A Terrible Secret

In the very short time she served as Alaska's governor, Sarah Palin's single greatest achievement was...wait for it...raising taxes!  There's a fair probability that it wasn't actually her idea - more often than not, it's the staffers who come up with these things - but she pushed hard for a program of taxing oil company profits in order to give Alaskans a share of their state's great mineral wealth.  And she did it by going out of her way to get the Dems to support her efforts.

via Joshua Green:

...she managed to solve, at least for a time, the problem that lay at the heart of Alaska's politics for a generation: how to break the oil companies' grip on the state and capture a fair share of their profits for Alaskans. Palin's major achievement was winning an oil tax that did just that and was called Alaska's Clear and Equitable Share (ACES).

Shocking, ain't it?

And here's where politics is so fucking weird that I just have to love it in all its perverse glory:  no politician is going to talk about it out in the open.  Obama can't point at it as a good example of appropriate regulation because then he has to give props to Palin for getting it done.  And Palin sure as hell can't talk about it because it directly contradicts the party-line dogma about government interference.

But the main thing is the same ol' crap that talking about taxation is considered political poison.  There's a program in place that fills the coffers of a (very red) state government, while not hindering the profitability of Big Oil, but it seems nobody anywhere else is allowed to make any serious effort at getting hugely profitable corporations off the dole, much less getting them just to pay the taxes they already owe.  This is just too weird.