Pregnancy test dispensers to appear in Alaska bars

KTUU.COM ^ | Jan 29, 2015 | Adam Pinsker,

[thackney]

Nice to have your priorities straight in times of need:

Alaska Facing Huge Deficit Without Oil Tax Revenues
http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Alaska-Facing-Huge-Deficit-Without-Oil-Tax-Revenues.html

The part-time state legislature, whose 2014 session ended in April, had passed a $6.1 billion budget for 2015, but since then a barrel of oil has lost more than half its value. Add to that, Alaska gets 90 percent of its budget from oil taxes. So when the 2015 legislative session began Jan. 27, the state’s budget was $3.5 million short.

With an 80 percent drop in oil revenues since June, Alaska is over a barrel. It has no state sales or income taxes, but it does have a kind of savings account from previous oil revenues, but that may not be enough to make up for the shortfall.

“Even if you lay off every state employee, that only saves us a billion [dollars],” Representative Chris Tuck, a Democrat and the minority leader in the Alaska House of Representatives, told The New York Times. “We’d still have $2.5 billion to go.”

The state’s solution, for now at least, is on raising money, not cutting services, according to David Teal, director of Alaska’s Legislative Finance Division. “The numbers just don’t allow you to cut your way out of this, not without some severe impacts on the economy,” he said.

[GreyFriar]

Is this a new feature of Nobamacare?