Turn out is all the Republicans need to win in Machester Ward 2 (Hills-9). It is a special election. GOP voters just need to show up in adequate numbers. I’d like to try and motivate you if I can.
IBEW 2320 local union President Bill O’Neil, the Democrat in this New Hampshire House race, claims he should not be unfairly saddled with unpopular national issues of which he claims not to be player. Okay. We’ll ignore the fact that the party he is running under does that all the time to their opponents and stick with what sticks to Bill.
Bill O’Neil and local IBEW 2320 have a strong (and recent) connection to local politics; they endorsed Democrat Jackie Cilley for Governor. And if these types of associations matter, and you know that to Democrats they do, then Bill O’Neil can be rightly referred to as a Jackie Cilley Democrat.
This means that he and his local support a conversation about taxes– broad based taxes, for New Hampshire. We know this because there was a candidate that claimed to be against a sales or income tax in New Hampshire. That is not the candidate Bill O’Neil chose to support. He picked the one that was running for office on bigger and broader taxes for New Hampshire under the cover of the “having a conversation.”
We know this to be true because Cilley has long supported a sales or income tax. That “the conversation” needed to be about how to convince Granite Staters that state government had to grow bigger, had to do it regardless of the economics of our day, and that we had to include sales and income taxes in the conversation. Otherwise, she’d have pledged not to pass any or to exclude them. Instead she attacked the promise not to pass any; a noble feature of a losing campaign given that Democrat leadership in our state has long paid lip-service to the pledge to get into office. But even if we were to agree to the conversation there are unspoken truths and outright lies left hidden beneath the “idea about the conversation about taxes” itself that Democrats, ironically, refuse to discuss.
There is no tax relief in that conversation at any level. There can’t be. You can’t “need” to make government do more, to make it more responsible, to make it bigger, and then collect fewer taxes. You also cannot promise more government intervention at the state level and lower property taxes at the local level, without accepting that you also have to support either expanding local government as well–which equals more and higher taxes, or are in fact, in favor of redistributing “local control” away from taxpayers in towns and cities, along with the money, so the so-called “experts’ in Concord can make those decisions instead.
This is the fatal flaw in the lefts state party rhetoric on taxes and the need for a larger state government, one they all share, one that Jackie Cilley danced around during her campaign for governor, while trying to avoid the words “sales and income tax.”
So should we trust Jackie Cilley Democrat Bill O’Neil when he says things like this?
O’Neil would support a temporary gas tax under certain provisions. “I’d vote for a short-term usage tax to repair roads and bridges that have been closed or in need of immediate repair,” he said. “It would be a short-term fix and then we’d work on a long-term fix.”
I don’t recall when Democrat leadership ever rolled a tax back, in fact their tendency is to raise taxes again and again–because government must always get bigger and do more. Bill does point to the idea of a long term fix. Could that fix be an expanding sales or income tax? You would be right to be suspicious of that.
O’Neil’s endorsement of Cilley suggests other real world baggage. Does O’Neil support scrabbling after one-time federal money to make state government bigger, complete with all the strings, even if it leaves us holding spending promises for which there is no local revenue? Cilley did. Would Bill do the same?
Does O’Neil support the late-night, last minute, budget circus that creates taxes without public input and counts money from land sales when no one knows what land and to whom it will be sold? Cilley was a ring leader of repeated budget circuses, but no bread. They just tried to take more of it from the mouths of New Hampshire families to grow the state during a recession.
And Does Mr. O’Neil believe that state union employees should work as a privileged class–paying less of their own benefits than their private-sector counterparts? Do state employees deserve raises even when the average private sector worker has seen their annual incomes decline and their wages and hours eroded by a corrosive economy? Do state union employees get a waiver? Is Mr. O’Neil content to blame someone else instead, to excuse making the state bigger on the backs of taxpayers instead of doing what is right for the people who are tasked with paying for those raises and benefits while their own lifestyles and retirement accounts decline year afer year?
Bill O’Neil is a “Jackie Cilley” Democrat. To be perfectly honest, we simply cannot afford him. And if Manchester Republicans just get up and go vote, we can keep one more rubber stamp Democrat out of the progressive hand of tax and spend liberals in Concord.
7:57 am Update– I removed the fat-fingered extra ‘l’ in Bill’s name from the post title, added an image, edited a few awkward sentences.
