I read the whole thing, and it is pretty much all rhetoric.

To come close to finding the worse one without wanting to retch.

I looked on the AK OMB website, and I found several sources that show that the last Murowski budget was ~5.1 billion (here’s one of them, look on page 40 of the PDF that you get when you select “FY07 Operating Appropriation Bill” under “Operating Budget”), and that the 2009 budget was ~7 billion (here’s the link, look on page 70). Moreover, real spending (as a result of off budget and supplemental spending) soared in AK (here’s a link to an AK gov report that shows this in graph form on page xi [page 19 out of 298]).

I’ll look at the IN stuff later, but for now, put me down as befuddled concerning your source.

not per-capita growth. Palin can’t be legitimately blamed for the spending levied by her predecessors, so azaeroprof’s comparison is valid. (Of course, it makes you wonder why with such large pro-capita expenditure there needed to be any increases, but I’ll grant that AK is a unique state.)

just VERY in over his head and (for him) the unfortunate “last straw” of 50 years of progressive/RINO governance. Carter actually presided over three very good things: airline deregulation, trucking deregulation, and micro-brewing deregulation. He also very weakly supported Paul Volcker, though Reagan’s strong support of Volcker’s anti-inflation efforts was more significant. Probably the worst things he did had to do with energy and foreign policy: he highly regulated nuclear power plants, and obviously his presiding over the gas crisis was just terrible. His general fecklessness and pessimism did him in on foreign policy, as well: note to future Presidents, do not micromanage rescue efforts. He also had the misfortune of just being a weird and unlikeable guy in general; the comments about his daughter and foreign policy, the killer rabbit, and others can’t just be chalked up to fatigue or the campaign trail.

Carter was just the guy left holding the liberal bag. Liberals never liked him much, anyways (remember Kennedy’s challenge for the Presidential nomination): he was always that hick whose religion was too on the sleeve for their liking. His honesty concerning the effects of policy were no boon to them, either: they preferred their pols to tell them that progressive legislation would only hurt “the rich”. And hey, it gave them a convenient fall guy for the Great Society’s failures (LBJ’s fault), Kennedy’s awful handling of foreign policy (involved us in Vietnam and Bay of Pigs), and most importantly, it saved them from having to explain FDR’s New Deal and “uncle Joe”. Far easier for them to peg the blame of their policies on the short four-year term of a guy that they didn’t even like that much. Though they would have vastly preferred tarring and feathering Reagan for their errors, Carter was a good second for them. Carter was just a well-meaning idiot whose fecklessness doomed him. Obama is an idiot with vastly more dangerous ideas, and much less fecklessness (unfortunately), though he is certainly more incompetent than Carter ever was.

can be misleading. However, the fact that a ~30% increase in government expenditures has widely been levied as a knock against Palin’s governance, and that said charge hasn’t been rebutted by either the Palin or Parnell administrations, leads me to believe that there is no “reasonable explanation” at hand. Given that Palin was only in for 2 1/2 years, it seems unlikely that the expenditure spike was due to a demographics shift. I would be tempted to fail someone who presents unsourced numbers for various concerns that contradict the numbers more commonly used without explanation, especially without adjusting for inflation+demographics changes Fortunately, neither of us is so much engaging in a full academic analysis as engaging in casual extrapolation on a website, and at any rate, it is sufficient evidence to render critiques and questioning of Palin on the issue valid. (Somewhat off-topic: I wonder if there is sufficient evidence put out by state OMBs to run a regression analysis on the data and some causes of government growth? That would be interesting to see.)

I would also note that “revenue returned to the citizens” is a somewhat charitable way to characterize a redistributive program which takes money from oil producers and gives it to the general population. I won’t complain much about it because AK is unique enough to be its own special class. However, it is still a stretch to characterize it as “returning” revenue to AK citizens, in much the same way that a “tax credit” given to someone who doesn’t pay taxes is not a tax cut. Given that a large part of our critique of big government has to do with transfer payments, it is fair to include an increase in redistributive programs as “government growth”. (Of course, one can make the case that AK is so unique, that any comparison between it and other states/the federal government are useless. If so, this entire exercise is just a waste of time.)

So can other states in the continental US. AK, HI, and our territories are just really weird and tough to compare to how the Federal government works. I think that, in many ways, you’re correct: it largely depends on how much you trust the candidate in question, and I’ll confess to being somewhat risk-averse about throwing an unproven candidate into the mix (Obama-like problems, learning curve, too many unknowns, etc). I think that, at the very least, we can say that most localisms are not as dwarfing as those in AK, and that most states in the US don’t have such a unique revenue scheme (about 95% of funding for AK is provided by oil revenues and the Federal government), given that most states are funded by sales and property taxes. Then there are the Indian tribes, and the fact that the Federal government sits on a lot of valuable AK land, has a base there, bosses AK around a lot, etc.

In many ways, I think that people also miss on the area where AK can directly compare to other states and the federal government: civil liberties, regulation, and social issues. Given the spotlight on the growth of government, it is understandable that these issues have been left to the side. However, these liberties are just as important as growth of government and ensuing taxation: after all, a dollar isn’t worth much if it’s surrounded by red tape and when you’re living out your days in prison for speaking out against government. On these issues, I suspect that Palin might rate more favorably: my impression of her is not that of a “nanny stater”. The city she governed was in a region known as the “crystal meth capital of America”, and her favorable comments regarding marijuana decriminalization tells me that she is at least not averse to greater freedom. In essence, I wonder if Palin isn’t a “Denmark conservative”, to coin a term: someone not averse to large government, but who also believes that what money the government leaves you with should be used to your discretion. It would be interesting to see someone take a look at those three issues and how they fared under Palin as mayor and gov.