the bill and figure out how to do that, right? Was there a guarantee or was there a mechanism or a way that the legislators at the state level... who are appropriators, are the ones that make the decision on what state money gets spent and where it gets spent to for what purpose. Is there a way that those members of the legislature can...
be assured that the money that gets spent actually gets down to the students. I mean, it's important to draw the correlation here to the finance committee members who are saying, hey, this is for the kids. What? What controls, what ability does the state have to know that that money is actually going to get spent down at the kid level in the classroom versus, I don't know, like administration or overhead or things like that?
Yeah. So in this particular bill, because of the nature of the foundation formula, there really aren't any controls in order to do that. Right. So. So basically, you can do that if you look at targeted funding. Oh, sweetie, you know, the bathroom is my daughter's asking me where the bathroom is right down the hall. And you have, Bernard will take you too, sweetie. Sorry about that, kids, you know. That's okay. No, it's a really good question. So you can actually do those things, as you know.
And the way you do that is you look at targeted funding aspects and you have different metrics that go different places. So an example. people transportation for example that's a funding mechanism within the formula that is designed to pay for busing kids to school and that's an item that we can track and each school district has that account
within its internal budgeting system that we have access to and they have to report to the legislature. So we know how much funds that they have in the people transportation account. But at the end of the day, It's still relatively subjective because it's kind of considered black box money. So what do I mean by black box money? The money that I appropriate to school districts, you know, they, the individual districts. can at the end of the day determine how they want to spend that money.
And the legislature has had laws in place in the past that try to direct that funding into the classroom. And those laws no longer exist in most of our statutes today. Yeah, I remember from my time in the legislature, there used to be, I think, a provision that said... 25%, if I'm not mistaken, of the money appropriated could be spent towards administration, but 75% needed to be down at the classroom level. Is that what you're referring to?
Yeah, exactly. And I can't tell you off the top of my head when that statute was removed. I might have been wrong on the 2575.
But that's, in essence, what we're talking about. Yeah, I don't remember the split off the top of my head either. So one of the arguments that I've heard for removing that is... um you got to think like a bsa dollar a per student dollar is not equivalent to all districts so i'll give you an example So where I live in Fairbanks, my residential cost of power is 27 cents a kilowatt.
Okay. So in Ketchikan, it's around 11 cents a kilowatt. In Juneau, it's like nine cents a kilowatt, right? So the notion that $1 in education funding is supposed to go the same distance is... the disparities of those are very wide all across the state. So an argument could probably be made that, hey, you should take those fixed costs that are very wide and very all over the state, and you should try to pull them out of the foundation formula itself and account for them separately.
they are separate costs right so it's kind of unreasonable if you think about it on a macro term to think a one dollar in Kenai will go the same distance as it will in Utqiagvik or no right so what would I mean, would it be possible to have the school district submit those fixed costs to the finance committee or to the legislative process so that we would have a...
so that the money managers, the legislators would have a better understanding of what is actually, what it's actually costing for each one of the school districts. Is that something that's doable? Yeah, no, it is doable. And depending on the district that you live in. So in Fairbanks, our school district has like an electronic budget checkbook, right? I don't know if you're familiar with that, where you can go on the Fairbanks North Starboro website. actually see
all the costs and all the items in the budget, right? And where they go and where the dollar goes and what they spend on this and this facility. And it's pretty detailed. Anchorage School District, I don't believe is anywhere near that transparent. is looking at the funding that's directed. But you're right. I mean, you absolutely can, as terms of funding, have them produce those reports and report back to the legislature at the beginning of the session. And I guess since we're...
I've asked that question in the way that I have. It's kind of almost leading. Just to confirm, the finance committee did not consider what actual costs were coming from school districts when they're deciding how much money needs to be appropriated. Is that a true statement? Can you clarify a little bit more for me at a point I understand? When they were looking at House Bill 69, it's got a dollar figure associated with it.
The finance committee considered what the actual costs were coming from each one of the school districts in order to justify spending the money that was in House Bill 69. Oh, no, there was no detailed breakdown of that, right? So we're just trusting the formula. We called it a foundation formula. We're just trusting that the formula is accurately covering the costs of the school, each one of the school districts.
