Let's "Have a Conversation" About Democrat Bill O'Neil, Taxes, And Jackie Cilley

Turn out is all the Republicans need to win in Manchester Ward 2 (Hills-9).  It is a special election.  GOP voters just need to show up in adequate numbers.  I’d like to try and motivate you if I can.

IBEW 2320 local union President Bill O’Neil, the Democrat in this New Hampshire House race, claims he should not be unfairly saddled with unpopular national issues of which he claims not to be  player.  Okay.  We’ll ignore the fact that the party he is running under does that all the time to their opponents and stick with what sticks to Bill.

Bill O’Neil and local IBEW 2320 have a strong (and recent) connection to local politics; they endorsed Democrat Jackie Cilley for Governor.  And if these types of associations matter, and you know that to Democrats they do, then Bill O’Neil can be rightly referred to as a Jackie Cilley Democrat.

This means that he and his local support a conversation about taxes– broad based taxes, for New Hampshire. We know this because there was a candidate that claimed to be against a sales or income tax in New Hampshire.   That is not the candidate Bill O’Neil chose to support. He picked the one that was running for office on bigger and broader taxes for New Hampshire under the cover of the “having a conversation.”

We know this to be true because Cilley has long supported a sales or income tax.   That “the conversation” needed to be about how to convince Granite Staters that state government had to grow bigger, had to do it regardless of the economics of our day, and that we had to include sales and income taxes in the conversation. Otherwise,  she’d have pledged not to pass any or to exclude them.  Instead she attacked the promise not to pass any; a noble feature of a losing campaign given that Democrat leadership in our state has long paid lip-service to the pledge to get into office.    But even if we were to agree to the conversation there are unspoken truths and outright lies left hidden beneath the “idea about the conversation about taxes” itself that Democrats, ironically, refuse to discuss.

There is no tax relief in that conversation at any level.  There can’t be.  You can’t “need” to make government do more, to make it more responsible, to make it bigger, and then collect fewer taxes.   You also cannot promise more government intervention at the state level and lower property taxes at the local level, without accepting that you also have to  support either expanding local government as well–which equals more and higher taxes, or are in fact, in favor of redistributing “local control” away from taxpayers in towns and cities, along with the money, so the so-called “experts’ in Concord can make those decisions instead.

This is the fatal flaw in the lefts state party rhetoric on taxes and the need for a larger state government, one they all share, one that Jackie Cilley danced around during her campaign for governor, while trying to avoid the words “sales and income tax.”

So should we trust Jackie Cilley Democrat Bill O’Neil when he says things like this?

O’Neil would support a temporary gas tax under certain provisions. “I’d vote for a short-term usage tax to repair roads and bridges that have been closed or in need of immediate repair,” he said. “It would be a short-term fix and then we’d work on a long-term fix.”

Union Leader

I don’t recall when Democrat leadership ever rolled a tax back, in fact their tendency is to raise taxes again and again–because government must always get bigger and do more. Bill does point to the idea of a long term fix.  Could that fix be an expanding sales or income tax?  You would be right to be suspicious of that.

O’Neil’s endorsement of Cilley suggests other real world baggage.   Does O’Neil support scrabbling after one-time federal money to make state government bigger, complete with all the strings, even if it leaves us holding spending promises for which there is no local revenue?  Cilley did. Would Bill do the same?

Does O’Neil support the late-night, last minute, budget circus that creates taxes without public input and counts money from land sales when no one knows what land and to whom it will be sold?  Cilley was a ring leader of repeated budget circuses, but no bread.  They just tried to take more of it from the mouths of New Hampshire families to grow the state during a recession.

And Does Mr. O’Neil believe that state union employees should work as a privileged class–paying less of their own benefits than their private-sector counterparts?  Do state employees deserve raises even when the average private sector worker has seen their annual incomes decline and their wages and hours eroded by a corrosive economy? Do state union employees get a waiver? Is Mr. O’Neil content to blame someone else instead, to excuse making the state bigger on the backs of taxpayers instead of doing what is right for the people who are tasked with paying for those raises and benefits while their own lifestyles and retirement accounts decline year afer year?

Bill O’Neil is a “Jackie Cilley” Democrat.  To be perfectly honest, we simply cannot afford him.  And if Manchester Republicans just get up and go vote, we can keep one more rubber stamp Democrat out of the progressive hand of tax and spend liberals in Concord.

Cross posted from here

A New Hampshire Income Tax By Hook or By Crook

Today there is a hearing (10am - LOB 301) for HB 330. HB 330 would allow any county delegation in New Hampshire to adopt a 'County Income tax' to be administered by the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration (DRA). HB330 sells its tax as money that would go toward paying for education (public education at government run schools) and who could possibly dare to be against dumping more money into government run education?

