Correction and update: I'm recycling this post through the rotation.
Kate O'Beirne, President of the National Review Institute, emailed requesting a correction. I had wrongly claimed that Jim Geraghty at NRO was compensated by NRI's tax exempt dollars. That is incorrect and was sloppy of me. The post has been corrected below.
Additionally, in response to a follow up question, it seems NRO as a website does, as I imagine many do, avail itself of content from think tanks and such which do rely upon tax exempt donations to compensate employees, or fellows, to generate said content. Blogs also use said content for commentary, or postings, in part - so it isn't like there's some one bad actor in this whole thing. But I would argue that, as tax exemptions of one sort, or another, go toward producing some part of the media many of us, including NRO and, I imagine the Daily Caller, use for overall value - the logical position for NRO in this case would seem to me to have been to defend Sarah Palin as a good conservative on the issue in Alaska, not to mostly just pile on the Daily Caller's latest traffic troll of a post invoking Palin's name. Additionally, as tax exemptions do provide, in part, some value to NRO, it might have been prudent for Jim to note that in his post under the circumstances. If it's an issue for Palin, is it not also an issue for self-professed bastion of conservatism, NRO? I did not formally request such an acknowledgement. Ultimately, my earlier ::snicker:: still stands.
Frankly, net net - if Right-side Beltway media wants to dot the i's and cross the t's to cheap shot Sarah Palin, or other serious conservatives, conservative blogs are fairly entitled to take a closer look at those letters, too.
Jim Geraghty just can't stop digging, providing even more foolishness regarding media-based tax credits, not subsidies as regards Sarah Palin and Alaska. But this raises a couple of interesting questions.
At some point (I expect and hope) Sarah Palin is going to go out before the American people as a presidential candidate and argue that government can and must do less and spend less. I just grind my teeth knowing that she’s now set up for the easy snickering response: “Yes, that way government can stick to its core duties, which is providing tax incentives to television programs.”
First to NJ, as I imagine Jimbo might hyperventilate over every new Chris Christie You Tube video. While Christie cut $2 million from NJ's tourism budget, it still spends several million dollars of taxpayer dollars a year to attract tourists. Through some tax credits, Alaska now has Ice Road Truckers, Deadliest Catch, Alaska State Troopers, Palin's reality show and other productions, which often tout Alaska as a beautiful tourist destination, while building a cottage film industry that provides jobs and income to Alaskans. They're even building a sound stage up there, so I hear. Certainly in Jim's mind, if Palin's tax credits are an issue, Christie's 5% hotel tax to fund all that government spending in NJ is an even bigger problem for him, right?
So, how would Christie defend all this spending as a conservative were he to run in 2012? I bet Jimbo will get right on providing us the answer to that troubling question. But the question below this is, perhaps, an even better one.
New Jersey funds tourism through a 5 percent hotel-occupancy tax. The state Travel Industry Association said that will generate about $9 million in the next fiscal year.
How is it Geraghty can pontificate so on the evil of tax credits when (Jim and others are not compensated by tax emempt dollars by NRO) the very place that employs him relies upon them to bring in the cash to pay him to pontificate? Maybe when he gets done grinding his teeth over that one, he'll let us know what makes him and NRO so special that they have to be subsidized by American taxpayers. I'm not so sure it's as good an investment of our hard earned dollars as it once was, now that I think about it. Are you? ::snicker::
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