Friday, April 1, 2011

Alaska's House OKs big cut in oil profits tax

The Alaska House of Representatives voted Thursday night for a massive rollback of the oil profits tax that the lawmakers put in place four years ago.

The vote, after about three hours of debate wound down after 8:30 p.m., was 22 to 16.

The House vote was an attempt to torpedo one of the biggest legacies of Gov. Sarah Palin's time as governor. Gov. Sean Parnell supported the oil tax when he was her lieutenant governor but is now leading the effort to weaken it, saying he's since become convinced that it hurts oil company investment......

Read the full story here.

16 comments:

Right Wingnut said...

There's doubt whether this will make it out of the Senate.

Did you check out the comments after the article? EVERYONE is pissed about this. Some are calling for a recall of Parnell.

Limited Government said...

This was a ridiculous bill to begin with.

Alaskan's getting checks in the mail from oil companies. The argument was it's the peoples oil because it is an Alaskan resource.

Every state has resources. Some have tourism as a resource. To we start taxing tourists more in Florida and start sending checks to Floridians?

This was a bad policy to begin with.

Anonymous said...

This puts Palin in a tough position, IMO. One of her few legislative accomplishments is now challenged by her hand-picked successor, and being defended by Democrats. ACES was never congruent with the conservative message she now champions.

Coming on the heels of last weeks film tax credit--which she clearly benefited from, this is more reason to believe Palin will have trouble defending her record in a real campaign where it will be thoroughly examined.

-Martha

Right Wingnut said...

Martha,

You have got to be kidding me. This is a lot easier to defend than Romney's big government solution to health care. I just read the section of the Alaska Constitution that explains that the resources are to be developed to the maximum benefit of the people. The people own the resources. While most states are going broke, the people of Alaska like their $12 billion surplus, and judging from some of the commentary I've read, are not happy giving the oil companies another $8 billion of their money.

Anonymous said...

Lets see Palin tweet her way out of this one.

Ellie said...

RWN, It must be getting harder and harder to sustain your undying support of all things Palin. The 'comments' you eluded to were funny, and I doubt they were from real Alaskans.

Anonymous said...

Wait just a minute! We've been told incessantly that Palin saved Alaska by resigning. The lynch pin of Palin's redemption of Alaska was that she left the state to Parnell. Now he is pushing legislation that is killing Palin's greatest accomplishment and is pissing off all the conservatives in Alaska? How did that resignation help? And won't the lost revenues from this new legislation be many times larger than the costs that the State was paying to defend Palin from all those spurious law suits?

Anonymous said...

"RWN, It must be getting harder and harder to sustain your undying support of all things Palin. The 'comments' you eluded to were funny, and I doubt they were from real Alaskans."

Yes RWN, if you could only dig down and use hatred as your motivating factor, the way a certain commenter does against Palin, then you would have no problem maintaining a never ending, irrational, paranoid rant.

OhioJOE said...

"Now he is pushing legislation that is killing Palin's greatest accomplishment" This is not a great accomplishment anymore than fixing a pothole is. This is small potatos.

Anonymous said...

OJ, in order of magnitude, this is far bigger potatoes to the good citizens of Alaska than the small sum that those spurious law suits against Palin were.

BOSMAN said...

Maybe she'll say something like,

"There were certain aspects of this bill that I liked. Some that I didn't. Overall, I'm proud of that bill. I saw a problem in my state and I tried to fix it."

Oh wait, her supporters would never buy that.

Anonymous said...

I think this shows an overall problem that is inherent with all levels of government bureaucracies...it involves the constant need to justify their own existence. It reminds me of building codes in America and how they constantly change back and forth and sideways and then back again...not because the new codes are better but because if they didn't change them, how could they justify their positions...that's how I feel about elected officials.

jerseyrepublican

Anonymous said...

So true, Jersey. I just read a story about an Oregon congresswoman who voted for a bill creating a new government position. As soon as the bill was signed, she promptly resigned her seat, and applied for the new position--she was the only applicant!, and now she makes $122,000 rather than her piddling pay as state senator. I don't know how much hand she had in promoting the bill. But please.

-Martha

Right Wingnut said...

A point of clarification...

This is not a repeal of ACES. It's just a change of the tax structure within ACES.

It doesn't sound like the Senate will take it up by the April 17th deadline anyway.

Anonymous said...

Martha, that is too funny...it was probably her legislation...if it wasn't she was the smartest person in the state legislation.

jerseyrepublican

Anonymous said...

RW - right. From the highest tax rate in the industry - 25% (and progressive, no less) down to 15%. Sounds like it was way out of whack to begin with.

Jersey good point!

-Martha