Today the Palin administration rolled out ACES, the reform to PPT. You can visit the website here. ACES stands for Alaska's Clear and Equitable Share.
What makes the debate over the tax interesting is the nature of everyone in it, and what they are pushing. There seem to be two kinds of Conservatives and one kind of Liberal (There are Liberals who are inconsistent, but we'll leave that alone for now).
The first kind of Conservative takes the same kind of position that Conservatives would take at the national level. Lower taxes and less government are the better way to go. We here at ASP tend to advocate the free market, but we also think this first kind of Conservative is wrong to use free market justifications to justify a lower PPT tax.
The second kind of Conservative operates from the principle that the resources are owned by the people of Alaska (as it says in the Alaska Constitution), and that it is the duty of elected officials to manage, sell or develop those resources for the best possible profit for the citizens here. The oil, mines and even the large stash of natural gas that the producers have stored up north: it all belongs to the citizens of Alaska. While this kind of Conservative would revolt if the federal government tried set up something similar, he's okay with this situation at the state level. Inconsistent?
I argue no. There is a qualitative difference between the state and federal government. A federal government is a kind of utilitarian construct. The state governements in most cases are bodies where the people have a genuine connection with each other that is more than utilitarian. Because of this qualitative difference, there are things we can do at the state level that we would never do at the federal level.
The Liberal who seeks to raise the PPT tax, does so for Marxian reasons, and would push for a higher tax even if the resources were not owned by the people of Alaska. What the Modern Liberal argues for at the state and federal level is the same, because ideology is not nuanced by context. Blinded by its forward march to whatever utopia it sees, it cannot discriminate between community (state) and construct (federal), and will gladly walk over any tradition, moral, principle or person who stands in the way. And that is what makes it inferior to the other two.
Both kinds of Conservatives need to keep the locus of debate between them and not allow this to become a conversation between Liberals and Conservatives. Ideology has little if anything constructive to contribute to the conversation.
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First, let me say I consider myself a fiscally-conservative bleeding-heart liberal, so feel free to discount this comment completely. Though, why would I be here if I weren't willing to cross the bridge?
I would say your second type of conservative does show inconsistency. No matter that it's a state construct, our current management of mineral rights is the very definition of socialism. If you want an inconvenient truth, there it is. But to dismantle that construct, you would have to ask, who would benefit? How many people (conservatives and liberals) would metaphorically riot if we tried?
As for liberal reasons for the tax, I cannot say whether or not the tax is justified, but my first questions would have been how much of the revenue already stays within the state, how much of it leaves, and is it a fair deal? Sure, we can't discount the jobs the industry provides, but if, say, 4/5 of the revenue from each barrel of oil immediately leaves the state, why wouldn't we do what we can to help the state economy? Conversely, if it's more like 2/5, isn't that a fair trade for the risk and investment? At one end of the spectrum we prostitute an increasingly valuable resource for the table scraps, and at the other we never reap any reward. I truly believe somewhere in the middle everybody wins, and with good data we could find consensus on where that position should be.
As a fiscal conservative, I would have asked if there are any other ways we could accomplish the same effect without increasing the level of bureaucracy, but my end goal would be the same: let's make sure Alaskans come first.
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