Mayor Gatsas Goes after The “Benfit Plan One-Percenters” in Manchester

Manchester Mayor Ted Gatsas is singing a tune we like to hear and one that I have advocated for myself.  What is it?  Hidden in the Cadillac plans of public sector employees is a revenue resource that must be tapped.

Gatsas is standing up for taxpayers, and defending the spending cap, in his negotiations with the Teachers union with regard to Manchester’s School budget.

He said teachers still enjoy plans with zero deductibles, $5 co-pays and $50 charges for emergency room visits, while the police union, among others, recently made concessions to avoid layoffs, shifting to a plan with higher co-pays, deductibles and $150 per emergency room visit.

“With the $3 million in savings, we hired more police officers,” Gatsas said.

So why can’t the teachers do the same thing?  It’s a great question.

There are literally millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars state wide, tied up in paying for the kind of health care benefits and retirement plans that most private sector employees only dream about–the very people funding the plans of the benefit-one-percenters.   And in his particular case, Mayor Gatsas is only looking for Manchester teachers to go where the other Manchester Union employees already have, so that the city can free up 4.4 million…for education.

(If it’s really about the kids….?)

That kind of agreement would be but one small step for benefit equality, though it still would not bring those public employees anywhere near parity with their private sector counterparts.  We’d need the contract negotiation equivalent of hydraulic fracturing to get even close, but you have to start somewhere.

And this is a well that must be tapped, and not just in Manchester.  Town, county, and state wide elected officials have to go after these plans in every contract moving forward, and they have to ask these folks to make that choice.   They can choose to lean toward benefits parity with the people who pay for those benefits for them, or they can explain why we have to cut cops, fire-fighters, teachers, or services because the public employees refused.

Grow-government-first politicians, at every level, who think that they can keep milking taxpayers while many public employees continue to enjoy their One-Precenter benefits package’s, are only setting everyone up for failure.  The pension deficit is no joke.  The economy is no joke.  The kinds of co-pays and retirement plan funding that many have enjoyed in the past is a sick joke—and it is unsustainable.

But if everyone in the public sector accepted that over the next few years they will need take more fiscal responsibility for their own retirement, and accept that they must pay plan rates and co-pays more in line with the rest of us, and that may include paying for a majority if not all of their own future 401K and pension plan payments from their own pockets, this would free up hundreds of  millions of dollars annually, across the state, for all of those other things they also claim cannot be left unfunded.

So put your money where your mouth is.  Admit that you’ve had a sweet deal.  Accept that people who are paying your way can’t pay your way, their own way, and sustain the growing cost of existing government, along with millions more annually in more of it.  Yes, you will feel the pinch, but that ride has to end.  It is unsustainable in any economy–it is nearly criminal in this one.

And it has to end or you may find that if you still even have a job when it comes time to retire, there is nothing there because there never really was.

H/T Union Leader

by Steve MacDonald . cross posted at GraniteGrok

Is the NH Economy So Good That We Can Afford To Grow State Government by 16%?

I know what you were thinking while you were paying almost four dollars a gallon for gas, or looking at your utility or cable bill, or thinking about how much more it costs to do the grocery shopping these days.  You were thinking, “Hey, times are so good, lets grow the size of the state government by 16%!”

You must have said that because someone in Concord seems to think they heard you say it.

What?  You weren’t thinking that?  Well you’d best get in touch with your legislator and tell them because the Democrat majority House is preparing to vote on a budget that will make your state government cost you 16% more.

The Hassan/House Democrat budget also includes $600 million dollars in new spendingthat was not even in the original budget–which itself spent revenues from streams that do not even exist.

I suppose that might explain why the Democrats have already gotten back to the business of cramming and downshifting costs on towns, as Susan observed just a few hours ago here.  That 16% growth in the cost of government has to get paid for somehow.

Of course, we could suggest to the legislators in Concord that the economy has not grown 16%–if at all. That if the people of New Hampshire were even making more now than they were last year or the year before, they’d need that money for themselves just to manage the skyrocketing costs of running their own households at level funding.    Costs which more than a half-decade of Democrat rule in DC have failed to address, and may (arguably) have made worse.

We can ask, but they don’t give a damn.  They really don’t.  How could they?  Only someone who is completely disconnected from reality would vote to take 16% more from the citizens of their state in almost any economy; New Hampshire Democrats are looking to take 16% more in this one.

And yes, I’m going to say I told you so.  I told you that New Hampshire Democrat party leadership was and is committed to government-first growth.  The expansion of the state,  paid for by the working families and the business owners who employ us, is their first priority.

And here it is.  In a stumbling economy with rising unemployment, rising prices, and stagnating wages, the Majority Democrat House needs that 16% so they can make government bigger.  They added 600 million more in spending and buried it inside the budget.  And after years of denying all the downshifting of costs they voted for while trying to hide their last tilt at the levers of fiscal power, and all the blaming of Republicans for doing it, their first budget takes up right where they left off–cramming costs down on cities or towns so they can grow state government. 

