Socialist Republicans

by digby

Hendrick Herzberg’s column in the New Yorker is all about this “socialism” nonsense and he does a particularly good job of explaining Alaska’s special brand of it:

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.

But lord how they hate the government. Alaskan Republicans will be the first in line to cash the check, while telling each other how much they resent paying taxes and want the government out of their lives.

Last night, slimy Ari Fleischer was on Larry King lying as easily as he breathes (claiming, among other things, that Obama hates Israel.) And here’s what he had to say about this:

L. KING: We have a blog question for Ari Fleischer. It’s from Dawn, “How does Sarah Palin’s policy in Alaska of taxing the oil companies and distributing $3,269 to each citizen differ from distributing the wealth?”

FLEISCHER: Well, that’s because there is no state income tax in Alaska. Nobody has to pay because Alaska has such an abundance of natural resources. The state actually gets the royalties and passes it back to its citizens.

I wish that was the case for everybody in every state. That would be a real big growing private enterprise. I’d have no problem with that.

Golly, that sure sound like some sort of redistributional scheme to me, but what do I know? (And here I thought I heard McCain and Palin railing against corporate taxes …)

So, how does Palin explain it? Here’s Hertzberg again:

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.”

Oh fergawdsake…

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