/steve raises his hand

This would also not be a 'state wide, broad-based,' income tax, as it is optional by county, but we would still need the collection mechanisms and apparatus just the same if even one county decided it wanted to do it.   We would need tax forms and filings and processors and handlers, auditors, collectors and even printers and mailers of refunds due.  Every one of them a state employees, siphoning off more tax dollars for wages, benefits, pensions, mileage reimbursements, buildings, supplies, phone, heat, electricity, (million dollar energy improvement projects to "green-up" their office space)....and who do you suspect pays for that?  Every one of us.

If just one county decides it wants an income tax, we all get to pay.

No one should be surprised that this bill was sponsored by Democrats. Reps Burridge and Robertson, our Cheshire County Cats, both of whom serve on the know infamous committee of Criminal Justice and Public Safety, home of chair Laura Pantelakos, are our "we'll find a way to take your money by Hook or by Crook" --you can decide for yourselves who is Crook and who is Hook.

HB330 is one of the longer Bills.  That alone should be enough to disqualify it.  There ought to be a rule that if the bill is greater than a certain length, is should be shredded and used as bedding for small rodents.

HB330's fiscal cost to the state is also not yet known.  And how could it be?  We are talking about adding an income tax collecting apparatus capable of handling from one to ten counties worth of tax calculating, collecting, and so on.  There is a point at which you only need so many bodies warming office chairs (and more than likely surfing the Internet to post comments on porn media or political sites like this one) but that point is always going to be one body higher than the number of bodies we have now at the DRA and that is one body too many.

HB 330 is supposed to collect revenues for distribution to public schools in that county.  As previously observed, there is plenty of tax money already available for schools...in existing taxpayer levies for benefits and pensions to public employees.  A "slight" adjustment that makes them more personally responsible for their own retirement --all still paid for with our tax dollars--would free up vast sums of money for any purpose be it schools, mental health waiting lists, or roads to get the teachers to the schools or mental health patients to their doctors and therapists.

There is also the question of how state government, in the face of a series of large layoffs across the state, resulting from corrosive federal regulatory and tax policy, can justify instituting this kind of additional tax pressure on its citizens?  How do you look across this economic landscape and say screw the people, we need more money to grow government?

It's easy if you are a Democrat; a government firster.  Government forced on the people, before the people, paid for by the people. ( That should be the liberal motto. )

Just say no to HB330.  It may not be the dumbest idea to come from the mind of the government first party but it's close.

You are reading  "A New Hampshire Income Tax By Hook or By Crook"   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

Mark Fernald Needs New Material for His Income Tax Arguments

by Steve MacDonald

Mark Fernald wants New Hampshire to have an income tax before he dies.  It appears to be one of his deepest desires.  So desperate is this need that he is willing to reuse debunked rhetoric to ensure he is not prohibited from having the chance to get one.

Yesterday, over at Windham Patch, Fernald had the income tax equivalent of a recurring rash as “Fair Share class warfare” sores rose up from the page in his opposition to CACR 13.  CACR 13 is a Sttate constitutional amendment that would ban New Hampshire from taxing personal income.  But such a prohibition for Mr. Fernald would be akin to the death of the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia to Dead Heads.  “Well now what do we do with all our free time.”  So Mr. Fernald has gone on the offensive (as in, to offend).

We have a tax system that is made by and for the top 1 percent. The households in New Hampshire with the highest incomes – the 1 percent with incomes $480,000 and up – on average pay just over 2 percent of their incomes in state and local tax. The folks in the middle, on average, pay about 6 percent. The lowest income people have the highest tax burden. They pay, on average, over 8 percent of their income in state and local tax.

I’ve been over this deception more than once, but I am more than happy to revisit it every time Mark wants to bring it up–which will be often between now and Noveber.

There are several things wrong with Fernald’s assumptions, not the least of which is that New Hampshire’s reliance on property taxes has managed to make it a state with one of the lowest overall tax burdens, year after year.   If tax burden were his true concern you’d expect that to come up but it never does.  (Hint: he is not interested in your tax burden, he is interested in revenue streams most likely to create the expansion of government.)

But of all the things wrong with Mark’s meme, I find this the most interesting.  In his world of ‘fair’ the cost of things, a nice bowl of fruit, a widget, any product or service, even state government, must be measured in percents not actual dollars, because fair is not a level concept of access, cost, or opportunity, it is an arbitrary political notion managed by experts in the government and subject to their capricious whims–based solely on their obsession with  financing the expansion of the administrative state; an expansion method which, by the way, is far more likely to advantage the rich and encumber the poor.  Another problem Mr. Fernald will not waste breath on.)

