The Big, Beautiful Bill is still making its way through Congress; we can expect some news at any given moment as to its fate in the Senate, where it currently lingers. In the process, the BBB is still being tweaked, its provisions debated, and what form it may take in the end is far from certain.
At the moment, though, Alaska's Senators have managed to add a couple of provisions for the Great Land that are, well, interesting; especially a tax cut for whaling ship captains. Yes, whaling ship captains are still a thing in Alaska, and they are getting an increase in the amount they can deduct from their taxes for work-related expenses.
There’s a surprising winner in the latest draft of Senate Republicans’ domestic policy megabill: whaling boat captains.
Buried in the 940-page bill is a provision upping a deduction some can take for whale-hunting-related expenses to $50,000 from the current $10,000.
It’s one of the more unusual breaks in the tax code, and often mocked because it allows people to deduct the cost of maintaining boats and weapons as a charitable contribution.
This benefit affects, primarily, Alaska's Native community, who are allowed to take whales for subsistence, as they have been doing for many years.
The deduction was added to the code in 2004. In order to claim the benefit, the IRS says someone has to be recognized as a whaling captain by the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission and must be engaged in the sanctioned, subsistence hunting of bowhead whales.
While that's interesting, I find I must set aside the temptation to start spewing "Moby Dick" quotes and look at the second provision, which is more far-reaching in the Great Land - and for a mildly alarming reason.
Alaska and Hawaii could be temporarily exempted from paying for some costs of the nation’s largest anti-hunger program after last-minute negotiating from lawmakers, according to Senate Republicans’ new megabill text.
The new text grants the Agriculture secretary authority to waive the two states’ cost-share requirement for up to two years if they are “actively implementing” a plan to lower their payment error rates, which is what will be used to calculate how much of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program states will need to fund.
Alaska’s SNAP error rate was over 60 percent and Hawaii’s was over 20 percent as of fiscal year 2023, which is the latest available data. Alaska’s two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, have spent the past several weeks pushing their colleagues to provide an exception for their state.
That's disconcerting. Alaska's overpayment rate in the SNAP program is far ahead of any other state; it's not even close. The waiver is contingent on Alaska (and Hawaii, which also has an alarmingly high overpayment rate) taking steps to deal with it.
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What isn't clear is how long these carve-outs would last, and what steps Alaska is taking to address this problem.
The SNAP program, formerly known as the food stamp program, has been plagued from its very onset. Everyone knows the familiar stories of abuse and fraud, and many of us have seen it for ourselves; food stamps being traded at a reduced rate for non-eligible things, even for drugs, and so on. We've all heard the stories of food stamp recipients spending their benefits on pop, chips, candy, and cupcakes.
Any program that is so loosely applied is inviting abuse, but this issue isn't a matter of fraud; overpayments occur when the recipients are overpaid through the government's mistake. Those benefits are normally required to be paid back, but when a state's overpayment rate is this high, one can only suspect that something is going on besides a flood of accounting errors.
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