[wagglebee]

There are good reasons for an oil-rich state to tax oil production, but a fiscal conservative would usually use any tax increase to reduce taxes elsewhere. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I see no evidence that Palin offered any major tax cuts.

I guess this jackass missed the part where Alaska HAS NO PERSONAL INCOME TAX OR STATE SALES TAX.

It's impossible to cut taxes that don't exist!

[wideawake]

An excellent point: the vast majority of taxes paid by Alaskans are in the form of municipal property taxes which the governor has no direct control over.

Alaska has no income tax and no sales tax - so there aren't many taxes over which the governor has direct control - yet she managed to find taxes to cut, anyway.

Meanwhile on the oil front, the $1.5B in severance tax increases are an estimate - not a hard number. What is a hard number is the $500M in subsidies the state of Alaska is offering oil companies in the form of rebates to do more exploration.

So the net new tax on the oil industry is potentially as high as $1B or as low as $0, depending on the interplay of market forces.

Perhaps this is why The Tax Foundation has named Alaska the fourth-friendliest state in the union to businesses.