Special Spending! Spending! Spending! Edition

And the number in Juneau is…

Eight billion five hundred and fifty million dollars. That’s how much Gov. Sarah Palin wants the Alaska State Legislature to spend in the upcoming session.

As Little Orphan Annie would say, Glorioski!

Yeah, but is it spending?

In her three press conferences about this, Palin referred to everything but the operating and capital budgets as saving. Why?

The obvious answer is that no governor wants to come right out and say she’s raising state spending by 27 percent. Bad politics. Really bad politics. And saving sounds so much nicer, don’t you think?

Besides, saving is kind of a murky concept for representative democracies. In theory, the legislature decides how much it wants to spend, and levies taxes to pay for the spending. The result at the end of the year is zero. That is, spending equals revenue. There’s nothing to save.

But Alaska is also a resource owner, so we have all this lovely oil revenue flowing into our treasury. In years when that’s more than we spent the year before, we have a surplus. We expect to have a surplus next year, because oil prices are high and because we just raised the oil production tax. So the question of saving arises.

What is saving? The dictionary defines it as putting money aside for the future. Is that what Palin is proposing?

Not exactly. What she’s proposing varies from item to item, but nothing on this list is true saving.

Clearly, the operating and capital budgets are not saving. Nobody would argue that.

Neither is the TRS payment. That’s just paying off part of the state’s share of the cost of the teacher’s retirement system. Spending, pure and simple.

The energy fund is slightly different. It’s possible that all the money in it won’t be spent for energy projects, so some might be there in the future. But that’s not the intent. The intent is to spend it all on energy projects. So, it’s spending.

Ditto the education fund. Could some money still be there in the future? Sure. Is that the intent? No. The intent is to spend the money on education.

Out of all of this, the only money that’s intended to be there in the future is the transportation endowment. It’s supposed to be invested to earn money, with the earnings spent on transportation projects. So, the intent here isn’t saving, either. It’s spending.

Even if you give Palin the benefit of the doubt on the transportation endowment, that’s only $500 million in saving out of $8.550 billion, or 6 percent. And if you don’t, on this list saving equals 0.

Can you say “tax and spend Republican”?

What about saving?

Now don’t get me wrong. We could actually save that money. We could put it into the principal of the Alaska Permanent Fund. We’d have to change the state constitution to get it back out of there. Or we could put it into the Constitutional Budget Reserve (CBR). Getting it out of there requires a three-quarters vote of each house. It’s a savings account in the sense that it’s harder to get the money back out than if we just left it laying around in the general fund.

Palin has proposed putting $223 million into the CBR. Good for her. That’s much better than the governor and legislature did last year, when we put in a measly $50 million. But do the math. That $223 million to the CBR – to which we owe something more than $5 billion, by the way – is 2.5 percent of the money we’re expecting to get. Not much. If you were making $1,000 a week, you’d be saving $25.

What do I think?

If you’re getting the impression that I’m underwhelmed by Palin’s plan, you’re right.

First, we’re not even sure we’ll get all this money. But that’s a discussion for another time.

If we do get the money, we’re not saving nearly enough. Right now, I’m in favor of putting the entire surplus – everything but the operating and capital budgets – into the CBR. That’d be right around $3 billion, a tidy little number.

Of course, my bill to put last year’s entire surplus -- $1.35 billion – into the CBR went nowhere. So the smart money’s not on me. But all I can do is try.

Aren’t you just being contrary?

Contrary? Moi? Not really. We know that we’re not going to be bringing in this kind of money for long. Then what happens? There’s nothing in Palin’s plan to guarantee money for police protection in coming years. Or health care for the poor. Or environmental protection. Or tourism promotion. The list goes on and on.

That’s the point of real saving. You might not know exactly what you’ll need the money for, but you know you’re going to need it. Instead of committing all the money for a narrow range of interests, we should be saving as much as we can so that we’ll be able to pay for all the regular stuff government does in the future.

That’s the Doogan plan. Think I should have three press conferences to explain it?

Happy holidays.