Old Fashioned Political Hackery

So as not to disappoint people, I figured it was time someone contributed some decent hackery.  Some Republicans are claiming that Governor Palin’s experience isn’t any less than Obama’s.  She was after all mayor for a number of years.

As mayor of Wasilla, she had to manage a $12M budget (2007).  To put it another way, she had to manage just a little more as 2 rich men, at least as defined by McCain.  Perhaps I should offer more credit for her management of the State budget.  The budget there is a much more impressive.  She managed $7B in expenditures there.  Balancing a budget would be more impressive if Alaskans were taxed $7B.  They aren’t though.  They are directly taxed for $352M.   With licenses and fees, the total Alaskan tax burden is $800M.  Alaska receives $2B from the Feds and $4.5B from Petroleum extraction.  For comparison’s sake, let’s look at the City of Richmond, VA.  For FY06, they taxed and spent about $580M.  This prompted Karl Rove to say,

Will all due respect again to Governor Kaine, he’s been a governor for three years.  He’s been able but undistinguished. I don’t think people could really name a big, important thing that he’s done.  [Kaine] was mayor of the 105th largest city in America.  And again, with all due respect to Richmond, Virginia, it’s smaller than Chula Vista, California; Aurora, Colorado; Mesa, or Gilbert, Arizona; North Las Vegas, or Henderson, Nevada. It’s not a big town

Those 3 years as governor of Virginia, by the way, were spent managing a $37B budget, five times Alaska’s budget.  For comparison sake, that little budget item called the Iraq War is costing us $12B a month.