Alaska By Way Of Bemidji

Does Sarah Palin have a Minnesota connection? Because she sure sounds like a Minnesotan, especially in her tendency to elongate her vowels. Tina Fey has fun with her accent in this Saturday Night Live sketch, making her sound like a character from Fargo.

I also had a chance to watch clips from her interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson. She had this to say about the issue of entitlements:

GIBSON: So you’d take military off the table, the veterans’ benefits. That’s 20 percent of the budget. … Do you talk about entitlement reform? Is there money you can save in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid?

PALIN: I am sure that there are efficiencies that are going to be found in all of these agencies. I’m confident in that.

GIBSON: The agencies are not involved in entitlements. Basically, discretionary spending is 18 percent of the budget.

PALIN: We have certainly seen excess in agencies, though, and in — when bureaucrats, when bureaucracy just gets kind of comfortable, going with the status-quo and not being challenged to find efficiencies and spend other people’s money wisely … then that’s where we get into the situation that we are into today, and that is a tremendous growth of government, a huge debt, trillions of dollars of debt that we’re passing on to my kids and your kids and your grandkids … It’s unacceptable.

Entitlement programs are probably one of the country’s thorniest economic issues and I don’t expect any politician to deliver a fully detailed response while in campaign mode. But Palin seems to think that the costs related to Social Security and other entitlements can be reduced by cutting some dead weight from bureaucratic agencies.

Let’s say you owe your credit card company an obscene amount of money, like $100,000. You need to cut expenses, but the only thing you do is drop your gym membership. That’s essentially what Palin is proposing. It’s not a serious answer.

McCain has already admitted that economics isn’t his strong suit. Evidently, it isn’t Palin’s, either.