In 2000, Sarah Palin, as mayor of the Alaskan town of Wasilla, hired a Washington lobbyist to secure federal earmarks for her community.

This is not totally atypical in her state. Alaska’s government receives more money per capita in federal earmark money than any other state, despite being the only state in the union with no income tax and no sales tax. They fund their government primarily with petroleum money, and recently distributed oil profits to its citizens in the form of rebate checks.

But even in her heavily earmarked state, Sarah Palin was the earmark queen.

From 2000 to 2003, she secured over $27 million in earmarks, averaging $6.7 million in federal money every year for her town of about 6,700 people.

An analysis of the databases of Taxpayers for Common Sense by Center for American Progress Action Fund Senior Fellow Scott Lilly puts these numbers in perspective.

He notes the following amounts:

–$50: The amount the average state received in earmarked funds, per capita in 2008
–$506: The amount received by Alaska’s citizen per capita in 2008, represented by the Senate’s earmarker in chief, Ted Stevens, ten times the national average
–Over $1000: The annual amount received per capita in Wasilla between 2000 and 2003, twice the 2008 Alaska state average

Some of these earmarks drew the scorn of Senator John McCain. The LA Time reports that, “three times in recent years, McCain’s catalogs of ‘objectionable’ spending have included earmarks for this small Alaska town, requested by its mayor at the time — Sarah Palin.”

As Scott Lilly writes, “Palin has advertised herself as a reformer and a skeptic of earmarking while maneuvering to become the earmark queen of the earmark state.”

Digg It!

Last night at the Republican National Convention, former Senator Fred Thompson gave a crack at economic analogies to attack progressives and defend John McCain’s $300 billion tax cut for corporations and the wealthy. He said:

THOMPSON: They tell you they are not going to tax your family. No, they’re just going to tax “businesses”! So unless you buy something from a “business”, like groceries or clothes or gasoline … or unless you get a paycheck from a big or a small “business”, don’t worry … it’s not going to affect you. They say they are not going to take any water out of your side of the bucket, just the “other” side of the bucket!

Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong. There are some gaping holes in Fred Thompson’s folksy but flawed “bucket” analogy.

–We’re not all in the same bucket: Over the last eight years, rising worker productivity has fueled huge corporate profits and relative economic growth. But this economic growth (the “water” in Thompson’s bucket) didn’t trickle down to American families: real wages have stagnated, rapidly eroded by inflation (the spiraling cost of the “gasoline, clothes and groceries” that Thompson mentions).

–McCain’s tax cuts won’t trickle down: McCain’s $300 billion tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy give almost half their value to the top 1% of all taxpayers. The centerpiece of the program, a $175 billion tax cut for corporations won’t create new or better jobs. As the CBO found in a recent report: “increasing the after-tax income of businesses typically does not create an incentive for them to spend more on labor or to produce more.” In other words: no new jobs, no lower prices, just bigger corporate profits.

–McCain borrows water from our kids: John McCain’s massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy will be paid for by either deep and draconian cuts to popular government programs, or, more likely, through borrowing. As the Tax Policy Center says, “the positive effects of lower tax rates will be offset by the costs of increased government debt…[which] eventually translates into higher interest rates, which discourage business investment and consumers’ demand for homes and such durable goods as automobiles, or into increased debt owed to foreigners, which mortgages the nation’s long-term economic future.”

There are some holes in your bucket, dear Freddy.

Digg It!

The campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is presenting his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK), as a reformer, fiscal conservative, and “tough minded budget cutter.” Other conservatives have latched onto this image – Phyllis Schlafly calls Palin “the total package” with “fiscal conservative credentials.”

Palin embraces the title, labeling herself a “hard-core fiscal conservative,” whose “agenda was to stop wasteful spending.

However, as mayor of Wasilla, AK, Palin “was not always the fiscal watchdog she has since boasted of being.”

During her term in office, Palin cut property taxes and other small taxes on business. But as the Anchorage Daily News points out, “She wasn’t doing this by shrinking government.” During her tenure, the budget of Wasilla (population 5,469 in 2000) “apart from capital projects and debt, rose from $3.9 million in fiscal 1996 to $5.8 million.”

Palin also successfully pushed through a sales tax increase in Wasilla, which went to fund a $15 million sports complex. However, a land dispute over the sight of the complex led to “years of legal wrangling” and cost Wasilla almost $1.7 million, “a lot more than the roughly $125,000 the city would have paid in 1998 if it had closed a deal to buy the property outright.” Wasilla is still facing budget shortfalls from the case today.

When Palin left office in 2002, Wasilla had “racked up nearly $20 million in long-term debt,” or roughly $3,000 of debt per resident.

But Palin’s approach actually brings her in line with McCain, whose own “massive tax cuts” “would recklessly exacerbate the fiscal irresponsibility of the Bush Administration” and cause the largest deficit in 25 years.

Digg It!

