Witchy Woman

"For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama "Barack the
Wealth Spreader," seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is,
at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an
Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it
imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds
finance the government's activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual
check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has
been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to
this year's check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before
she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip
Gourevitch, of this magazine—that "we're set up, unlike other states in the
union, where it's collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the
wealth when the development of these resources occurs." Perhaps there is some
meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it
("collectively," no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of
Karl the Marxist."