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)

GrokTALK! Returns...stay tuned!

When “Government Does Not Work”….to Eliminate “Government” That Does not Work

The non-partisan US Inspectors General have recommended spending reforms to Executive branch agencies that would reduce waste, fraud, and abuse.  The House Oversight committee has jurisdiction over the IG’s and on March 5, released a report relating to the issue, going back to 2001.

There are now close to 17,000 unimplemented recommendations, over 6000 of them added since 2009. The minimum savings if implemented is estimated at $67 billion.    Sequester anyone?

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

Demokrat Diktionary – Tax Cuts

by Steve MacDonald

Tax Cuts:  Money you earned legally that the Democrats did not take from you (yet).

Example.  You earn $1000.00 dollars.  The government takes $200.00, but it could have taken $500.00.  In this example, the Democrats gave you a $300.00 dollar tax cut.  (They actually gave you a 500.00 tax cut because none of that money is really yours to begin with.  It belongs to the government.)

Note: This same thinking also applies to budgets and spending.  If Democrats spent $100 million dollars last year on something and instead of raising the amount of spending to $200 million dollars this year they only raise it to $150 million, the Democrats have cut spending by 50 million dollars.   This is then advertised as a demonstration of their love and affection for the struggling middle class unless Republicans did it, then it is a catastrophic budget cut that will cripple (insert name here).

Spending still went up, and you still get screwed out of another 50 million, but if you don’t thank the Democrats for pointing out either their generosity or the Republicans skulduggery you are an unpatriotic, extremist, bigot, who is probably a racist that wants wealthy bankers to run down poor single pregnant women of color with their limos before they can make it across the crumbling pavement of our decrepit infrastructure from the unemployment office to their back-alley abortion.

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