Governor can be trusted

Governor Palin has certainly done her best to define reality for us in her Spectrum piece, “Oil taxes require balanced fine tuning,” in Sunday’s Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, as did Rep. Gatto in an earlier Frontiersman edition.

Both of their comments make it clear that residents of this Valley need to call on this Legislature to support Governor Palin’s ACES proposal.

As I write this, oil is selling for over $90 a barrel and going higher. Yet, oil companies and AOGA hit us daily with their disingenuous commercials and whine to the Legislature that higher oil taxes will make it too costly to do business and too unstable to invest. Unstable compared to what? Russia? Venezuela? The Mideast? It seems to me they should be paying us a premium for the real stability we provide.

Perhaps if they refrained from criminal actions that cost millions in fines or from providing outrageous golden parachutes to errant CEOs, or perhaps if they maintained their business responsibly to avoid costly shut-downs, these companies would be more open to a measly $600 million or so to us. Instead, they expect us to eat their bad business costs with tax write-offs — and some of our legislators actually agree.

Oil companies with their windfall profits are wallowing in billions because the demand for oil is outpacing the supply, while we, the oil owners, are struggling to heat our homes and put gas in our cars to get to work. At the same time some legislators won’t support Governor Palin because they think the state will then have too much money. Meanwhile, here in the valley, people are dying on unsafe roads because we can’t afford to fix them. When the Valley needs get desperate enough it’s our property taxes that fund the costs. All that nonsense about being good to the oil companies is the same as being good to constituents won’t fly anymore. As has been painfully illustrated by recent events, you can’t serve two masters.

Governor Palin’s overwhelming endorsement by the people of this state, and particularly this Valley, was a repudiation of the tainted, for-the-corporation policies of the Murkowski administration and Legislature, and a clear and loud demand for the clean, honest, open, for-the-people policies she promised. Yet, some of our Valley legislators, like state Sen. Lyda Green, seem to be constantly crossing swords with the governor in an attempt to hold on to the old Murkowski way of doing business.

It is past time to let it go and get behind the governor and her policies. The ordinary voter in the Valley may not have digested all the information about the complicated intricacies of oil company profits, taxes and the governor’s ACES plan, but one thing is clear: given a choice of two plans to tax oil companies — one from the governor and another from the Legislature — it’s the governor we trust to get it right.

Marian Elliott

Wasilla