H/T AFPNH

Note: Democrats say yes!  The House Passed the budget on a partsian line vote. 

You are reading  Is the NH Economy So Good That We Can Afford To Grow State Government by 16%?   by  Steve Mac Donald originally posted at GraniteGrok.com (Home)

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Ruth Gulick – A Belknap County Democrat Morality Tale

Democrats say the darnedest things.  Take NH House Rep Ruth Gulick (D- Aesop’s Fables), whom Skip from GraniteGrok recorded at a recent Belknap county budget meeting.  Ruth shared a little morality tale with those present, with regard to budgets and responsibility.

In Ruth’s version the county taxpayers have a moral responsibility to the employees whom they pay.  That responsibility includes ensuring that the employees continue to enjoy the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed, regardless of any other circumstances.  Put simply; she objects to taxpayers (or any of their elected representatives) asking those employees to pay more for their own benefits.

Not a surprise coming from a Democrat, until you hear how she went about it.

To make that point, as Skip observed here, she compares paying for county employee benefits to how she is “…a superb parent because I give them an allowance and I pay for their food and clothes.”

So in Ruth’s analogy, as a” mother,” we have an obligation we are not permitted to shrug regardless, presumably, of how painful that might become.

We also have to assume, for her analogy to have any relevance at all to the debate at hand,  that the money for the food, clothing, and allowance Ruth gives her own children did not actually come from Ruth.  She will have had to go door to door and extracted it from her neighbors, using the looming authority of the law and the backing of the power of the police state, to guarantee her “superbness” as a parent.  And this shall have occurred without regard to the neighbors rights or needs, their right to their own  labor and property, or whether Ruth’s “shakedown” could in any way affect their own ability to be as superb a parent as Ruth.

Such is the nature of the Left’s morality.

Taken to its extreme, Ruth’s ”children” (or government employees) have more rights than anyone else, including Ruth, so it would be acceptable for them to cannibalize her should the need eventually arise, to ensure that they do not see any decline whatsoever to the lifestyle to which they feel they have become accustomed (see also “entitled”).   And that consumption is inevitable as the state grows larger and more demanding at the expense of those with dwindling resources with which to feed it.

And therein lies the real morality tale of Ruth ‘Aespo’ Gulick.   The needs of the state outweigh the needs of the many, even up until there are no longer any resources left among the “many” to feed and clothe them.    The state is nothing more than a fire we feed, incapable of starting itself, unable to even sustain itself without the resources of others, but entitled to demand a never-ending escalation of those resources until it has consumed them all, leaving nothing left, including itself.

Sorry, there is no happy ending to this tale.

You are reading  "Ruth Gulick – A Belknap County Democrat Morality Tale"   by  Steve Mac Donald originally posted at GraniteGrok.com (Home)

Steve has been recognized as the Americans For Prosperity Blogger of the month for December 2012

Hassan’s Budget Gamble Takes Heat From Her Left

No one should be surprised to see Maggie Hassan's budget has millions of dollars in revenue from a source that does not even exist.

In this instance it is gambling, but a few years ago Senator Hassan was part and parcel to repeated budget balancing fiascoes that relied on non existent revenue.

She voted for budgets "balanced" with revenues from taxes that had not even been through the committee process or had a hearing.  She voted for budgets that relied on revenue from the sale of land even though no one knew what land or how much they might get for it.    She was a gold medal recipient in the Granite-State-Left-Wing-Fiscal Gymnastics Finals, helping execute chess master like moves to create the illusion of paying for what had not been paid for.  She even continues to insist to this day that the 800 million dollars in spending she helped accumulate in the Majority Democrat legislature--for which there was no money to pay for in successive fiscal years--was not a deficit nor evidence of fiscal malfeasance on the part of her or her party.  So why, WHY would we be surprised when her first budget as governor relies on at least $80 million in gambling industry dollars for casinos that do not even exist?

I'm not surprised.  This is Classic Hassan, which now that I've thunk it, sounds like a good name for a dish comprised of week old flounder, wrapped in baloney, breaded in crushed nuts, half-baked, that comes to your table at twice the price listed on the menu.

So we've got another steaming plate of Classic Hassan, but served with a gambling sauce.   This is of a particular interest given that New Hampshire Democrats, while fond of what I guess we'll refer to as "rapture revenue," are as likely to oppose casino gambling as anyone, having shut down the "I think I can, I think I can" Lou D'Allesandro Millennium Express year after year, even when they held a majority in every branch of state government.  And it looks as if the "Gambling Revenue Resistance" (GRR?) is already on the move.