Well, I mean, it doesn't, though. So this is kind of the fundamental problem with the foundation formula itself, as I just kind of dictated, right? I mean, it doesn't account for fixed costs, and it doesn't account for that.
And where would you fix the, if the formula is not working, where would you fix the formula? Is it in the finance committee or is it in the policy committee that it was just? I would start in the policy committee. Like if I wanted to rewrap the foundation formula, I would start in the policy committee.
Because you want the funding mechanisms to be tied with the outcome driven expectations, right? So, you know, if I can wave a magic wand, for example, and determine how I wanted to take this process, I would start with... the policy committee, and I'd really ask, like, what do I want to see out of an education system in Alaska, right? What am I trying to engineer? Am I trying to create a workforce for...
tomorrow's Alaskan jobs, then I should really dictate those and guard those things to things. Excuse me one second. Hey, Noam, Noam, I'm on the interview. Can you shut the door, please? Sorry about that. It's all right. It's a family show. We understand. Family's here. Yeah. So you would start there.
And then you would kind of build up from there and you get into the monetary aspects of that in the finance committee, right? So after you kind of established what type of education outcomes you're looking for. uh and again the system that you want to create at the lower level committee by the time you get the finance committee you want to ensure that your financial metrics that you use are designed to um kind of be
aggravated factors to improve those outcomes. Okay, so we didn't talk about any of that in the policy committee, the education policy committee, and we didn't talk about it in the... Finance Committee. So what's next for that particular bill? Well, you know, that particular bill will ultimately either have a debate on the House floor, which we are willing and prepared to have all those discussions that we didn't want to have in the committees that they're actually supposed to be in.
or you know it'll never go to the floor to see the light of day is the fundamental problem of the bill as i mentioned in the finance committee uh you know before it was passed out of there was look there's not a lot of point in debating a bill that you have no way to pay for it if that makes sense right so the issue with the bill
And, you know, we can talk about all the things that need to be talked about in education. But as well, you know, when the majority who controls the flow of legislation decides it wants something, right, you know, they do possess the power to try to achieve. that most times you know and um when you don't have the money to pay for something um then people will have to first kind of come to an understanding that hey uh you can't cash checks your budget can't
cash, right? So you can't write them. So once people come to the understanding that they have a bill that they can't pay for, then my hope is we'll have a conversation about actually all the things that we should be talking about in education and improving outcomes and what those actual funding metrics look like, you know? Yeah. Interesting. Well,
assuming that the bill makes it to the House floor and has an up or down vote, then it goes to the Senate and they get to repeat the process. So I guess we will stay tuned on that. If we can segue for just a second, I know that you've introduced a couple of bills. legislative session. Would you like to just give us kind of a summary on the bills that you've introduced and why you think they're important? Oh, sure. Well, let me start with...
I'm cutting program spills because those are kind of my things I like to do. Right. So I have a couple of bills that I introduced prior. One is that I reintroduced this year. One is the repeal of the catastrophic and acute medical assistance program. And that actually was a program that I identified a couple of years ago that didn't have any active participants, yet the state was still funding, right? So didn't have any active participants on the program.
in the previous fiscal year the fiscal year before that or the fiscal year preceding those other two and yet the state was still paying you know budgeting money for this program and the state was um actually incurring administrative costs to administer a program that no one was on. And, you know, so just to tell folks how kind of egregious that was, I checked with the department a couple of years ago and they had processed 6,600 and some applications for this program.
And they approved none of them because nobody qualified for the program because years ago during Medicaid expansion, the need for the program was basically outmoded. Yet. Each one of those applications, the average processing time is about 90 minutes of state-backed employees on payroll, only to deny them for a program no one can qualify for.
So to me, that's, you know, a really clear example of government waste and inefficiency. So I have a bill to eliminate that program. We did actually defund that program last year. That's one of the good things we did. One of the few cuts we were able to make.
was cutting the program that no one was on. And my hope is this year that we will pass the bill that basically just repeals the program from law so the department will never have to process an application for programs people don't qualify for going for.
Thank you for giving us a summary of that. And I think this is really key for people to understand is when you say that we were... able to reduce the funding last legislature what you're really talking about is reducing the funding in the appropriations bill or the budget bill and not anything not dealing with the underlying policy or the statute that said this is supposed to happen. And your bill is now addressing the policy, the statute that says it should happen.
