Building a state budget ...

Note:  The following piece was updated on October 4, 2013:

Yesterday I wrote a column on the direction in which the Governor's budgets are currently taking the state ("Sean Parnell's budgets ... and mine"). As I said there:

The budgets which Sean Parnell has proposed, the legislature has passed and Sean Parnell has signed over the last three years, combined with what he has said on the record about the budgets he intends to propose over the next five years are leading inevitably to one thing: statewide income or sales taxes, if not both, and use for government spending of a portion of the earnings of the Permanent Fund. Period, end of sentence.

Although there is a time and a place for simply identifying problems, you can't realistically expect things to change unless you also offer solutions.  As a result, in yesterday's column I also committed to laying out an alternative budget which avoids that outcome and provides Alaskans instead "a safe and secure fiscal future."

As I have thought through it, I have decided to lay out the case in three pieces. 

• Friday, October 4:       "Reality bites" (The coming fiscal crisis is real)
• Friday, October 11:     "We can't afford it" (Correcting the flaws in Alaska's budget process)
• Friday, October 18:     "We can do this" (The next Alaska budget)

I am looking forward to the series, and the discussion.