Evil Tea Party Manipulates NH House To Produce First Balanced State Budget Since 2006 - Granite Grok

Evil Tea Party Manipulates NH House To Produce First Balanced State Budget Since 2006

Hey.  If we (the TEA party/Right wing activists, etc)  are going to get blamed (by left wing radical Democrats) for making the New Hampshire House and Senate write and pass legislation (that reduces spending, taxes, regulation, and increases liberty and freedom), then we damn well deserve credit for this.

NH Republians balance budget to within +0.8%It’s the end of the two-year fiscal cycle and revenues came in +0.8%.  That means we took in revenue just a little bit more than we spent. And for the first time since (cough cough) 2006–the last year for which Republicans were responsible for revenue estimates–we are not in a fiscal crisis.  No late night, last minute, emergencies.  No layoffs.  No mid-budget hiring or wage freezes, no sudden need to borrow more money, no special, late night meetings to pass unpopular taxes that never had a hearing, or draconian plots to sell as yet defined public lands while cramming pension costs down on towns becasue revenue estimates were not even close.  No forcing department heads to look for savings in the middle of the budget cycle. No abrupt, heavy handed, executive orders to bring spending in line with revenue.   No delaying the pain or kicking the can down the road for someone else to deal with.

These were all features of the four year budgetary disaster known as Democrat majority control.  And thanks to the TEA party–if Ray Buckley and his Tax and Spend Democrat Party are to be believed–we no longer have that problem.

Republicans promised a responsible, balanced budget, and no new taxes.  They delivered a responsible, balanced,  budget without raising taxes during a recession and…they dealt with the massive (very real) structural deficit left in place by the departing Democrat majority.

Two years later and we are within +0.8% of plan.  No impending fiscal crisis like, say, kicking a “mythological” 800 million dollar deficit down the road that Democrats new was so real they were admit to planning to make cuts to address it in the next fiscal biennium.

Not to worry.  Republicans fixed it.

It is worth noting that in the last ten to twelve years, the only time we’ve been in a near a constant state of fiscal crisis are the four years in which Democrats had a Majority in the Legislature, and John Lynch just couldn’t say no.

There is a lesson to be learned here.  Democrats believe that Government not just knows better but that it can and should run your life.  And they insist that they, Democrats, be in charge when that happens.  But there is not one shred of evidence that government can or should do that, nor have they demonstrated that they are qualified to run anything even if it is…unless the goal is constant crisis while you run it into the ground.

So thank you Tea Party.  Becasue of your “radical” influence on Speaker O’Brien and the Republicans in the New Hampshire legislature, we have one of the most fiscally stable and balanced budgets in the entire country.  No new taxes. No new debt.  No need to look for cuts next year to balance bad spending decisions from the previous two budgets.  And just a little bit left over.  A budget Democrats complained about from beginning to end. Which just proves that even out of power, they have not one damn clue what they hell they are talking about.

 

Note: Yes, we  have to look like we “balanced” our budget, by law, but this time around it was not at the expense of the next budget.

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