What? She wasn't a fiscal conservative? You mean like the massive pork that was ten times the rate of people from Illinois and the highest in the country? Who would have guessed? And here I thought a fiscal conservative would have cut taxes and spending, but no, that was not what Palin did.
Indeed, in her 20 months in office, Palin's toughest financial decisions involved dickering with the Legislature on creative ways to spend and salt away the billions of dollars in oil revenues pouring into the state treasury.Windfall oil profit taxes, just like Obama suggested and the McCain and the GOP rejected. What a phony baloney fiscal conservative, but typical. She cut spending about as much as the GOP Congress during the Bush years.
At times, Palin has been more economic populist than small-government conservative, partly because of Alaska's unique government financing system.
With no statewide income or sales tax, Alaska funds about 90 percent of the state budget from royalties and taxes on oil producers. Soaring oil prices and a higher windfall oil profits tax - an increase pushed through by Palin, now the Republican vice presidential nominee - have state coffers overflowing with petrodollars. The Alaska oil industry calculates that its annual payments to the state doubled in a single year to $10.2 billion.
