AFP-NH’s Greg Moore observed recently that NH Governor Maggie Hassan’s Budget is bad for growth and and burdens small businesses.
Hassan spokesman Marc Goldberg responded, “The governor’s balanced budget proposal begins restoring critical investments in the priorities needed to create good jobs and build a more innovative economic future, such as higher education, economic development, mental health and public safety.
So if we dump more taxpayer money into a University system that, according to Democrats, consistently creates graduates who then leave the state–no matter how much money they spent on the university system, spend more money on the idea that the government taking more money from business owners knows best how to attract and grow business, and add more cops and state-payroll therapists, the Granite State will leap forward from the dark ages of the Republican Majority.
All this does is add state employees, state payroll, dues paying union members, and expands the budget. Maybe they are great jobs “for favoring elected Democrats” but it’s our money.
I’m no economist but if you add to the cost side of our spreadsheet, particularly during a non-growth economic period like we are in now, all you are actually going to do is poke holes in your own boat. There is no growth in forcing lateral hiring decisions that redirect dollars from responsive small business owners to unresponsive leviathan government, simply because Democrats are obsessed with state programs and padding their donor roster. As a state we will go backwards, and government will, like last time, be tossing state employees in chaos with threats of furlough’s, layoffs, and termination. Just so you can have a bigger budget?
The money isn’t there. You know it isn’t there or you wouldn’t be imaging millions that do not exist. Unless of course this is another effort similar to the 800 million dollar deficit debacle. The one where you were planning to retain enough control after 2010 to argue that a broad based tax was the only way around the problem of paying for “…the critical investments in the priorities needed…,” which translates more simply to we want more of your wages to “pay for whatever Democrats want to spend our money on.”
A this moment, you are asking working families and the small business struggling to keep them employed, in a flat wage, no growth economy, to cough up another billion dollars. That’s just this year. (We know that if you get this billion you will just ask for another billion in the next budget.) Is it not a bit arrogant of you to think you have a better use for it in this economy (or any economy) than they do?
