Each Alaskan gets a "welfare" check each year just for being a citizen of Alaska. The whole Palin family collects a virtual bounty among them.In 2008 the amount of the payment to every man, woman and child was $3269.00. That's just for being a citizen of Alaska! Sarah Palin has five children so together with husband Todd, this made the Palin family eligible for a socialist welfare check of $22,883.00 just for residing in Alaska! Yes, friends socialism is alive and well in the People's Republic of Alaska. Does the Palin family refuse their yearly check because they hate socialism? I DON'T THINK SO. And Alaska has no state income or sales tax. Alaska's Permanent Fund dispenses the welfare checks each year to each Alaskan.
Yes, Sarah Palin is one of the biggest hypocrites on the planet because, as she decries socialism, she and her family are wallowing in welfare checks from Alaska's Permanent Fund which is similar to a Sovereign Wealth Fund. Sovereign Wealth Funds have been used by socialist governments for years to accumulate capital which is then redistributed to citizens as old age pensions and other forms of socialist welfare. In addition to Alaska's Permanent Fund the state has been receiving a huge amount of Federal pork. This is from an article in the Economist in 2006 entitled "America's Welfare State":
NEVER let anyone tell you there is nothing to do in Alaska during those long, dark winters. When the snow is deep, you can jump off the roof of your house into a drift. “It's like landing in a cloud,” says David Pine, a local student. You can go cross-country skiing on a floodlit trail around Anchorage—which becomes a cycle path in the summer. Alaskan licence-plates may growl that this is the “The Last Frontier”, but urban areas—where four-fifths of Alaskans live—are amply stocked with espresso bars, broadband connections and all the comforts of modernity. Alaskans are, on average, slightly richer than Americans who live in the “lower 48” states. Yet they are wrapped in a thick mink coat of subsidies.
Federal spending supports a third of all Alaskan jobs, according to the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska in Anchorage. Alaska's representatives in Washington, DC have a hard-earned reputation for piping federal dollars back home. A proposed $229m “Bridge to Nowhere”, connecting the town of Ketchikan to an airport on an island with a population of 50, is the most notorious boondoggle. But the state is paved with pork—from its half-empty high-speed ferries to the $500,000 that the federally-funded Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board gave to Alaska Airlines to paint a giant king salmon on one of its aeroplanes. Citizens Against Government Waste, a watchdog, calculates that Alaska guzzles more pork per head than any other state.
Why is Washington so generous to Alaskans? It is not as if they have no other source of cash. Alaska's oil wells allow the state to function without levying an income tax. And the interest from a $34 billion “Permanent Fund”, in which past oil receipts are stashed, gives every Alaskan man, woman and child an annual handout, expected to be about $1,000 this year.
Yes, Alaskans hate socialism except when it comes to their yearly welfare checks from the government. Sarah Palin as Governor didn't speak out against socialism insofar as Alaskans' checks from the Permanent Fund were concerned. She had ample opportunity. Why not campaign against the dispersal of these checks because they are SOCIALISTIC? But Palin has no problem taking government handouts for herself and her family.
This is from "Sarah Palin: The Welfare Queen from Wasilla":
We all know by now that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin hates socialism. Unless it's socialism for her family.
Palin, who loves painting herself as a self-reliant woman who likes to say, "Thanks, but no thanks" to unnecessary government spending, is always on the lookout for a freebie, even if it means playing it fast and loose with the law. While she ridicules Sen. Barack Obama's plan to "spread the wealth" to people who actually need it, Palin is seeking more of the socialism for the wealthy pioneered by President George W. Bush. In fact, the motto of the GOP since Ronald Reagan has been "spread more wealth to the financially avaricious rich by pickpocketing the working class."
New reports of Palin's misspending government funds for personal financial benefit emerged from an Associated Press investigation this week. Palin charged taxpayers over $20,000 to pay for her daughters to travel with her to events to which they were not invited, including 64 one-way and 12 round-trip tickets, as well as the girls' own expensive hotel rooms. In all, previous reports have estimated Palin charged taxpayers more than $43,000 in travel expenses for family members.
If that weren't enough, it seems Palin lied on official reimbursement forms, saying the girls were invited when, according to organizers of the events, they were not. But it doesn't stop there. Apparently, after she was tapped as Sen. John McCain's running mate, Palin went back and amended the expense reports with language to make the travel sound like official business, as is necessary for reimbursement under Alaska state law. So on top of being a freeloader at taxpayer expense, she altered financial documents to misrepresent unjustified personal expenses paid for by "average Joes."
If this rip-off occurred just once, one might be able to write it off as a lapse in judgment. Unfortunately for Palin, it comes on the heels of reports of other questionable "write offs," adding up to what appears to be a pattern of abuse. In short, we are learning that Palin is not the self-reliant opponent of government spending that she claims to be. She's more like the welfare queen from Wasilla.
The state is already looking into the possibility of the impropriety in $17,000 of Palin's claim for per diem pay. The money was apparently paid to her for "travel expenses" incurred on nights she spent at her home in Wasilla, AK. The money is supposed to be used for when an official travels on state business, not for a commute from an Anchorage office to a home in Wasilla. Is it part of "the real America" to steal from the taxpayer? Palin receives a governor's salary, from which she is expected to pay -- like any average small town American -- her home expenses. But she chose to have taxpayers pick up the tab.
It's important to note that Palin is not continuing any Alaskan gubernatorial tradition of defrauding taxpayers. The only Alaska governor to have school-age children while serving in recent memory is Tony Knowles, Democratic governor of the state from 1994 to 2002. Knowles told the AP he had never charged the state for his children's travel. Knowles also said that he prohibited Alaskan commissioners from charging per diem allowances when staying at home, no matter where their home was located.
One Alaskan tradition exhibiting tendencies of socialism is the oil and gas rebate checks. Last year, Alaskan residents received a $1,654 check as a dividend from oil revenues in the state. Now, thanks to an initiative backed by Palin, each Alaskan (including Palin, her husband and children) will get $1,200 more to help pay for energy cost increases. Apparently the almost $10,000 the Palin family received last year wasn't enough to heat their Wasilla lakefront home.
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What's to say she won't continue in this same pattern of abuse once she's in the executive branch of the nation? Despite her populist posturing and rhetoric, it's clear she favors continuing Bush's socialism for the rich, and by extension, for herself. And the taxpayer keeps getting stuck with the bill. Palin has done very well living off of the public treasury, very well indeed.
So let freedom ring, and down with socialism. Freedom, good; socialism, bad. Except when it comes to the welfare of Sarah Palin and her family.