Outside megadonors are sending us back our money

By Larry Persily

Economists talk about “new money” and “old money,” but not always in the sense of old, like long-time rich families, or new, like tech startup multi-millionaires. Old money can refer to dollars earned in a state that stay and circulate in that state, like plumbers who provide services to people in town and then spend their earnings at stores in town, while new money refers to dollars brought into the state.

Old money is good, but a state needs new money to grow.

Tourism dollars are new money for Alaska. Selling seafood to Lower 48 shoppers and overseas markets brings new money into the state to pay for wages and supplies. And not to forget, federal spending is Alaska’s biggest source of new money — to which we sometimes say thank you, but mostly we just ask for more, particularly in an election year when federal spending is a reelection badge of honor.

Sometimes the new money in Alaska is really just our own money coming back to us, though not always to our benefit. At least tourists don’t generally tell us how to think when they put their money on the counter.

Take the new money of political spending, which will be the dominant noise in life until the November elections.

Just scan the list of the big-money donors to Alaska political campaigns. The latest to make the headlines was the $1.5 million that Elon “My Ego is as Obnoxious as My Wealth” Musk gave to the Aurora Action Network, a Wisconsin-based political action committee that has donated $1 million to another political committee which is campaigning to revoke Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system.

Much of Musk’s money will be spent either in Alaska or with outside service providers to influence Alaskans. And much of his money comes from his ownership stake in Starlink, which is popular across Alaska for its satellite internet service.

And giving a bad name to irony, the ballot measure to return Alaska elections to a political party-dominated candidate selection process — no more open primaries and ranked voting in the general election — also would eliminate the state’s campaign finance laws. Those laws enable voters to know when big money people like Musk write big checks for campaigns.

The Wisconsin-based anti-ranked choice group also has collected large donations from billionaires Jeffery Hildebrand, who owns Hilcorp, one of Alaska’s largest oil producers, and from Dick Uihlein, who with his wife owns Uline, a major business supply company that sells its good nationwide, including Alaska.

On the other side of the ranked-choice voting debate are other rich people who have donated to an Outside group which is pouring money into Alaska in hopes that the campaign advertising, mailers, social media and text messages will convince voters to retain the elections system in November.

Recent six-figure contributors to the Unite America Political Action Committee include Ben Walton, heir to the founder of Walmart, where a lot of Alaskans shop, and Marc Merrill, California founder of Riot Games, which develops video games and esports, no doubt popular with many Alaskans.

Certainly, we welcome new money spent in the state, though buying more seafood and expanding winter tourism would be better for the economy than spending more on campaign mailers, door hangers and radio ads.

Maybe Musk and the others thought it only fair that they send some of the money they earned from Alaskans back to the state, though I doubt they thought of it that way. Rather, they like sharing their opinions — and can afford to do it.

• 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.