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!

New Hampshire House Votes to Raise Tobacco Taxes

The ten cent resolution, that one thin (not so thin) dime New Hampshire Republicans cut off the tobacco tax two years ago, expires shortly.   At the time it was proposed and passed the left was so insane with outrage that you'd have thought Republicans were selling guns to foreign drug lords across the border who were killing agents of the federal government and innocent civilians as well.  But some Democrat president was the one who'd done that so there was no moral call to war; New Hampshire Democrats were as quiet as church mice.  (Regular Church mice, the social justice Church mice are noisy sums-o-beeches--and likely protected by a stimulus grant through the EPA.) But that ten cent tax?  That was a crime against humanity.

But it was probably doomed from the start.

As a step toward another reduction it could have achieved its ultimate goal but at just ten cents it was always too thin, never allowed a long enough run.  Ten cents in this economy doesn't even cover the rising cost of fuel to get from A to A+1 let alone to B or C and back to A to make it worth the trip.   So as much as I (among others) wanted to see it succeed it likely never could.  Not because lowering the tax wouldn't work but because the hill it had to climb was too steep.

So the same Democrats who can ignore a president of their own hue whose policies kill people against their will must seize on an insufficient tax cut to justify a tax increase. There is some moral imperative to 'need' the revenue, and plucking at any heart-string to get it will suffice.  So the New Hampshire House just passed a bill to tack on another 0.20 cents a pack.

This 'revenue' will be extracted from predominantly middle and lower income people, but the left has an excuse.  They think the cost will deter teenagers from picking up the habit.  That is a dreamy notion given that most teens who smoke probably either have parents who smoke or friends who wield something more powerful than the "cost per-pack" to jump start the habit--peer pressure.  I'm surprised some left-wing Mary-Poppins has not yet found a way to define that as bullying so they could bring the full weight of the nanny-state to bear on the problem of teenage smoking.  "Off with their Butts!"

Butt they need the revenue...

I've asked repeatedly in the past, if teenagers stop smoking, when the old smokers die off, what happens to that revenue we so desperately needed in the first place?  It dies with them.  At which point the tax and spend cave dwellers pick up their spears (coated with self-righteousness) and shuffle off onto the progressive plantation to find fresh game to harvest, if there is any left; heart shaped harps in tow, as they seek revenue meat to feed to their insatiable government gods.

It is all a game to them.

In the long run it is not about the dime, or two dimes, it's about the idea.  The progressives believe first, above all things, that Government must always grow, even if it means you have to shrink.  If you do not take a stand for the dimes, you will lose them and the dollars that follow.

You are reading  "New Hampshire House Votes to Raise Tobacco Taxes"   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

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.

Democrats Always Lie About Taxes and Spending

Democrats lie about taxes, spending, and caring about the middle class, and two opportunities to prove that have recently presented themselves.

First, Nashua Democrat David Campbell, from whose progressive womb sprang the 15 cent per gallon gas tax, recently remarked in an email to Democrat party leadership that the Democrat gas tax was...

..."the gift that keeps on giving"

...

"As my father used to say, 'Don't spend it all in one place!" Rep. David Campbell, D-Nashua, chairman of the House Public Works and Highways Committee, wrote on Friday in explaining that his gas tax hike bill will generate "bonus monies" for purposes not directly associated with highways, roads and bridges.

Not directly associated is right.

The gas tax will screw you, your family, your small business, and the entire  state economy out of millions more annually once fully implemented, money that will not got to wages, jobs, or anything but the Democrats government first addiction.

When his proposed four-step gas tax hike is fully phased in, Campbell wrote, it will generate $1.25 million annually for the Fish and Game Department, $658,000 annually for the general fund and $593,000 annually for the Department of Resources and Economic Development's Bureau of Trails.

Democrats will say, it's just a few bucks a week.  Sure.  Every week.  Week after week. For every vehicle you own.  And for every vehicle that carries goods and services--added to the cost of those goods and services--which you will also pay in incrased prices, or potentially lower wages, or fewer jobs.

Those millions for Fish And Game and "other departments" have to come from somewhere before state government wastes them on "purposes not directly associated with highways and bridges."

Democrats don't care they are just happy about the bonus money.  Millions more every year than they need for the stated purpose of the tax they are voting on.   Happy!

Happy to steal your money from you for whatever they want.

The second example relates to a Union Leader non-scientific poll whose results just happened to be sidled up next to John DiStaso's Granite Status column describing how the Democrats were happy about soaking the middle class under the cover of their infrastructure desperation narrative.

The poll asked "How would you use 80 million in new revenue from casino gambling?"

Fifty percent of respondents said, lowering taxes and fees.

Hello?  McFly?  Don't you listen?  Democrats need more money because they've already spent it and 80 million isn't even the tip of one nipple on the Democrats big fat spending sow.

The party that is giddy over robbing you of an extra 2.5 few million "for other purposes"on top of the millions for which the tax was created, hav an endless list of ideas about how to spend your money.  Just two years ago they had willfully spent 800 million more than they had after raising around 100 other taxes and fees--some of which crammed costs and actually raised taxes on towns and cities.  And That still wasn't enough.

There is no limit.  New Hampshire Democrats could spend a cool billion without blinking and plan to pend more and you'd never see one dime of tax relief.  Not one.  Nor will you ever.

So wake up.  (I SAID WAKE UP!!!)

The gas tax is just another way to deprive you of your hard earned wages for their laundry list and the only thing Gambling taxes or fees will ever do--no matter how much or how little it might be (if any at all)--is allow Democrats to spend that and more, and more, and more.

No amount of your money will ever be enough because it's not their money.

It's yours.

It's what they do.  it's all they do.

You are reading  "Democrats Always Lie About Taxes and Spending"   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