Mental Health Issues - Taxing Up The Wrong Tree - Granite Grok

Mental Health Issues – Taxing Up The Wrong Tree

Skip already gave a run-down on HB 499 and how it could suggest that gun buyers report all sales to the Department of Health and (in)Human Services and pay a fee on every sale.

You have to keep track of that fee, so we get a back-door gun registry while claiming to get gun owners to shoulder the cost of adding more beds for mental health patients.

As former New Hampshire State House Rep Jenn Coffey points out in a letter sent to the committee members hearing HB 499, if you are serious and you want to tax an actual cause-and-effect relationship in the real world, gun owners are not the people you need to consider taxing.

According to a report issued in 2009 by the New Hampshire department of Human Services, there were 164 citizens that died from a drug overdose, which is significantly higher than all of the traffic fatalities from the same year which was a total of 130 citizens (“Division community based,” 2009).  A year later, in February of 2010, WMUR reports that prescription drug overdoses are a leading killer in New Hampshire.   Nothing about that fact has changed to date.

so…

If you want to create a new tax or fee that is related to mental health care, then it would have to be on all over-the-counter and prescription drugs sold in the state.  That is the method of choice most often used by those who suffer from mental health issues that leads them to suicide. 

Connecting the risk to the behavior most likely to lead to it….hmm.

So this would be very sensible if you happen to be a liberal who taxes tobacco, gas, electricity, or anything else that you–as the wise and benevolent rulers above all men (and women, and the gender-neutral, un-gendered, dis-engendered, trans-fat gendered, or gender-challenged)–want “less of” for the greater good of all people-kind (oh, and don’t forget saving mother earth for our animal friends).  Put another way, you tax it as much as you dare because that would prevent the behavior.

That is how taxation as social engineering works, and it is what liberal Democrats believe–or, more likely, claim as an excuse to raise taxes.

But not here.  HB499 makes no such connection.

And no, Ms. Coffey is not suggesting that we tax all prescription and OTC drugs, she is merely pointing out that any legislator with two-brain cells to rub together would realize that the primary source of the undesired behavior tied to the recommended solution is prescription drug abuse, not guns, and even the average Democrat has at least two of those brain cells so they can make their index finger click “Donate” every time an email comes in from Obama For Anything asking for three dollars.

Put another (other) way this scheme…

The commission’s study shall consider among its funding methods whether persons buying and selling guns may be required to pay a fee which would be transmitted to the department of health and human services to be used for the purposes of increasing mental health beds.

…has nothing to do with mental health issues or an adequate number of beds. It is a plan to create a stacked anti-gun committee that will very likely agree to create a New Hampshire HHS gun registry (having recorded all sales and collected the ‘fee’), the only purpose for which is to allow some government entity to later find those lawful gun owners…and it will not be to “say hi, how’s that gun working out.”

The only reason for the government to keep track of lawful purchases is so they know who to visit when they decide it is time to take some guns away.  And no, any actual illegal gun sales will still go unrecorded no matter what crazy idea or excuse progressives come up with or could.   Who wants to bet that it would increase those unrecorded sales?  /Steve raises his hand.

The curious might ask…why can’t you just do this crap in the daylight?  Why do you need to hide your intentions, bury them under unrelated issues, and disguise them from those who elected you to office?  Those of us paying attention know why?  Democrats cannot be honest about what they want because it would get them kicked out of power–except for Chuck Weed.  He can say every stupid thing a liberal can think to say, and no one seems to give a damn.

New Hampshire Democrat Ken Gidge, the bill’s sponsor, appears incapable of operating in daylight.   This bill is a stealth bill on several levels.  It connects things that have no relation while using it–not to create the HHS fee directly–but to create a stacked committee that will come to agree with the suggested fee and the records keeping required to collect it.

Prescription drug abuse?    Maybe they need that to keep the beds filled so they can use it as cover for the rest of their schemes?

 

 

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