Yeah. And again, I ran the same bill last year. It did pass the House. It just didn't make it through Senate Finance. So ideally, so people understand kind of the root cause of the state's budget is in the thing called programmatic funding. Right. So basically what happened is over the course of many years, elected officials told the state government agencies that they had to do things. And typically after they told the state government.
agencies that they had to do things nobody ever goes back and looks at those things that we told them that they had to do years ago that they're still doing because of the nature of how we budget right the state budgets on a baseline budget i.e we always start with the same amount of money we spent last year and then look to add or subtract rather than a very detailed review like a zero-based budgeting process where you actually have to go in and justify all the things that you do.
So how do you understand or articulate that? Well, basically, if you want to cut state spending in Alaska, you have to go through and you have to look at all the programmatic funding things that we do, and you have to get rid of the ones that don't make any sense. And there's a lot of those programs, right? And I have another bill that addresses a different program that I'm looking to eliminate half of it, you know, and then we'll discuss that as well throughout the legislative process.
That's, I think, really instructive because if we step out from the Alaska legislature for a minute and look at the national scene, then we've got a very, very potent. effort to reduce spending in the Department of Governmental Efficiency or DOGE effort that's going on. But that's from an executive position. That's from a...
cutting the budget perspective. It's not in the adjusting the underlying policy discussion perspective. So what you're talking about here in this bill that you brought forward is the same thing that would have to go on at the federal level in order to... make the policy changes so that whatever is happening with the Doge effort actually is sustained into the next year. Otherwise, the new, you know, four years later, a new administration could, you know, put back what was taken out this year.
I think people should understand that Congress is going to have to act in some cases to make changes permanent with the – efficiency gains that are happening at the national level, just like this effort that you've highlighted at the state level. Yeah. And again, the approach is different, too. And, you know, it's the difference between a hammer and a scalpel. Right. So from the executive standpoint.
They can use the hammer. And this is kind of what you see Doge going through a bunch of different agencies and eliminating things. But you're right. In order for those to stick, most of the time, you are absolutely going to need to pass a law. or amended law that says that the things that those folks cut actually doesn't have to be a thing anymore, right? So, for example, I'm not sure what federal law governs USAID.
But it doesn't really matter if the executive defunds USAID. If there's still a law that says USAID must exist, the next president can come back and restore all the funding to it tomorrow. So I appreciate that opportunity to point that out because it's sometimes lost in the narrative through the press and whatnot that just because we've cut it this year doesn't mean that it actually, you know.
changes things over the long term. So speaking of reducing budgets or fiscal responsibility, talk us through your constitutional amendment and the thinking that you have for controlling spending at the state level well it's not a new idea it's uh it's uh it means that so i have a bill to um and i ran this bill basically every year i've been in elected office uh to uh re
make the constitutional spending limit in Alaska. So what people don't know is there's already a constitutional spending limit in Alaska. The problem with it is it basically is not a limit on anything because the bar is so high.
uh that we could probably never have enough money to spend in order to hit the bar although never underestimate folks's ability to spend money you know um So, and the other aspect is, and what a lot of people don't realize is the legislature actually back in, I want to say 2012. violated its own spending cap under its own appropriation bill. So the constitution actually tells us that we have to spend X amount of dollars on capital appropriations if we indeed hit the level of the cap.
And we didn't do that at the time and we overspent on the operating budget. So if you'll go to go back and I can't remember off the top of my head what fiscal year it was, but I want to say it was around 2012 that we actually spent so much money. in this building that we violated our own constitutional spending limit. So what my proposal is, is basically to change the metric in which we benchmark our spending cap to our...
own state's private sector gross domestic product. And the reason I like that idea is because It fundamentally, you've got to ask yourself what the role of government is. And to me, one of the primary roles of government is to ensure that.
commerce by the private sector is facilitated in the most efficient way possible, right? So what does that mean? It means I got to have public safety so people can't... you know, destroy people's private property and stuff like that means I might have to have a road because people want to be able to ship their goods from point A to point B.