So what about that 2% and 8% gibberish?  Back in March of 2011 it looked like this.

Using Fernald’s figures on percentages a person making $20,000.00 would be paying 8.3% of their income in taxes.  So the annual cost for their NH state salad bar plate is $1,660.00 per year.  Without even considering tax credits, rebates and so on for any income group, here’s the breakdown based on Fernald’s misleading percentages from the top of each of his income brackets, in terms of actual dollars.

$20K/year           $1660.00

$34K/year           $2244.00

$55K/Year           $3190.00

$159K/Year         $5565.00

$474K/year         $9480.00 ($9600,00 in the new 448K and up reference)

And just for fun…

1.6million/year  $32,000.00

This does not take into account that there are probably 150,000 small business owners in New Hampshire who comprise a moderate to large portion of the upper income brackets whom Mr. Fernald believes are screwing the rest of us.  The  people whose commerce pays the majortiy of all state taxes from taxes on business property, utilities, communications, the BET and BPT, and some 35 other taxes or fees that pay for the cost of the state government that, coincidentally, lower income persons use more heavily.   So if anyone is paying an unfair share of taxes in New Hampshire, it is more likely higher income persons and more specifically those who own and run business in the Granite State.   (This is probably why Fernald sticks to percentages because it can’t be made using real tax dollars paid.)

Mr. Fernald’s got other problems as well. The original source for his percentages included additional data he could not use because it deals a mortal blow to his class war rhetoric. (Referring back to my March 2011 post again.)

Did you know that while people in New Hampshire pay 60% more in property taxes than the national US average, we also pay 65% less than the national average for sales and excise taxes, and 92% less than the national average for income taxes.  (Figures provided by the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy–a group started by a rich liberal with some connections to American Progress and the same source Fernald used to get his percentages argument–but then forgot this other stuff for some reason.).

You know who gets hit hardest by sales taxes, excise taxes and income taxes?  Lower income people.  Know why?  Because those taxes and fees represent a significantly higher percentage of their annual income.  Right Mark?  A $2.00 widget is a larger percentage of income from someone who earns $20K compared to a millionaire.  Same for milk, golf lessons, Frisbees, happy meals and everything else, which is why Fernald’s argument is so stupid.

Unless Mark is willing to make a case that the entire system of commerce, even in a fixed economy, is grossly unfair by his measure, then he has no argument at all.  Remember, that 2.00 widget is 0.01% of a lower income persons wages but only 0.0004% of the rich bastards income.  Even if Mark used the polcie state to fix the price he could not eliminate that disparity.  This is why we must talk dollars.  The folks making $484K are paying at least $9500.00 dollars for the same thing someone else gets for around $1500.00, with the person paying $1500.00 having significantly more access to the supposed benefits Fernald believes government exists to provide.  This is Mark Fernald’s Fair Share argument and it has no legs to stand on.

More problems?  Why yes.

The first thing they did when they had complete control of state government was to spend.  They passed the first budget over 10 billion, and then the first one over 11 billion.  So what?  Property taxes are overwhelmingly used to pay for local taxes, and local spending.   The Democrat controlled state government not only raised more taxes and fees to fund their spending binge, they went after local shares of rooms and meals taxes, crammed higher registration fees onto local municipalities, and abandoned the states portion of pension costs to local taxpayers in an effort to cover their irresponsible spending.   An income tax would go straight to Concord where the kind of people who want badly have a miserable record when it comes to managing money.

This is why there is no evidence whatsoever that an income tax will limit or eliminate the burden of property taxes.  Everywhere the argument has been made,  relief –if any–vanishes in just a few short years as property taxes inevitably go back up.

So what Mr. Fernald is really supporting is the expansion of state government.  Now I am certain that if we could get him to admit to any of this that he would still fall back on the idea that such expansion of the state would actually benefit lower income people, but there is no evidence of this either.   The very scheme Mr. Fernald claims is unfair–which we have in fact demonstrated is not–has consistently made New Hampshire a state with the lowest poverty rate, highest average annual wage, safest place to live, with one of the highest qualities of life, and a below average unemployment rate.  Please show me the states with income tax schemes that fair better than New Hampshire?

No such place exists except in the fantasy world of the progressive-Democrat mind where the government always makes better decisions about how to spend your money, and always spends more than any sane person ever would.   What Mr. Fernald wants is to create a new expensive tax collecting bureaucracy–complete with union-dues-paying-Democrat-candidate-supporting-state-employees with more pensions and benefits paid for by tax payers–who can use the the police power of the state to separate you from your income…to grow an even larger and intrusive state government.

