Is this a sucker’s bet? That Maggie is already set to ratchet up the spending (and the taxes to support them) – and this is the excuse she’ll use (emphasis mine)?
CONCORD – Gov.-elect Maggie Hassan issued an upbeat but sobering call for agency heads to lower their expectations as hearings on a new, two-year state budget commenced Monday.
In their initial budget requests, state administrators asked for a 26 percent increase in total spending to a record $11.97 billion for the cycle that begins June 30.
Spending from state tax and fee sources alone would go up 19 percent, to $3.3 billion, if those who run state departments get their way.
Earlier this month, Hassan won election to replace retiring Gov. John Lynch vowing to undo deep cuts in state aid for higher education and acute care hospitals.
That rise in spending will pretty much erase the downsizing of the State’s budget during Speaker O’Brien’s tenure.
Democrats campaigned and campaigned HARD against those cuts to the budget that the Republicans had to do based on the mess that the Dems deliberately created the previous two sessions (to which Steve caught a Dem politician admitting in a gaffe – I just can’t find it- Wait, here it is: Link added .). I am certainly leaning to the case that “she will carefully consider all of the requests” but in the end, she will not be able to help herself and pretty much sign off on pretty much all of it. She is who she is – a Progressive that worships at the Holy Altar of Big Government – and that the Republicans committed heresy and that she has to “save it”.
However, Hassan opened three days of budget hearings by noting all her pledges to restore cuts can’t be achieved in the first two years as the economy slowly continues to recover.
“It is important for all of us to understand that we will not be able to reverse course all at once,” she said.
Head fake? The national economy was already in the tank as she and her fellow Big Gov Riders continued to ride the budget to the Progressive Promised Park of spreading other peoples’s money all over and taking the the Obama largesse of the Stimulus that accomplished nothing of lasting consequence (at least FDR got a Hoover Dam built) and baked it into the NH budget. Which is exactly why the Dems got tossed out in 2010.
This is her first test – will she resist and walk, or just embrace the temptation?
Six pack of Mtn Dew is on the table; any takers?
