Ad libbing as he warmed up the Republican convention crowd for their vice presidential nominee, Rudolph Giuliani quipped: “She got an 80 percent approval rating. You don’t get those kinds of numbers in New York!”
Of course, getting those numbers would be just as easy for a New York mayor or any other mayor or governor if they were able – like the charming hockey mom — to send $1200 to every man, woman and child in their jurisdiction thanks to a windfall profits tax on the oil industry.
But wait a second. Didn’t Rudy tell us that she had reduced taxes and cut government spending?
Actually, for all her boilerplate conservative rhetoric about the wonders of freedom and the evils of taxation and government, her career reflects a penchant for raising taxes and redistributing wealth. From a traditional Republican perspective, her policies seem suspiciously socialistic.
Last year, Palin imposed a substantial new tax on the profits of corporations pumping oil from state lands, escalating along with the market price per barrel. With proceeds amounting to more than $10 billion, or more than double the amount of revenue collected in fiscal 2007, she and the state legislature set aside $1.2 billion to fund the rebate checks as well as a one-year suspension of the state gasoline tax. Those generous special payments to the Alaskans came on top of the $2000 “dividend” each of them receives annually from taxes on the state’s oil production.
Palin’s heavy new levy on oil company profits is precisely the kind of taxation that Senator McCain, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and all the other faithful friends of big oil vehemently oppose (and that Senator Obama supports, along with a rebate for Americans who don’t happen to live in Alaska). For his part, Senator McCain has angrily denounced windfall profits taxes for discouraging domestic oil production — an argument that prevailed in Washington when Republicans killed exactly such a tax last June. There is at least some evidence that McCain is correct, since both Conoco and BP have protested Palin’s new taxes by suspending new development projects in Alaska.
Meanwhile, the revenue she raises to send checks to her constituents essentially comes from the US Treasury, because the oil companies deduct every dollar of state taxes from their federal tax payments. In other words, the rest of the US taxpaying public is actually subsidizing her state’s enormous welfare program.
That image of the tough, self-reliant Alaskans eking out their survival on the tundra with rod and rifle is mythical. Like the red states that rely on defense contracts and Social Security checks, Alaska is utterly dependent on government spending and taxation of oil resources. Nothing inherently wrong with those policies, but in Alaska — as in petroleum economies around the world — they have led to gross corruption and waste.
As for Palin, she should stop pretending to be a tax-cutter and a fiscal conservative. She’s a tax-and-spend, big government mama whose record in government is a complete repudiation of conservative principles. If they still had any principles, that is.
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