One comment really stood out in the Anchorage Daily News coverage of U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s tour of the Anchorage port.

The Biden administration approved a $68.7 million federal grant last fall to help renovate the port, an essential element in Alaska’s infrastructure.

The priceless pontification was from Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson and why he believes Alaska deserves hundreds of millions more in federal money for the port project, which has an estimated price tag of $2 billion and rising.

It would be nice, Bronson said, to have the federal government pay for the whole thing, but if not, $1.2 billion would be great.

“We’re not asking the federal government to pick up the whole tab. It would be nice. Historically, in our country, as we moved from east to west, there are states, there are cities, jurisdictions, that got all their funding from the federal government and the highway system,” Bronson said. “We shouldn’t be last. We should get our bite at the federal apple for something of this importance.”

Not since Eve took a bite of the forbidden fruit has there been such a false sense of entitlement.

In February, the Anchorage Daily News had a good editorial in which it said that Bronson has proven himself to be “unqualified, incompetent and out of his depth” as mayor. The author forgot to mention that Bronson is also uninformed.

The Daily News should have insisted that Bronson identify the non-existent cities and states that have paid nothing for their highways. He could buy himself a ticket to one of those places and enjoy the free ride.

It’s one of the hypocritical oaths of Alaska politics, propagated as gospel by our Congressional delegation and legions of those who profess to dislike big government, that Alaska deserves whatever federal money it can grab because it hasn’t been a state very long and has catching up to do, etc.

It’s a lazy recitation, regurgitated without the slightest chance of original thought by Bronson and his fellow travelers.

And it never comes with a suggestion of new taxes or higher taxes to pay for federal largesse.

This is not about getting a well-deserved “bite at the federal apple,” but of grasping for a federal handout, while complaining about socialism and the evils of “federal overreach.”

This hypocrisy is not exclusively a Republican delusion, but it is a bedrock principle of GOP politics in Alaska, along with the “War on Alaska” that breaks out whenever a Democratic president holds office.

More than 99.7 percent of the U.S. population live in the 49 other states, but the Alaska sense of entitlement, nurtured by our leaders, thrives in no small part because every state has two senators at the federal trough, just as California, New York or Florida.

More than one-third of state funding in Alaska comes from the federal government and on a per capita basis, Alaska is always near the top or at the top in collecting subsidies for roads and everything else.

The real Alaska Statehood Defense initiative is all about defending the flow of federal money.

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