I was listening to Air America interview some delegates from the RNC who were from Alaska. At first, the delegate was reluctant to talk to the reporter, because he was afraid that the reporter would discuss Palin's family issues. However, the Air America reporter said he did not want to discuss such issues, he just wanted to ask whether the delegate thought Palin was prepared to be Vice-President based on her positions and experience. The Republican delegate then ripped into Palin's fiscal record, as not only be pro-tax, but also giving massive dividend (bribe) checks to Alaskans, which helped explain her popularity. Essentially, she bought her popularity, and in a time of rising oil prices and profits, she has never faced a crisis, because Alaska has more money then it knows what to do with.
Of course, I did not want to rely just on an Air America interview of a GOP delegate from Alaska, so I checked out the San Francisco Chronicle, which has the following story discussing how Palin imposed an oil windfall profits tax similar to the tax proposed by Obama, but opposed by McCain:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/0... Palin's state reaps the windfall profits McCain decries
/snip
Welcome to the People's Republic of Alaska, where every resident this year will get a $3,200 payout, thanks in no small measure to the efforts of Sarah Palin, the state's Republican governor. That's $22,400 for a family of seven, like Palin's. Since 1982, the Alaska Permanent Fund, which invests oil revenues from state lands, has paid out a dividend on invested oil loot to everyone who has been in the state for a year. But Palin upped the ante by joining with Democrats and some recalcitrant Republican state legislators to share in oil company windfall profits, further fattening state tax revenue and permitting an additional payout in tax funds to residents.
No wonder she is popular with voters in a state whose residents pay no income or sales taxes but are blessed with state coffers rolling in cash at a time when all other states are suffering. Indeed, when the oil companies pay more taxes to the state of Alaska, they get to write that off against their federal tax obligation, leaving the rest of us to make up the shortfall.
The state of Alaska owns most of the oil-producing land and has been getting upward of 85 percent of its budget from the oil companies that lease the fields, even before Palin helped increase the state's cut.
While other states fire schoolteachers because of the economic downturn, Alaska has, as Palin indicated in accepting McCain's offer to join him on the GOP ticket, more money than it knows what to do with. In a display of plucky arrogance at her coming-out press conference, Palin boasted deceptively that if Alaskans wanted that infamous bridge to nowhere, "we'd build it ourselves."
She originally had supported having U.S. taxpayers finance that boondoggle before McCain and others in Congress blasted it.
* * *
Why is it a good thing for the folks up in Alaska to get a cut of exorbitant oil company profits, but not the rest of us, if we are all part of one nation? Didn't taxpayers from the lower 48 states buy the place from the Russians? Isn't it our federally collected tax dollars that have been subsidizing Alaska more lavishly than any other state, both before and after the bonanza of oil? And subsidizing Alaska mightily, despite the state's enormous oil revenue.
/snip
Now, I know that Obama also supports an oil windfall profits tax, but even he is not proposing to distribute $22,000 checks to a family of four like Palin did for Alaska.
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