Scott Lilly, former top staffer of the House Appropriations Committee, puts her record on earmarks in this context:
Fiscal year 2008 was the first year for which there was a complete listing of all earmarks contained in all appropriation bills. That information was loaded into several databases, including the one developed by Taxpayers for Common Sense. According to that data, the average state got about $50 per person in earmarked funds in 2008. Alaska, represented by Ted Stevens, the Senate’s earmarker-in-chief, got $506 per person—about 10 times the national average. Wasilla between 2000 and 2003 was getting well over $1,000 per person—twice the Alaska state average in 2008.