And one final problem every Democrat must ignore is price pressure.  Any new broad based tax will put price pressure on everything.  Income taxes affect the cost of labor.  The cost of labor affects the cost of products and services.  This inevitably drives up the cost of everything for everyone, a cost which always weighs more heavily on lower income folks.  Yes, Mr. Fernald’s obsessive desire for an income tax is a regressive tax that will ultimately harm the less fortunate more than any other income group; a problem created by Mr. Fernald which he would then happily offer to “fix” with yet another expensive bureaucracy–paid for by a slight increase in that income tax he wants. Rinse. lather. Repeat.

CACR 13 protects low income workers from being nickle and dimed to death for the pleasure of big government liberals like Mark Fernald.  It ensures that the people who earn the most, and most likely to own more expensive property and more of it, do shoulder more of the burden of taxation.  And it keeps the cost of government in front of everyone, when the tax bills shows up in their mailbox–inciting acts of public interest from even the most disinterested taxpayer, with demands for transparency in government from persons of every political stripe, that are by their very nature inducements to lower overall taxation and all the great things that make New Hampshire a better place to live and work.

It is this ritual of lump sum method of taxation of property owners that has consistently made New Hampshire a state with the lowest poverty rate, highest average annual wage, safest place to live, with one of the highest qualities of life, and a below average unemployment rate.

The ability to enact an income tax will not secure nor protect any of those benefits,  it will only allow a revenue hungry intrusive government to grow in ways that make those unique benefits unsustainable.  And like all taxes it will find its way into your paycheck–the people who want to spend it so badly have guaranteed this will have to happen.  Protect yourself from the expansion of intrusive state government for its own sake.  I don’t care who you are, you know don’t want your income taxed.  Just admit it.  This November vote in favor of CACR 13.

You are reading "Mark Fernald Needs New Material for His Income Tax Arguments"  by Steve Mac Donald originally posted at GraniteGrok.com.(Home)

Questons For The 'Pro' Income Tax Folks.

I have some questions for the pro-income tax folks out there.

Who are 'The Rich?' You always want to tax the "rich" to make it "fair."  So who are they and what is the income cut off?

How much will it cost us to create the necessary bureaucracy to handle a new income tax and all the family fun related to collecting, processing, returning, disputing, investigating, litigating, and so on? Include state salaries, benefits, pensions, operating costs, and estimate total department growth, administrative costs related to dealing with another bunch of state union employees, and will the increased dues paid to the unions through these state workers (who vote for pro-tax democrats) still be tax-deductible,or can they be considered income for taxing purposes without deduction?

What will the state do with the money, aside from grow uncontrollably?  And how long will they pretend to legislate it only for specific forms of tax relief (of the 'fair' variety) before they start tying strings to it and making town selectmen and councilors behave like Dickensian orphans to get a piece of that pie?

Which lobby will become the most powerful first once we have nearly invisible, unencumbered revenue pouring into Concord?

How much will property taxes go down?  And how long before they go back up and then surpass where they were when you lied about tax relief while promoting a new income tax?

Don't we already tax profits and income from the job creating class through the BET and BPT?

Will this new tax replace those taxes, and are we going to stop taxing business profits as personal income for LLC and S-corps or (as I suspect) are you just going to tax these folks again. (Bride of LLC Tax).

How long will before people realize you are scamming them?

Who actually funds the very partisan Granite State Fair Tax Coalition? Are they from other states who are pissed off because they can't compete with us in New Hampshire?

If you like income taxes so much, and they are so "fair," why don't you just move to a state that has them already?  Are you put off by their lower quality of life, higher overall tax burden, larger populations of unemployed, higher poverty rates, higher crime rates, and invasive meddling bureaucracies of those other states?

Why are you incapable of making any connection between the kind of taxes and government you claim to want, and the kind of state you end up with after you get them?



cross posted

A Gift From The Gods

The House voted on HB 642 yesterday and despite being (I am told) a bad income tax bill--Ways and Means released it as ITL--seventy (70) NH House democrats couldn't contain their glee, and voted for it anyway. (Despite being told not to by members of their own party for political reasons).  

So what do we do?  We say Thank You.

These 70 democrats have just provided us with a list of legislators so desperate to tax us no matter what the situation, that they cannot help but stand up and be counted.  And so they shall be. 

Nay on an ITL from committee is of course a vote in favor of the bill, and in this case the education income tax bill HB 642.