(And hold your breath because if a recent  press release from the NHGOP is quoting correctly, Democrat Peter Sullivan from Manchester and I are about to agree on something.)

In a series of tweets aimed at Democrat Party leaders, State Representative Peter Sullivan (D-Manchester) sharply criticized Governor Hassan and her casino revenue scheme.

“Dem party leaders pressuring legislators to back casino solely to protect Hassan's hide,”tweeted Representative Sullivan. “Casino gambling is NOT a Democratic issue. Hope@ChairmanBuckley and @nhkathysullivan remember that...I just don't want to see any thumbs on the scale from party officers. Gov. Hassan isn't NH’s only Dem.”

Representative Sullivan also indicated that Governor Hassan’s budget gambit is already facing widespread opposition among House Democrats.

“House response to Governor's casino proposal can charitably be called underwhelming, he tweeted. “ Governor is badly overestimating House Dem support. Outside Manch/Nashua, very thin.”

This is also not surprising, though I am curious to see whether Sullivan has his thumb on the pulse of House Democrats or stuck someplace else.  He was a Cilley person (Still is!).  He ragged on Hassan loud and often during the Democrat primary for Governor.  So for him to come out against anything that avoids what he wants--broad based sales or income taxes--is not surprising; unless you are thrilled at any defection among the Borg.  Then it's all good.

Dean Barker is also called out in the NHGOP press release as expressing concern for Hassan's approach.

“I find disingenuous the implication…that we can’t fund needed services without gambling. That kind of blackmail rhetoric will turn off lawmakers rather than get them on board,” said liberal BlueHampshire (3/18/10) blogger Dean Barker. “NH should not be in the business of holding children’s welfare hostage to whether the slot machine industry gets their way.”

I'm not down for the liberal class warfare-welfare narrative but the same idea applies to roads, bridges, public employee wages, or anything else they care or about, or might actually be a function of state government.

The last time Democrats went Classic Hassan on the budget, the word of the day was unpredictable.  State employees often found their jobs swirling around in the blue water of the toilet bowl called Democrat leadership.  From year to year job cuts, furloughs, all manner of song and dance could come up on any given day with Democrats playing with the purse strings.  It's a feature not a bug.

And the same is true with gambling money.  Even with a contract in hand there is no guarantee of stability tomorrow, or five years from now.  What is guaranteed is that there are Democrats who have already spent it no matter how much it is or isn't, but they will always (ALWAYS) imagine far more than will ever come down the pipe, just so they can spend it, and gambling revenue is just another channel in their sieve.

These are (of course) all subjects long discussed here, regardless of which party is running the table.   Gambling is not the answer to any question that anyone who is serious about local control or limited government would ask and it will never be the revenue pipe dream Democrats would lead you to believe, solving woes or lowering property tax burdens.  So let's reminisce on that a bit...

From a 2010 post titled  "Where do we put the Vagina"

So is expanded gambling inevitable for New Hampshire in this economy? 

I think our situation mirrors the tragic tale of a young woman who has set off ill prepared to pursue some dream only to find herself in dire straits.  Penniless, and perhaps homeless, having lived outside her means for too long, she abandons the last tenuous holds on what once constituted in her mind good or safe behavior and turns her body into a revenue center. 

Keep reading that here

And from Feb 2012 post titled "Gambling?  Seriously? "

Pro-liberty legislators, if anyone, should know what happens when you  funnel that kind of cake directly into the maw of the state capitol.  It filters vast sums past the gore of the voters palette allowing politicians to expand government based on outside interests and influences. Direct Casino revenue would empower central planners and bureaucrats in Concord in contradiction to the libertarian idea of small government and local control.  It would encourage the proliferation of more lobbyists and influence peddlers capable of further superseding the interests of voters on all state matters.  And it would grow government in excess of any preconceived fiscal advantages.    It always does.

Read off of that one here

Those are recent.  I've written at least a dozen like them since 2008.  But I've bored you enough with my relevant and timely back links.  Suffice to say,  gambling is not a done deal with Democrats and it never was.  The house could prove to be the place where it goes to die again.  The Senate is less likely where any stand will be made.  Run as it is by moderates who would risk speech intimidation for the benefit of their own political futures suggests that a little gambling revenue song and dance about jobs and commerce--none of the true, are right up their ally, if for no other reason than the promise of the warm comfort of more lobbyists to comp them buffet lunches.

There are plenty of reasons why gambling would wreck a state like new Hampshire and every one of them is good enough, but all together it should be a dead issue.  And yet it is not.  Such is the nature of politics.

Entire NHGOP Press Release follows

DEMOCRAT OPPOSITION MOUNTS AGAINST HASSAN’S IRRESPONSIBLE BUDGET
Governor’s Casino Revenue Gamble Faces Skepticism From Her Own Party

Concord, NH – As Governor Hassan prepares to testify today on gambling legislation, her irresponsible casino licensing revenue scheme is facing increasing criticism from members of her own party.

