A New Hampshire Income Tax By Hook or By Crook - Granite Grok

A New Hampshire Income Tax By Hook or By Crook

NH Demcrats looking for new county income taxes
“How About Some New Taxes My Pretties”

Tomorrow 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 employee, 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

Steve Mac Donald has been recognized as the AFP December Blogger of the month

 

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