Sarah Palin's Wasilla; High Crime, Big Budgets, A Sales Tax & Wal-Mart

While the McCain-Palin Campaign continues to misrepresent Barack Obama's $1000 middle class tax cut proposal by falsely claiming that he will raise taxes on those earning less than $250,000 a year, it was actually Sarah Palin who ran on a sales tax platform for her town of Wasilla while running for city council.

Palin supported a 2% city sales tax which hit every citizen including children anytime they purchased anything including candy or toys. And Palin grew the city budget from $4 million to $6 million for a town of just over 9,000 persons. When Palin planned to run for governor, she lowered the city sales tax to 0.5%. Since the state of Alaska does not levy a sales tax, Palin's city sales tax was the only one of it's type in the state.

Palin also lured low wage big box stores like Wal-Mart to the town. Generally these big box low wage stores tend destroy many small businesses and replace many higher wage jobs with minimum wage jobs. Because of the high cost of living, the average wage in Alaska state is $832. However in Palin's Wasilla wages lagged far behind at just $652, or around 25% less than the state average. How many families could survive with a 25% wage cut?

Another serious area of Palin failure as mayor was a crime rate in Wasilla nearly three times the statewide average rate.

Under Palin crime was high, as were taxes, and Wal-Mart helped to make wages about 25% below the statewide average. On paper it sure doesn't look very attractive at all. This is some record of achievement to run on? Is this how Palin would run the U.S. if she became president. The thought is chilling and the facts sobering.