PALIN'S NOT ALL BAD

I wrote a little about this before and here's some more info. I don't know how much she had to do with drafting this tax bill but she did sign it, so I have to give her some credit for good fiscal sense.

Palin and Obama Have Pushed Similar Plans to Raise Oil Taxes
By Richard Rubin, CQ Staff
CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS – ENERGY
Sept. 4, 2008 – 12:29 a.m

...the tax functions exactly like a windfall profits tax, said Jerry Burnett, acting deputy commissioner of the Alaska Department of Revenue. As the price of oil goes up, oil company profits rise. And as profits rise, so does the tax rate on oil production.

When prices are $80 a barrel, the tax rate is roughly 37 percent, and the state’s budget runs a slight surplus. When oil hits $120 a barrel, the tax rate reaches about 50 percent of profits, and the state collects about twice what it spends, Burnett said. For fiscal year 2008, the state projects that the tax increase Palin pushed will generate an extra $2 billion for the state.

That progressivity came mostly from the legislature, said Richard Fineberg, a consultant who said he worked for the Palin administration on the issue. Although she did take on the oil industry and ultimately signed the bill, Palin seemed detached from many of the details, he said.

Naturally, one of McCain's flunkies tries to spin this away:

“The key difference between what the governor did and what Senator Obama is proposing is, the governor did not impose a windfall profits tax,” Holtz-Eakin said during a lunch with reporters this week. “It’s a permanent change. It’s not an opportunistic grab for ‘windfall profits’ and I think that’s a fundamental difference in the approach. She was trying to set the state up for both good and bad times in the oil industry and that’s very sensible.”