taxes and socialism in alaska

Hendrik Hertzberg on the subject in the November 3, 2008 issue of The New Yorker - online version here.

snip

For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.

If McCain and Palin were really against socialism they would announce that Alaska, the most socialistic of all states, be required to support itself rather than redistribute oil money to its citizens to run the state and give each citizen $3,269 (that is $22.883 for the Palin family this year - not bad when you don't have state taxes either).  The rest of America is paying for this subsidy of that good Alaska life through higher energy costs.   Alaska also gets about $1.80 from the federal government for every tax dollar its citizens pay in the form of income taxes.  This and the oil rebate makes the state more socialist than the European socialist countries.

My guess is any politician or party who would try to make Alaska non-socialist would be run out of the state.  

Comments

[Jon]

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