So to me, you know, if you need government as a necessary evil, right, because you need some structure of organization, but that structure of organization should be. do everything in its power to make people's lives easier and not harder. And a good metric of that is determining, hey, what private sector GDP is, and if... People in Alaska are doing great and they're growing their own businesses and they're employing their own people and our economy is growing.
then OK, maybe government's not doing a terrible job and they should have the ability to spend more money to ensure that those services continue that growth. But if government in Alaska is doing a terrible job and the people are. not doing better, in fact, they're doing worse and GDP is falling, then the government shouldn't be able to just continue to spend money exponentially when the people it's supposed to represent are not doing well under its governorship, right? Interesting.
Go ahead. So to if that resolution were to pass, it would have to go to a vote of the people because changing the Constitution requires a vote of the people. But then the legislature would be would care in a sense. whether the gdp goes up or down because we would have more money to spend so the economy goes good we've got economic growth the state could spend more and that would help our our wants and desires at the, at the finance table. That's a good summary of the thinking, right?
Yeah, no. And again, it changes your perspective of why you do what you do. Right. So a lot of folks in the building will often want to do things. that may not have any positive impact on the private sector economy in the state. It might even have a negative impact on the private sector economy in the state. And oftentimes, many ideas that are proposed in this building are probably more majority bad ideas than they are good.
objectively, if you have a metric, as we were talking about earlier, that is designed to get a positive outcome. and people's ability to appropriate money is tied to that outcome, right, then people will start thinking in terms of, hey, is what I am attempting to do for the betterment of the people who live and work in Alaska?
or not because if it's not there'll be an adverse consequence um you know and if it is there'll be a positive consequence right yeah someone who uh works for the federal government or works for the state government might say, well, yeah, does this apply to state and federal jobs? So as we have more federal money flowing in and we have more federal, higher number of federal workforce in the state, does that mean the state's GDP grows?
we would be rewarded by the growth of government being part of that mechanism to be able to spend more. So as our government grows, we're able to spend more. Well, no, we exclude public sector GDP. Right. So what does that mean? We cost out those items because you're right. You don't want a self-fulfilling prophecy. Right. So what does that mean for the listeners? Right. So the reason I don't count those things, even though, by the way, public.
does change GDP growth. But the reason we don't want to count it in a spending cap is because now I have what's called a perverse financial incentive, i.e. the more government employees I had that don't have a job that I pay money to, the more they'll spend in consumption. And I kind of juice that.
metric, which means I can self grow my own limit, right? So the reason you want to sit through and kind of work through those financial metrics, as you well know, Ben, is because in life, generally, you don't want to have those perverse financial incentives. What does that mean like on a practical sense? So Ben here's a peony farmer, right? I would not want to basically have a program in which I allow him to buy millions of acres of irritable land.
and then pay him not to grow anything, you know. And then the more acres of land he gets to buy, the more money he gets from the government not to grow anything, right? That would be what we would call a perverse financial incentive, you know. which interesting you should pick that as an example because that's exactly what we do at the national level and it works doesn't it works beautifully yeah for for some good reasons and some some probably not so good reasons anyway um
Any other bills? I really do need to ask one question about one of the bills that you probably know which one I'm going to ask about. Oh, yeah. I have a good example. So what's up with the dinosaur bill? Oh, the dinosaur bill. I need my, my prop. Hold on. You have my prop there, Mr. Bernard. I have, I have the dinosaur bill. Okay. So I, um, long story short, you know, I have young kids. I have a daughter who's a six going on seven. I have another daughter.
who's um just turned four and I have my son who's 18 months and I tour my elementary schools in my district often and I talk to different kids class I'm actually heading back to Fairbanks on Friday to talk to high schoolers actually about legislature and stuff like that. But talking with elementary school kids, there was a reoccurring theme, which was they wanted a state dinosaur.
