TheHiddenTrack wrote:pk500 wrote:
but I definitely will watch Palin's because I want to learn more about her positions and see if her rhetorical skills can match those of Biden.
Take care,
PK
For a head start, 2006 debate:
http://palintology.com/2006/08/08/decis ... und-table/
I haven't had time to watch much of it yet.
I hadn't seen that. Thanks for the link. My wife is going to kill me if I spend any more of my Labor Day researching the intricacies of recent Alaska state government policy LOL
Man, Murkowski must've been hating life in that campaign. Two of his own appointees coming right after his head He's a blustery, imperious old dinosaur, so at least Biden won't seem totally foreign to her.
Edit:
OK, at the risk of divorce I watched the rest. It's interesting but not terribly illuminating vis a vis Palin. It's an excellent educational tool for anyone interested in the relatviely unique landscape of Alaskan budgetary politics
Palin clearly benefitted from the fact that Murkowski and Murkowski Lite (TM) were at each like lions fighting over a steak.
My favorite part was after they were screaming like juveniles and Palin reprimanded them by saying the voters deserve a higher standard of discourse...and they agreed! LOL
On a related note, I'm seeing some of the NetRoots and other True Believers allege that Palin is on board with Obama's ridiculous Windfall Profits tax. There's an excellent discussion of this over at Beldarblog, but here's the most relevent portion:
What the article you linked to is discussing is a severance tax. State severance taxes charged on production of oil and gas and minerals are common throughout the United States. Also sometimes called "production taxes," they're charged by the state from beneath whose land valuable resources are extracted, and they're designed not to punish the energy companies, but to recompense the state for its loss of a non-replaceable resource — one that must be quantified and taxed upon removal, if it is ever to be taxed at all. Severance taxes are therefore based on production from within the state, not on profits earned by the company extracting that production — even though the production may be measured in, and the tax assessed upon, the market value or gross revenues (as measured in dollars) received for that production, rather than an "in kind" delivery to the state in barrels or cubic feet as such. See, e.g., Tex. Tax Code §§ 201.051 & 202.051 (Texas production taxes on gas and oil respectively).
Indeed, I once represented Conoco in a Houston lawsuit against Mobil over how to allocate the severance tax they jointly owed based on jointly owned oil and gas leases in Idaho. There's actually a fair amount of competing case-law from different states over whether severance taxes are more properly characterized as "property taxes" or "income taxes" — if for some reason (e.g., interpreting a sloppy contract) you have to put them into one of those two categories or the other. But in any event, severance taxes are in no way premised on the notion that energy companies are making unconscionable or excessive profits.
Alaska's previous version of its severance tax had been negotiated behind closed doors by defeated Gov. Frank Murkowski, a few top state legislators (some of whom are now in prison for corruption), and energy lobbyists. One of the campaign planks upon which Gov. Palin ran for office was replacing that tax with one negotiated in the open with full transparency; and the resulting tax was, indeed, slightly more favorable to the State of Alaska. The article you linked tells some of this anti-corruption history on the part of Gov. Palin. But just because the newspaper headline writers and some of the people the article quoted used the word "windfall," don't be fooled into thinking that the tax in question is the same thing Barack Obama and the Democrats are now promoting at a national level.
Rather, what Obama and the Dems are promoting is nothing less than selective government confiscation of the property of a particular industry, on the theory that such industry's profits are "excessive." That's a repugnant rabble-rousing scheme, populism turned into class warfare and carried to its excessive worst. It's completely unjustifiable either morally or economically. Its short-term victims are going to be energy-company shareholders (which include huge numbers of pension plans in which ordinary Americans have investments), but its long-term victims will be all Americans (who will suffer as our own energy companies are put at an increasing competitive disadvantage compared to others in the world, and whose national security interests will be further harmed as we become even more dependent on foreign sources of fossil-fuel energy).