“Governor Hassan is constructing a fiscally irresponsible house of cards that could collapse at any moment. She is basing New Hampshire’s financial integrity on a non-existent source of revenue that is even facing opposition from members of her own party,” said NHGOP Chairman Jennifer Horn. “If Governor Hassan is having difficulty convincing Democrats to support her disastrous budget, then its time for her to come up with a ‘Plan B.’” Granite Staters deserved to know how their governor will address the $80 million deficit that could result from her failed leadership and fiscal irresponsibility.”

Since Governor Hassan delivered her budget address last week, Democrats have voiced skepticism on the prospects of her proposal.

“I continue to have grave reservations with using gambling,” liberal Senator Martha Fuller Clark (D-Portsmouth) told the Portsmouth Herald following Governor Hassan’s budget address (2/14/2013.) “That's the conflict for me. I worry that we're allowing gambling to come to the state, (and it) will divert a huge amount of money earned in the state (to) a problematic industry,”

In a series of tweets aimed at Democrat Party leaders, State Representative Peter Sullivan (D-Manchester) sharply criticized Governor Hassan and her casino revenue scheme.

“Dem party leaders pressuring legislators to back casino solely to protect Hassan's hide,”tweeted Representative Sullivan. “Casino gambling is NOT a Democratic issue. Hope@ChairmanBuckley and @nhkathysullivan remember that...I just don't want to see any thumbs on the scale from party officers. Gov. Hassan isn't NH’s only Dem.”

Representative Sullivan also indicated that Governor Hassan’s budget gambit is already facing widespread opposition among House Democrats.

“House response to Governor's casino proposal can charitably be called underwhelming, he tweeted. “ Governor is badly overestimating House Dem support. Outside Manch/Nashua, very thin.”

Democrat Party activists have also criticized the tactics that Governor Hassan is using to promote her budget.

“I find disingenuous the implication…that we can’t fund needed services without gambling. That kind of blackmail rhetoric will turn off lawmakers rather than get them on board,” said liberal BlueHampshire (3/18/10) blogger Dean Barker. “NH should not be in the business of holding children’s welfare hostage to whether the slot machine industry gets their way.”

In addition to criticism from Democrats, Governor Hassan’s budget proposal has also faced widespread skepticism and scorn from editorial pages across New Hampshire including The Union Leader, Concord Monitor, Keene Sentinel, Nashua Telegraph, Portsmouth Herald and Foster’s Daily Democrat.

###

--
Communications
New Hampshire Republican State Committee
603.225.9341 I press@nhgop.org

You are reading  "Hassan’s Budget Gamble Takes Heat From Her Left"   by  Steve Mac Donald originally posted at GraniteGrok.com (Home)

Steve has been recognized as the Americans For Prosperity Blogger of the month for December 2012

Are New Hampshire Democrat’s Pushing a Mental Illness Narrative?

Mental illness is a moving target, but one that keeps getting bigger.  Here in New Hampshire, if you Google Mental Illness, you will discover that it is getting bigger here as well.  Mental illness is up, we are told.   More patients are going unreported or untreated.  And just in time for a Democrat Budget writing House and their spend then-tax-den mother (Governor Maggie Hassan) to ignore the delicate state of the economy, rising payroll taxes, unemployment, wage stagnation, and the cornucopia of looming federal burdens, cliffs, debt, and spending, and Obama care, to justify growing our own budget right here in the Granite State on top of all that.

Look,see!?  Mental illness.  It’s right there!  We (politicians and government) are the only ones’ who can do something about that.  We have to do something…

And didn’t the Sandy hook murderer have a mental illness?  That dove-tails very nicely with unaddressed mental illness narrative.  It’s almost too good to be true if you happen to be a pro-bureaucracy, big government, anti-gun Democrat.

(Never underestimate the “diversity” potential of a good left wing narrative.)

Of course my first thought, upon seeing the buds forming on the mental-illness narrative bush, was that this next observation was too obvious to be worth mentioning; look at all the Democrats we elected to the New Hampshire House.  Another Democrat governor.  Two Democrat Congress-critters.  Obama?  If that is not an indication of some increase in mental illness in New Hampshire what is?

Whatever the evidence, I predict that this up-tick in reporting is simply plowing the field and planting seeds so that the left can put more spending on the table in a way that makes Republicans who might normally question it…um..silent partners.

Facts and evidence will be hard to come by but grand rhetorical flourishes will be in abundance.

Let’s watch and see.

You are reading  "Are New Hampshire Democrat’s Pushing a Mental Illness Narrative?"   by  Steve Mac Donald originally posted at GraniteGrok.com (Home)

Steve has been recognized as the Americans For Prosperity Blogger of the month for December 2012