Our guest blogger is Brian Levine, a Senior Policy Adviser at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Tonight in Minneapolis, Carly Fiorina will take the stage to talk about the economy. Pay close attention because John McCain listens to Fiorina -he even defers to her on economic questions at town hall meetings. He once cracked, “she’s a lot smarter than I am,” as he asked her to field a query on the subprime mortgage crisis.

So what can we learn from Carly Fiorina about McCain’s economic worldview? American companies can indefinitely avoid paying corporate taxes by leaving their profits overseas. As CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Fiorina exploited this loophole. According to the Washington Post, HP held more than $14 billion in profits overseas in 2004, reducing its effective tax rate from 35 percent to 12 percent. Fiorina also defended offshoring, which she called “right-shoring,” and she once declared “there is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore.”

McCain and Fiorina are in lockstep on this issue. He is against eliminating the tax incentives for companies to keep profits overseas instead of reinvesting them in the American economy. McCain even voted against an amendment to require companies to pay taxes on money they earn from foreign-made products sold in the U.S. Not only does McCain oppose closing the loophole, he is proposing massive new corporate tax cuts that won’t help American workers.

But there does seem to be one point of disagreement between McCain and Fiorina. When Fiorina was recently asked what her candidate would bring to the economy that President Bush has not, she replied: “A focus on job creation.” Senator McCain must not agree that Bush has failed to focus on job creation because he famously declared that we have made great economic progress over the last eight years and he has made the perpetuation of Bush’s failed policies a key part of his “Jobs for America” plan.

Our guest blogger is Brian Levine, a Senior Policy Adviser at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Mitt Romney is part of tonight’s “prosperity” program at the Republican National Convention. If you got a nickel every time a pundit said Mitt Romney was strong on economic issues over the past 18 months, you might be as rich as Mitt himself by now. This bit of conventional wisdom is worth challenging.

Economists Andrew Sum and Joseph McLaughlin from Northeastern University in Boston examined the Romney era and found “a weak comparative economic performance of the state over the Romney years, one of the worst in the country.” Specifically, Sum and McLaughlin discovered that:

- Formal payroll employment in Massachusetts in 2006 was 0.5 percent below its average level in 2002, the year before Romney took office. Under Romney’s leadership, Massachusetts ranked third lowest in the nation on this job generation measure.

- Manufacturing payroll employment in Massachusetts declined by more than 14 percent during the Romney era, the third worst record in the country.

- While the number of employed people over age 16 in the United States rose by nearly 8 million during the Romney years, Massachusetts was the only state in the union that failed to post any gain in its pool of employed residents.

- Between 2002 and 2006, the median real (inflation adjusted) weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers in Massachusetts are estimated to have fallen by $10 or nearly 2 percent.

Romney was also a job-killer in the private sector. As Politico reported in January, workers’ jobs took a backseat to corporate profits during Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital:

In 1992, the firm acquired American Pad & Paper. By 1999, the year Romney left Bain, two American plants were closed, 385 jobs had been cut and the company was $392 million in debt. The next year, Ampad was forced into bankruptcy.

Bain Capital and Goldman Sachs bought Dade International for about $450 million in 1994. The firm quickly fired or relocated at least 900 workers. Over the next several years, it sunk increasingly into debt and laid off 1,000 workers. In 2002 – after Romney had left Bain – it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

A 1997 buyout of LIVE Entertainment for $150 million resulted in 40 layoffs, roughly one in four of the company’s 166 workers.

Romney doesn’t bring any fresh ideas to the table. Like McCain, he believes that continuing George Bush’s failed policies is the best way to grow our economy and create jobs. So why exactly is Mitt Romney the GOP’s go-to-guy on the economy?

Digg It!

Our guest blogger is Winnie Stachelberg, Senior Vice President for External Affairs at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

A lot has changed since 2004.

That year, as political director at the Human Rights Campaign, I was in the midst of a long campaign against the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA), which would ban marriage between same-sex couples. In that fight, I knew that I could count on Senator John McCain (R-AZ) to lead Republicans away from the radical religious right. We had different reasons for our opposition — he was maintaining federalism; we were working toward equality — but together we successfully protected the Constitution from this dangerous amendment.

Later that year, Log Cabin Republicans, the LGBT wing of the Republican Party, refused to endorse President Bush for reelection, citing his promotion of the FMA.

But now it’s 2008.

On Monday, McCain and his party signed on to a platform that devotes an entire section to the need for an FMA that “fully protects marriage as a union between a man and a woman, so that judges cannot make other arrangements equivalent to it.” Instead of allowing Ellen and other gay and lesbian Americans protection for their families, McCain bowed to pressure from the radical right-wing voices in his party.

And yesterday the Log Cabin Republicans, who stood strong against President Bush and the FMA, chose to endorse John McCain for President.

I was proud to work with Senator McCain in 2004 to defeat the FMA. But in 2008, no matter what the Log Cabin Republicans say, Senator McCain does not support the rights of gay Americans.