And I said, OK, well, that's interesting. You know, I didn't know. I'm really not a big guy on state songs and stuff like that. But you get a bunch of kids and they say that they want something. And then your own kids say they want a state dinosaur. So I get back down here to Juneau and my chief of staff, who's always very efficient, Mr. Bernard Oto, he's like excellent. He always takes notes on all the meetings that we have. And then he reminded me that the fact that there was big.
pressure from my constituents who can't vote yet that they want to see a state dinosaur. So I had a list of dinosaurs to look at. And, you know, I live in Fairbanks, so I saw the name Nanuxaurus. And that was kind of a no brainer for me because, you know, I live in Fairbanks and it looks cool. So I told folks that the only criteria I had in naming a state dinosaur was couldn't cost money much.
you know, don't really want to spend money on them. It had to look cool, it had to sound cool, and it had to be something to do with Fairbanks. So the Nanexaurus checked all those boxes, and it looks like this. You can see that. My staff got a figurine. That looks like a predator dinosaur, not a plant eater. Yeah, yeah. We don't want any herbivores either. We need carnivores, you know. No kid wants the dinosaur to be, you know.
the small herbivores. So anyway. Nanook means bear or polar bear, white bear. It's a polar bear lizard is what it translates to, which is honestly pretty cool if Alaska is to have a dinosaur. I don't know if you could do better than polar bear lizard, you know. It's for the kids. Yeah, for the kids, right? And I'm actually kind of shocked how many kids have reached out to my office being in favor of having a dinosaur.
And, you know, when I was a kid in elementary school, I had a savings account back when, you know, those were a thing. It was called Dino Savers at KeyBank. And they give you a dinosaur if you deposit like a hundred bucks a month or something, you know? So I remember getting my own dinosaur collection from my KeyBank savings account. Awesome.
Will, I just want to give you a couple minutes here at the end of the interview. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you'd like to have a few minutes to talk about or reach out to your constituency or let viewers know what's happening? Well, I think that, you know, the reality of folks in the legislature is kind of finally dawning on that. We are almost at the end of the road when it comes to spending and taxes. Right.
And Ben, you know this, you tried for many years to get people to kind of realize that the cliff was coming, right? And, you know, we're probably not quite at the end of the road yet, but we're going to be there in the next couple of fiscal years. So folks in elected office need to hear from their constituents about what their constituents want to see.
I know the folks that I represent don't want me and elected officials wasting their money, you know, so they want me to look for programmatic changes and reductions to the budget, you know, that will shrink the size and scope of government. But, you know, at the end of the day, something's going to give. Either you're going to cut programmatic funding to different programs or you're going to have to tax people and tax industry.
in order to fund the growth of the Alaska government at current levels and projected levels. And ultimately, you're going to have that conversation because just like an HB 69, the education bill, when you don't got the money, you can't pass the bill. It's well said. It's interesting to me to see the conversation happening in the state legislature here and a similar conversation happening at the national level.
And people probably don't really realize this because it doesn't impact our daily lives, but we're significantly in debt for our spending decisions that we're having. And to the tune of about $2 trillion, $2 trillion with a T, it gets added every year. And to break that, because a trillion dollars is like, who knows, who understands what a trillion is. But, you know, if you say...
We're going to add $6 to $7 billion a day to our national debt for everyday things, just to balance the budget, right? So we've got a federal budget. that Alaska gets a portion of, right? We're a net positive recipient, meaning we receive more federal dollars into the state than we pay in federal income taxes. And a portion of that, probably, you know, a little over a quarter of it.
is financed into the future. So those kids of yours that I see running around, they already owe money to the government to pay for the things that we're paying for right now that we've demanded from our government. So there's a reckoning coming. Yeah. And I like to articulate that in a bunch of different ways to help people visualize what it actually is. Right. So if you take a billion dollars.
and you stacked a hundred dollar bills up in a line equivalent of a billion dollars the stack would be over half a mile high right just to let you know right i don't even know what a trillion dollars is but one of your viewers can probably do the math, right? And that's going to be a real tall pile of money, you know?
Well, Will, I appreciate you spending a few minutes with us here, and it's been a great conversation. It's good to see you again. Yeah, you too. Wish you the best for the rest of this session. And maybe we can connect with each other here again later in the session and find out what happens with House Bill 69 and your bills. Be good to get an update. Yep. Thanks, Ben. All right. Well, thank you for representative staff for joining us. If you enjoy what you've seen on this podcast.
and want to help keep the lights on, go to mustreadalaska.com and click on the donate link. We would sure appreciate your support. This is Ben Carpenter signing off for Must Read Alaska show. Stay frosty out there.