State of dependence: Ted Stevens's Alaska problem--and ours.

• Author: Homans, Charles

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Ketchikan, the fifth largest city in Alaska, is situated on a narrow strip of land, eight miles long and seven blocks wide, wedged between the waters of the Tongass Narrows and the hilly, forested interior of Revillagigedo Island. The town of 8,000 people grew up as a small port on Alaska's Inside Passage, and getting to it by means other than water has always been difficult. Forty years ago, when Ketchikan hosted a thriving timber industry, the only way to reach the place by air was to fly first to Annette Island, twelve miles to the southeast, where you strapped yourself into a thirty-eight-foot amphibious aircraft called the Grumman Goose, a cartoonishly bulbous dual-propeller plane with a boatlike hulled fuselage hanging below a forty-nine-foot wingspan. The Goose's landing gear was raised and lowered with a hand crank, and in bad weather, occupying one of the plane's seven seats was like riding inside a yo-yo. But the craft could land at sea and taxi up to the docks that line the Ketchikan waterfront, and, at the time, the town had few other options.

Things hadn't gotten any easier by the 1970s, when the Alaska Department of Transportation decided to provide Ketchikan with an airport. Searching for a feasible spot on which to build, planners eventually settled on an island called Gravina, just on the other side of the Tongass Narrows. Getting to Gravina would require a boat ride, but state officials indicated that a bridge span would one day link city to airport. In the meantime, ferries would shuttle passengers and freight the half mile from Gravina Island to the Ketchikan waterfront.

As tourism began to pick up in Alaska, Ketchikan became the state's southernmost port of call for cruise ships, and by 2004 the ferry service between Ketchikan and Gravina was carrying more than 300,000 passengers a year. Ketchikan was also gaining inhabitants, and, since the town was hemmed in by water on one side and unforgiving topography and federally managed forests on the other, developers were eyeing the flat land on Gravina Island as the most promising place to build. Without a bridge to Ketchikan, however, no one was likely to move there. With all this in mind, the Department of Transportation finally took up the bridge project in earnest, and the local government put its seal of approval on a plan that would cost roughly $250 million.

Then things took a quintessentially Alaskan turn. The DOT picked a more expensive alternative design, increasing the price tag of the project to more than $300 million. And Washington got involved. In August 2005, at the apex of the earmarking bonanza of the 109th Congress, Senator Ted Stevens, then chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, and Representative Don Young, then chairman of the House Transportation Committee, steered $229 million in federal money toward the Ketchikan bridge project. When Hurricane Katrina prompted Republican Senate colleague Tom Coburn of Oklahoma to suggest diverting the bridge money toward rebuilding efforts in the Gulf, Stevens threw a tantrum, accusing Coburn of attacking Alaska's sovereignty and vowing that he would "be taken out of here on a stretcher" before allowing the funds to be redirected. (Alaska got its money, and the stretcher remained unused.) Thus was born the Bridge to Nowhere.

It wasn't that Ketchikan didn't deserve any federal money to build the bridge. In order to grow and accommodate its development, the town needed more land, and Washington has been funding large infrastructure projects around the country for decades. Still, even by the standards of federal earmarks, the Gravina project was unique in the enormity of the subsidy per capita, which was more than $17,000 per Ketchikan Gateway Borough resident. (By way of comparison, Boston's Big Dig project, which has become synonymous with pork-barrel politics and overspending, is estimated to have cost less than a fifth of this per Greater Boston resident.)

Two years on, the Bridge to Nowhere has gone from the drawing board to the dustbin--in September, the project was scrapped on the orders of Sarah Palin, Alaska's new governor. But it has lived on as a political symbol. In the Republican rout of 2006, it was an oft-invoked icon of government spending run amok.

To reduce the Bridge to Nowhere to a punch line, however, is to miss an important point. Life on the Last Frontier is complicated and expensive, and you pay for it. More precisely, we all pay for it, with about $8 billion a year in federal expenditures. Much of this subsidization is legitimate: the State of Alaska is only forty-eight years old, making it comparatively young, and it needs a boost in order to catch up to the rest of the country in development and infrastructure. But such legitimate demands become a pretext for federal handouts that are out of all proportion to any actual need.

Simply put, Alaska has made a habit of transferring its operating costs to the federal government. The state pulls out nearly two times as much money as it pitches in to the Treasury, a drain that looks especially bad in light of the state's fiscal reality. Today, Alaska enjoys a healthy budget surplus, and it sits on a Permanent Fund of more than $39 billion. It also refuses to levy sales or income taxes on its citizens. In a state that fails to pull its weight, the Bridge to Nowhere is just an especially weighty example.

This is often presumed to be the legacy of Ted Stevens, a lawmaker so eminent in his home state that he is known there simply as Uncle Ted. The senator is a legend of the Last Frontier, a reliable provider whose constituents regard him, in the words of veteran Alaskan journalist Michael Carey, as "something of a frontier fertility god--worshipped, propitiated, feared."

In Washington, journalists label Stevens with a less flattering nickname: the King of Pork. In recent months, Stevens has garnered media attention for even less desirable reasons: he is currently entangled (though yet to be charged) in a federal corruption investigation that has snared three lawmakers and lobbyists (with more indictments pending) back in Alaska on...