“Everything’s on the table. Everything’s on the table,” Gov. Mike Dunleavy said Thursday about the need to get a fiscal plan for the state.

What has never been on the table during Dunleavy’s years as governor is a clear commitment from him to support taxes and push for legislative action to enact them. That is still missing, though he said he will be introducing a bill that will probably be for a 1 percent state sales tax. His staff said later the plan is for a 2 percent sales tax, but that could change, the Alaska Beacon reported.

“What I’ve told folks is I’m willing to entertain almost anything to get to where we have to be,” the Anchorage Daily News quoted him as saying.

“A broad-based solution that doesn’t gouge or take huge parts from one sector or another, or penalize one sector or another, is probably the most important thing we can do.”

“To simply ride oil in a do-or-die situation for the state of Alaska is folly. It’s probably not a good idea,” he said.

I agree with him that his past claims were foolish and that a broad-based solution is needed. I applaud the conciliatory tone of his remarks, which are superior to the unworkable approach he rolled out two years ago.

But the biggest obstacle to a fiscal plan remains the lack of commitment from Dunleavy, who says he might be OK with this, that, and any number of other things.

He wants some kind of spending limit and he wants the biggest dividend possible, but he wants to see what the Legislature will agree on. He’s been saying some version of those words for years.

The wait-and-see tactic puts inordinate pressure on the Legislature, which is deeply divided, and makes it almost impossible to force compromise and reduce divisions. By design, the 60-member Legislature is never capable of providing the focused leadership only possible from a governor who knows how to use the tools of his office.

When everything is on the table, nothing is on the table.

Dunleavy has a credibility problem when he talks about a fiscal plan because he claimed for the last four-and-a-half years that all we needed were three constitutional amendments to settle the dividend formula, cap state spending and require that any tax increases be approved by voters and the Legislature.

In 2018 and 2022 he pledged there was no need for any new taxes and that we could have giant dividends and no real cuts in services, though it was clear to any competent analyst that he was wrong.

Now, he says, it is “folly” to base a state budget on oil prices that are constantly rising or falling. It is reckless, as everyone who pays attention has long understood.

The same issue faced us in 2018 and 2022, but candidate Dunleavy lied to Alaskans about the folly of our situation and he was not called on it by Alaska news organizations.

As I wrote here seven months ago, Dunleavy ran for reelection with the fiscal fantasy trifecta of his 2018 campaign—that oil prices will be high, oil production will increase and the Permanent Fund will never stop growing:

Numerous dubious assumptions that Dunleavy and his budget experts have concealed or downplayed in their Wizard of Oz-level strategy deserve examination by legislators and Alaska news organizations.

When Dunleavy agreed to stop pleading the Fifth Amendment and have his state-funded campaign respond to written questions from Alaska news organizations, the end result was one of his patented exercises in evasion.

Asked how he would balance the budget, he or his state employee “volunteer” said it’s already done and there is no need to raise any tax or cut any services.

“The budget is balanced, and we have a surplus that will put billions of dollars into savings for the Constitutional Budget Reserve, the Higher Education Fund and K-12,” Dunleavy’s “volunteer’ wrote.

For good measure, he responded to a question about whether taxes are needed with an emphatic “No.”

“The budget is balanced, and any new taxes should be subject to approval by the people,” Dunleavy claimed.

But Dunleavy is lying to Alaskans about the state of our finances.

The balanced budget claim is precarious. Almost preposterous.

It is based on an assumption about oil prices between now and next summer. Alaska has no knowledge of what’s going to happen with oil prices, which have fallen by one-third since June. Every budget claim has to come with the confession that it may be delusional.

That Dunleavy has now abandoned the fiscal fantasy trifecta of his campaigns is a plus, given the need to deal with reality, but it remains to be seen if he will show the commitment and leadership needed to get a fiscal plan through the Legislature.

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