With all the "socialist" hoo-hah being bandied about in the waning days of the election, I would like to present the following excerpt from that liberal rag the New Yorker, in which Sarah Palin appears to endorse a form of "spreading the wealth":
"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."
The full article can be found here. I found a link to it on the Talking Points Memo website.
-EB
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
1 comment:
Comparing the sharing of the oil revenues in Alaska with Obama's plan to take money from some and redistribute it to others is either convenient or dumb. Take your pick.
In Alaska the oil companies pay for the use of the land based on production that money is the used to fund the states financial requirements. Any excess is returned to the citizens of the state as required by law.
Barack Obama's stated goal is to redistribute the wealth. He feels it is only fair to take money from the "haves" and give it to the "have nots". I believe that is welfare. I believe we have an obligation to help those less fortunate, but history has shown that just giving the poor money kills incentive to improve. Taking the money and educating or training these people allows them to become productive and support themselves.
Post a Comment