Not exactly right. I agree with you that we are not in a fiscal crisis ... yet. We have time to cut the budget more and all indications are that oil will be back up around $60-75 a barrel, its historical range, by calendar year's end.

However, deficit spending is not a good long-term strategy. The CBR only has a couple of years left in it at current spending and revenue levels. The Permanent Fund corpus cannot be touched without a vote of the people which is never going to happen. Nor should it ever be touched. It's should be viewed as an annuity account that generates income for a "rainy day".

That is actually what it was set up for, not for us to get magic money every fall. The entire point of the PFD was to keep Alaskans interested in what happened to that account. Hammond worried that if we didn't have a direct stake in the Fund, we would vote as stupidly as we did with SB21 when asked if the Legislature could tap the fund. Our answer should be NEVER to tapping the corpus. EVER.