Tax advice from Larry Persily? Good idea.

Suzanne Downing has yet to retract the story on her website that falsely claims Larry Persily, one of the most accomplished political reporters in Alaska, can’t be trusted when he talks about taxes because he doesn’t have a current Alaska business license.

“Take your tax advice from this guy???’ Downing said on Facebook.

Better to take advice from someone with Persily’s strong credentials than a person who can’t look up a business license on the state website.

Persily had two business licenses. One expired at the end of 2022. One is current until the end of 2024.

It takes all of 60 seconds to find Persily’s business license on the state website.

Rather than get this straight, Downing used her false claim about Persily to complain about his columns on the need for a state fiscal plan and taxes. In his latest column, published below, Persily called for leveling the playing field on oil company income taxes in Alaska to include Hilcorp as a taxpayer.

Downing said that Persily has an LLC for the weekly Wrangell newspaper he owns, and billionaire Jeff Hildebrand has an LLC for Hilcorp, now the biggest oil company in Alaska.

“The difference is that Jeff Hildebrand invests hundreds of million of dollars into Alaska, employs thousands of Alaskans, and even kept the lights on in Southcentral Alaska during the near-blackouts during the worst of the winter cold snap this past season,” Downing gushed.

“Unappreciated by pro-taxers, companies like Hilcorp also provide services to the public, such as heat, but there are those like Persily who are wedded to the idea that government has a duty to skim capital from any company that risks investment in a tough-to-operate place like Alaska,” she said.

Downing’s company is now owned by Alaska Gold Communications, Inc., which is based in Homer. The Faulkners, owners of the Land’s End Resort on the Homer Spit, are among the major owners of Must Read Alaska, through a living trust.

The Hilcorp tax, which the Legislature again rejected this year, would have put Hilcorp on the same tax footing as Exxon and ConocoPhillips, ending a loophole that has cost the state many hundreds of millions.

The tax plan is not the radical scheme that Downing wants people to think.

Even Gov. Mike Dunleavy allowed a former revenue commissioner to endorse the idea as sound public policy in 2021.

On Aug. 5, 2021 and again on Aug. 10, 2021, former Revenue Commissioner Lucinda Mahoney testified that Dunleavy would support ending the Hilcorp loophole if the Legislature approved it first.

“Some of our oil and gas producing companies are not paying corporate income tax due to the way that their legal structure is set up. We are proposing that those entities begin to pay the corporate income tax and establish parity between the oil industry,” Mahoney said three years ago.

Dunleavy did not want to lead the charge for parity, however, and he choose to do nothing, dodging tax questions at every opportunity.

In contrast to Downing and Dunleavy, Persily has for years been making the case for a fiscal plan for Alaska.

Here is the latest colum published in the Anchorage Daily News.

By Larry Persily

National news stories earlier this month reported that a survey of almost 1,500 Amazon employees across 42 states found that one in three need government assistance, primarily food stamps or Medicaid.

The news matches a Government Accountability Office analysis in 2020 that covered nine states and found that Amazon — and Walmart, too — were among the biggest employers of workers whose earnings were low enough that they qualified for food stamps.

That Amazon and Walmart would be near the top is no surprise: Walmart is the largest private-sector employer in the country with about 1.6 million workers, more than the population of 11 states; Amazon is No. 2, at around 1.1 million.

Both Walmart and Amazon have raised wages in recent years to attract and retain workers. Those higher wages showed up in the survey of Amazon employees — almost two-thirds said they were earning more at the online retailer than in their previous jobs. But many still needed government assistance.

The two companies also share another trait: They built their businesses on low prices, lower than their competitors. In Amazon’s case, its prices are so low that the company loses money on many of its sales after it covers the cost of free shipping.

Shoppers enjoy the low prices. It saves tens of millions of people billions of dollars a year on food, clothes and everything else on the shelf or packed in a shipping box. The companies rang up about $1 trillion in U.S. sales last year.

But there is a cost to keeping prices and wages low, whether at Amazon or Walmart or other employers around the country. States and the federal government help cover employees’ cost of living through food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance and other programs.

Government’s role is to help ensure that families have enough to eat, safe housing and medical care. It’s a political struggle at times, and it costs a lot of money, but generally the country pays attention to the needs of lower-income families.

Which is part of the reason for taxes, along with paying for national security, law enforcement, roads and all the other essentials. And not just personal income taxes, but corporate taxes.

Which brings me to Alaska.

The state Legislature this past session considered — but did not adopt — amending the corporate tax code to go after oil-and-gas producer Hilcorp, the biggest operator in Cook Inlet and which bought all of BP Alaska’s assets in 2020. Texas-based, privately owned Hilcorp does not pay corporate income tax in Alaska.

It’s not a scam, it’s what the law says.

The state’s tax code was written decades ago to apply to publicly held corporations, before companies like Hilcorp and thousands of other Alaska businesses organized as privately held corporations or limited liability companies (LLCs). Those increasingly popular corporate structures are not an issue at the federal level or in states with a personal income tax — the companies’ profits flow through to the owners, who pay personal income tax on the money.

But Alaska has no personal income tax; the Legislature abolished it in 1980 as the state got rich from oil. Which means the state collects no income taxes on the profits of privately owned companies.

All corporations, whether publicly owned biggies like Amazon and Walmart, or privately owned moneymakers like Hilcorp, big law firms or medical practices, are able to succeed at their businesses, in great part, because government provides services the companies and their employees and customers use, such as roads, ports and police. Government also provides financial assistance that their lower-paid employees need.

It’s fair to tax all businesses, just as it’s fair to tax all individuals, as all benefit from public services.

Low prices make life more affordable; public services without tax revenue is unaffordable.

Larry Persily is a longtime Alaska journalist, with breaks for federal, state and municipal public policy work in Alaska and Washington, D.C. He lives in Anchorage and is publisher of the Wrangell Sentinel weekly newspaper.