BETHEL, Alaska — In this remote city in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, a pound of tomatoes costs nearly $7. Milk, when it’s available, is more than $13 a gallon. Almost all residents hunt or fish to feed themselves. Otherwise, they would go hungry. The cost of groceries is just too high. Gas, currently $10 a gallon, is delivered during one small window each year by barge when the river water thaws. If the price is high when the gas arrives, as it has been this year due to the war in Iran, tough luck.
“That’s the price you’re set stuck with,” said Nicholai Joekay, a 42-year-old Bethel resident, on a recent blustery afternoon. “We’re already spread thin and you just get spread even more thin.”
Few places feel the national concerns over affordability more acutely than Alaska. Though the state is usually red, Democrats believe frustration over high prices and the Trump administration will help them flip Alaska — a key state in their quest for control of the Senate. Former congresswoman Mary Peltola, a Democrat, is tying her opponent, incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan, to Republican policies that she said is making the cost of living worse.
“Cuts to public radio, cuts to VA benefits, cuts to SNAP,” Peltola said at a recent campaign event in Anchorage. “It’s like reverse Robin Hood.”
If we want to talk stupid we really need to talk about the Biden administration’s policy and politics. Their big marquee infrastructure bill basically just put money into state governments and for profit companies without requiring them to make any changes to how they had been doing business, while at the same time they knifed households in the back by cutting stimulus checks and support for expanded unemployment benefits. Maybe some of that stuff could have eventually trickled down in some way, but the fact that they were basically doing Reaganomics was really just a giant middle finger to their base in pursuit of Republican votes that never came in.
You seem to assume I support corporate Dems as well. That’s wrong, and you can go through my comment history to confirm that. I’d like nothing more than a progressive takeover to start with, and we can work from there.