Sen. Murkowski talks economics at Valley town hall meeting

PALMER — With the economy on everyone’s mind back from Wasilla to Washington, D.C., Sen. Lisa Murkowski came to the Palmer Senior Center Wednesday to talk about her ideas to address the nation’s looming national debt.

Murkowski said the debt problem is something she and her colleagues need to take a hard look at and make some tough choices to fix.

“It does require that we be honest,” the senator said. “This is not the time for political rhetoric or easy answers.”

She put the problem in terms of household economics. For an Alaska household pulling in $64,600 per year to spend like the federal government that household would have to spend $88,500 per year.

In 2011, she said, the country will spend $1.3 trillion more than it collects in tax dollars.

“If we were to do that within our own personal households we’d be bankrupt,” she said.

But that spending, she illustrated with a pie chart, hasn’t been entirely on bombers and bridges and the things people argue about in Congress. Yes, those projects exist. But by 2021, the senator said, the U.S. will be spending 58 percent of its budget on mandatory spending programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits, federal retirement and unemployment payments. Last year that portion was already at 54 percent.

That’s where the tough choices come in.

But Murkowski said she thinks the budget can be balanced without kicking anyone off the Social Security rolls.

“I feel pretty strongly about this aspect of the program,” she said.

She said she supports a plan in the Senate to gradually raise the eligibility age for Social Security so that by 2029 a person has to be 69 years old to qualify. She said she’d like to pair up the eligibility age for Medicare with that Social Security age. Over 10 years, those two changes could save $1 billion.

On the revenue side, Murkowski said she’d like to see tax rates dropped but deductions and tax credits modified or limited.

And what does all this federal belt tightening mean for Alaska? Quite a bit.

Another pie chart in Murkowski’s presentation noted that 15.8 percent of the state’s economy is made up of federal military spending and another 19.5 percent out of non-defense federal spending. There are 35,000 servicemen here and more than half of the land in Alaska is federally owned.

Going through those numbers, “the urgency of the task is more and more apparent,” she said.

This part of her presentation was the topic of the first question from the audience, in which Murkowski was asked if it bothered her to realize that her opponent in last year’s contentious election, Joe Miller, was right when he said federal money was going to dry up in Alaska.

“I think both Mr. Miller and I agreed that the amount of money coming to the state is not sustainable,” Murkowski said.

But the second largest contributor to the state’s economy next to the federal government is the oil and gas sector. Murkowski said new oil wells on lands and in waters the federal government have locked up could easily make up for lost federal spending.

Jennie Bettine with the local Conservative Patriots Group asked the second question, saying she liked a lot of what she heard from the senator, but didn’t see her backing it up with action.

“I’m sorry, Sen. Murkowski, but it’s time for you to stand up and make change,” Bettine said.

Murkowski countered that she is working against a president who disagrees with her.

“We have been led by an administration that believes, that fully believes, that government is more of the answer than we here in Alaska and probably most of the people in the country believe,” she said.

Regarding money in politics, she said there definitely needs to some sort of campaign finance reform is needed. Fundraising takes up time she should spend working, Murkowski said. She said she sometimes hears people dismissing her calls for reform there.

“It’s easy for you to say, Lisa, because in Alaska your elections are cheap,” she said. “I don’t think it’s cheap. Five million bucks?”

Murkowski was also asked for her thoughts on the Occupy movement staging protests in cities across the country and the world.

“It’s not so unlike what we saw last year, or the year before, with the Tea Party,” she said. “The fact that the people are motivated to really get out and get involved, I think that is good.”

Asked later if she fully supported the movement she said that insofar as it is an expression of people’s concerns, frustrations and apprehensions, she does, though she hasn’t read anything like a manifesto from the group.

Murkowski said she sees the current economic crisis as a time when she wants to reach across the aisle, work with people in both parties and find some solutions.

“The Obama administration did not get us into this mess. The Bush administration did not get us into this mess. We’ve been getting into this mess on a bipartisan basis for quite sometime,” she said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.