Aguiar, James	Democrat	Grafton	06	Nay
Beck, Catriona	Democrat	Hillsborough	02	Nay
Brown, Carole	Democrat	Merrimack	08	Nay
Burridge, Delmar	Democrat	Cheshire	03	Nay
Butcher, Suzanne	Democrat	Cheshire	03	Nay
Butterworth, Timothy	Democrat	Cheshire	04	Nay
Caron, June	Democrat	Hillsborough	25	Nay
Carr, Daniel	Democrat	Cheshire	04	Nay
Chase, Claudia	Democrat	Hillsborough	02	Nay
Cooney, Mary	Democrat	Grafton	07	Nay
Day, Judith	Democrat	Rockingham	13	Nay
DiPentima, Rich	Democrat	Rockingham	16	Nay
Donovan, Thomas	Democrat	Sullivan	04	Nay
Ford, Susan	Democrat	Grafton	03	Nay
French, Barbara	Democrat	Merrimack	05	Nay
Friedrich, Carol	Democrat	Grafton	06	Nay
Gould, Franklin	Democrat	Grafton	11	Nay
Gould, Kenneth	Republican	Rockingham	05	Nay
Grassie, Anne	Democrat	Strafford	01	Nay
Hamm, Christine	Democrat	Merrimack	04	Nay
Hammond, Jill	Democrat	Hillsborough	03	Nay
Harding, Laurie	Democrat	Grafton	11	Nay
Harris, Sandra	Democrat	Sullivan	04	Nay
Harvey, Philip	Democrat	Hillsborough	01	Nay
Henson, John	Democrat	Rockingham	13	Nay
Houde-Quimby, Charlotte	Democrat	Sullivan	01	Nay
Johnson, William	Democrat	Belknap	05	Nay
Keans, Sandra	Democrat	Strafford	01	Nay
Laliberte, Suzanne	Democrat	Grafton	10	Nay
Lisle, Carolyn	Democrat	Hillsborough	26	Nay
Mack, Ron	Democrat	Hillsborough	01	Nay
Mann, Maureen	Democrat	Rockingham	01	Nay
Matarazzo, Anthony	Democrat	Hillsborough	20	Nay
McClammer, Jim	Democrat	Sullivan	05	Nay
McEachern, Paul	Democrat	Rockingham	16	Nay
Meader, David	Democrat	Cheshire	03	Nay
Messier, Irene	Republican	Hillsborough	17	Nay
Miller, Kate	Democrat	Belknap	03	Nay
Mulholland, Catherine	Democrat	Grafton	10	Nay
Nord, Susi	Democrat	Rockingham	01	Nay
Osborne, Jessie	Democrat	Merrimack	12	Nay
Parkhurst, Henry	Democrat	Cheshire	04	Nay
Perry, Robert	Democrat	Strafford	03	Nay
Petterson, Don	Democrat	Rockingham	10	Nay
Pilotte, Maurice	Democrat	Hillsborough	16	Nay
Potter, Frances	Democrat	Merrimack	10	Nay
Preston, Philip	Democrat	Grafton	08	Nay
Read, Robin	Democrat	Rockingham	16	Nay
Rice, Chip	Democrat	Merrimack	12	Nay
Richardson, Barbara	Democrat	Cheshire	05	Nay
Roberts, Kris	Democrat	Cheshire	03	Nay
Robertson, Timothy	Democrat	Cheshire	03	Nay
Rodd, Beth	Democrat	Merrimack	05	Nay
Rogers, Rose Marie	Democrat	Strafford	01	Nay
Russell, Joseph	Democrat	Rockingham	13	Nay
Russell, Trinka	Democrat	Rockingham	13	Nay
Sad, Tara	Democrat	Cheshire	02	Nay
Skinder, Carla	Democrat	Sullivan	01	Nay
Smith, Suzanne	Democrat	Grafton	07	Nay
Spang, Judith	Democrat	Strafford	07	Nay
Splaine, James	Democrat	Rockingham	16	Nay
Stuart, Richard	Democrat	Belknap	04	Nay
Sweeney, Cynthia	Democrat	Sullivan	05	Nay
Theberge, Robert	Democrat	Coos	04	Nay
Tilton, Joy	Democrat	Merrimack	06	Nay
Townsend, Charles	Democrat	Grafton	10	Nay
Ward, Kenneth	Democrat	Strafford	02	Nay
Watrous, Rick	Democrat	Merrimack	12	Nay
Weed, Charles	Democrat	Cheshire	03	Nay
Wheeler, Deborah	Democrat	Merrimack	06	Nay
Wiley, Susan	Democrat	Carroll	03	Nay
Yeaton, Charles	Democrat	Merrimack	08	Nay