Palin, Earmarks, and the "Bridge to Nowhere."

The vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, touted as a "reformer" by the Republican party, does not deserve the reputation that John McCain has enjoyed as an opponent of congressional pork. That much most people already know (I hope). Being a "numbers" person, I decided to investigate exactly how much pork is associated with Palin. It's a lot.

According to this associated press article, Alaska is currently the largest recipient of earmarks per person at $295. The average amount per person for all states is $34 per person. That means that Alaska's pork per resident is over 8 times the national average of all states.

However, Alaska's amount of pork has been reduced under Palin's governance. Her pork requests are still higher than any other state's, though.

Far more provocative is the story of Palin's tenure as mayor. While mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a law firm to secure earmarks for the town at a cost of $24,000 to taxpayers, an amount that later increased to $36,000. This firm secured $27,000,000 in congressional pork for Wasilla, a town of about 7,000 residents. (This data was provided by the organization Taxpayers for Common Sense.)

This totals to more than $3,800 per person, or over 113 times the national average for all states per capita.

(Some of you might be wondering at this point: how much did Barack Obama secure in earmarks for the state of Illinois during his term as senator? It was $311,000,000, about $24 per resident. This is about 70% of the national average, or about 0.7 times the national average.)

Palin supported the "Bridge to Nowhere," a bridge costing almost $400 million, from the mainland of Alaska to a small island with an airport and fewer than 100 residents, during her gubernatorial race. Palin made campaign stops on the island and wore a t-shirt that said "Nowhere, Alaska," with the island's zip code. While governor, she buckled in the face of national public opinion, and referred to "the inaccurate portrayal of the projects here" as the reason for that opinion. She later spent the funding secured for the bridge on roads.

John McCain has been quoted as criticizing pet bridge projects in 2007, pointing to a collapsed bridge in MN that resulted in 13 deaths. He connected this to the Alaskan bridge project, stating "Maybe the 200,000 people who cross that bridge every day would have been safer than spending $233 million of your tax dollars on a bridge in Alaska to an island with 50 people on it."

One has to wonder why McCain selected Palin as his running mate. She certainly does not seem to share his values--that is, unless it is politically expedient to do so.

(Sources: "'Bridge to Nowhere' Abandoned," "Palin's Pork Requests Confound Reformer Image," both Associated Press.)