Alaska is Fucked

Because I work for the State of Alaska, and because my job is technically medical-adjacent, I still have to keep going into the office even though most of Juneau is shut down as a precautionary measure against COVID-19. While it’s frustrating, I understand why my office has been deemed necessary at this time.

But they are getting as many people to work from home as they can. Unfortunately, there are only so many laptops, and setting them all up isn’t instantaneous. Some of my co-workers have started joking that those of us left are like the band playing as the Titanic sinks.

It’s a pretty dire atmosphere, though everyone is working their hardest to make things function, and to find the best solutions. I work in an office full of consummate professionals, and if all of Alaska was in the hands of people like my co-workers, I wouldn’t be concerned.

But Alaska is fucked.

Alaska’s first strike came when China shut down. That dealt a heavy blow to the fishing industry here. Not only is China the primary consumer of some of the more exotic seafood products Alaska produces, but China is also where a lot of the America-market fish is processed and packaged, before being sent back stateside. As China opens back up for business, hopefully this particular blow is glancing, but only time will tell.

Alaska’s second strike came when tourism started shutting down around the globe. Much of Alaska relies on a robust summer tourist season to make it through a relatively lean winter, and week by week, the prognosis on when or if tourists can start making their way to Alaska becomes bleaker and bleaker. People are making tough decisions. Businesses are down-sizing, or closing altogether. Plans are being cancelled last-minute. There’s a lot of uncertainty, and nobody knows what happens if we just don’t get any ships at all this summer.

Alaska’s third strike is oil prices. Which, granted, have been helped along by some non-corona-related factors, but were already seeing a drop in demand globally. Alaska has not yet recovered from the last time there was a major drop in oil prices. We are not prepared even slightly for this drop.

Those three industries combine for basically the entire Alaskan economy. We are not a particularly complex people. Damage in one of those industries is difficult to overcome. Damage in all three at the same time is almost unthinkable.

But. Alaska does have a back-up plan. When oil wealth started flowing, someone had the bright idea of “what if we set up some kind of fund that remains permanent even if this oil wealth proves to be temporary?” And thus, the Alaska Permanent Fund was born: an investment portfolio, initially very risk-averse and conservative, that would serve to keep Alaska running when we hit hard times.

But a few years ago, someone had this idea: what if we expanded the portfolio a bit? What if we put some of it into the stock market? And don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a bad idea per se. It just didn’t anticipate… well… *gestures vaguely at everything.*

I can only assume that the managers of the Permanent Fund have shifted assets into less volatile markets, but who knows, right? This definitely isn’t a good thing.

And add on top of all of that the extra spending the state is going to need to do to ensure people don’t all simultaneously lose their shirts, to ensure that the virus doesn’t overwhelm the state, to ensure a bunch of things I can’t even conceive of right now, combine it with a governor who is bereft of even a single ounce of feck and is currently at risk of being recalled, and we have a state facing some of its biggest challenges ever, without any kind of responsible leadership to guide her through it.

But what can you do, but keep doing your job? Hope for the best? While we find ourselves flung into a seemingly-insurmountable chaos, there are good people in the body of the government, even if there are not at the top. And somehow I have found myself among those good people. Playing music on the deck of the Titanic, even as it sinks.