Albertson, So the gist of your comment is you tax because you can?  To your comment, at what level of taxation do you begin to jeopardize businesses and individuals?  I suggest you and Les Gara don't know, yet are quite comfortable to embrace taxing regardless of the deleterious impact on business.  What we do know is that Alaska’s fiscal situation has already caused a significant employment downturn in the private sector. Investment is drying-up.  By any reasonable measure Alaska is in a recession.  All those things are true for the private sector, but not government employment. Tax advocates (ie, transfer of wealth advocates) have protected the public sector from the ravages of our recession. The point is, before a tax solution is adopted we need to be damn sure that government is operating lean and efficiently - and we are far from that measure!