Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin has recently been criticized for her pork-barrel spending. This web-calculator helps you figure out how extreme she is. (Calculator is on the full story.)

Palin's been praised for being "against corruption" as Governor, by going after Ted Stevens and his "bridge to nowhere" pork barrel congressional earmark.  Her hypocrisy is that, when she was mayor of Wasilla, AK, she fed greedily at the porkbarrel herself!  (She also supported the bridge to nowhere.)  She got millions of dollars of congressional earmarks
for Wasilla, and she did it by hiring a firm that employed Ted Stevens' son as a lobbyist.

Now, as a politician, it's her job to bring money back from Washington for local use. The problem is, if some city takes too much, it leaves much less for others. They should get enough, and use it to pay people a good wage, but there is such a thing as "too much", and Palin got too much.

Imagine what the country would be like if more mayors were able to get as much as Palin did. Here's a calculator that does that. Pick a category of congressional pork, and a big American city, and see how much taxpayer money would be sent to that city if we allowed Palin-style overspending.

References: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.