By SUZANNE DOWNING
March 30, 2026 – With roughly 50 days left in Alaska’s 120-day legislative session, the flood of bills has mostly crested. Lawmakers have filed the bulk of what they intend to push this year, and a pattern is hard to miss: taxes, taxes, and more taxes. It’s as if they keep throwing tax bills at the wall hoping something — anything — will stick.
By late March, I’ve counted about 60 bills with the word “tax” explicitly in their short titles. That includes measures that tweak revenue, eliminate deductions, create surcharges, or shift the tax burden. Depending on how broadly you define it, roughly 8% of all legislation filed this session moves tax levers in some way, mostly upwards.
That’s a lot of time spent figuring out how to take more money out of Alaskans’ pockets and from the job creators who keep the economy going.
The ideas span the full spectrum of government creativity. There are income tax proposals reviving concepts Alaska largely abandoned decades ago. There are statewide sales tax concepts bundled into broader fiscal plans. There are targeted industry taxes for oil and gas, e-cigarette taxes, sports wagering taxes, room rent taxes, and even electric cooperative taxes.
If it moves, earns, rents, drills, smokes, wagers, or powers your home, someone in the state Capitol has probably drafted a tax for it.
Other bills chip away at the margins: eliminating deductions, adjusting apportionment formulas for digital businesses, changing property tax structures, or layering on new surcharges. Some expand exemptions, but many simply shift the burden to someone else. In the end, the taxpayer always pays.
To be fair, not all of these are sweeping changes. Some are narrow. Some are technical. Some will go nowhere. But taken together, they reveal the mindset dominating the building: When in doubt, look for more revenue.
Last year’s Legislature had roughly the same number of tax-related bills. That means this is no longer an occasional exercise, but may become the default posture of state government. Juneau increasingly sees its job as searching for revenue instead of restraining spending.
That’s just backwards.
Alaska doesn’t have a revenue problem. It has a spending problem. And every time lawmakers start with taxes, they avoid the harder work of prioritizing government, cutting duplication, and asking what state government actually needs to do, and what it doesn’t.
Instead, the conversation goes like this: What can we tax? Who can we tax? How can we tax them without too much political blowback? Will we get reelected if we pass this tax?
Fifty-ish days remain in the session. That’s plenty of time for these proposals to move, merge, mutate, and reappear as amendments to unrelated bills, a trick we’ve already seen happen this year.
The push is clearly on to get whatever tax measures they can across the finish line before adjournment.
Is this what we send legislators to Juneau to do? Spend months searching for new ways to tax Alaskans?
Many Alaskans would answer no. They’d rather see a smaller, more focused, and more efficient government. One that lives within its means. One that encourages growth instead of taxing it. One that trusts citizens to spend their own money better than government can.
Fifty days left.
If lawmakers want to impress voters, they could start by shelving the tax hunt and doing something far more difficult: Make government smaller again.
They could start by sticking to the 90-day session instead of lingering to 120 days just so they can collect their handsome per diem checks.
Suzanne Downing is the founder and editor of The Alaska Story and is a longtime Alaskan.
4 thoughts on “Suzanne Downing: Juneau is infested with tax legislation this year”
Compare government per capita spending with other states that are similar to our population. Even with allowing for our difficulty of providing services to remote cohorts of our population, the result will raise your eyebrows .
Well. We can see how a Democrat Governor in 2027 would govern just by looking at his Democrat co workers in the legislature, if the AKGOP doesn’t get themselves together.
The only good thing that’ll come out of a 2027 Democrat Governor would be he’ll give cause all the lazy Republicans to leave the state for “greener pastures” just like the Anchorage Democrats moved many complaining, whiny, do nothing Republicans up to the Matsu valley, Fairbanks, or down the Kenai peninsula.
It takes pruning a community of the do nothings, the atheists, the agnostics out of a community before growth can occur. Pruning is never a feel good action but it does growth after some people are removed.
“Alaska doesn’t have a revenue problem. It has a spending problem.” I’ve made that exact same statement countless times both on here and on MRAK over the years. A recent article on here pointed out that we are experiencing the effects of medicaid expansion pushed by Bill Walker. A visit to the Alaska OMB website confirms that the Dept. of Health/medicaid budget is far and away the elephant in this room, followed closely by junior elephant, the Dept. of Education. What are legislators doing to reduce spending in those areas? They literally act like it’s non of our business. It would seem that every single legislator, upon arriving in Juneau, begins the transformation into a money-sucking tax leech. They could institute a sales tax and an income tax. Both would grow rapidly, max out, and they’d still have a huge “revenue problem”. We’ve seen that scenario play out in almost every other state. But, somehow, Alaska would be different…….(Posted 3/30/26 at 12:31pm Alaska time)
If they spent 1/10th of the time they spend on revenue measures on solving the spending problem they wouldn’t need to spend any time looking at revenue measures. We can only hope they are dumb enough to tax the pfd at 100% and then add further taxation on top of that during an election year, then we have to hope that the electorate is paying attention.