If the Legislature Added Ten Cents to the Cost of the Nashua Telegraph, Would That Be a Tax? - Granite Grok

If the Legislature Added Ten Cents to the Cost of the Nashua Telegraph, Would That Be a Tax?

PaintThe Nashua Telegraph is behind a pay wall I wouldn’t waste ten cents to get past but I can still read the snippets, and this one was enough to make me laugh.

CONCORD – A growing program to permit homeowners to empty their garages and basements of old paint fell victim to political branding in the state Senate on Thursday. Most New England states have this program,…

The “political branding” they speak of is the idea that this is a Paint tax.  I suspect they are following the Concord Monitor, and many Democrats, in insisting that costs created by force of law are not a tax.  They are.  But the bigger sin is actually having the political sense to brand it as such.

But that was not what caught my attention.  This was; “Most New England States have this…”

You know what else the have?

“Most New England states” have broad-based taxes, lower standards of living, higher rates of welfare, less positive health outcomes, higher unemployment, higher overall taxation, less transparency, highly paid legislatures with more politicians in prison, and a few score other things that New Hampshire has not yet chosen to grow into.

In related news, I can’t find any stories about how New Hampshire’s flora and fauna are in constant danger from lone-wolf latex-weilding envrio-terrorists despoiling the landscape with household paint.   I wouldn’t put it past the post-paint-tax Telegraph to go looking for them, but we do not have this problem because most towns advertise collection days where people can…wait for it…empty their garages and basements of old paint and…drop it off at a collection point.

There is also the option to use the paint, or just open the can and let it dry out–then you can toss it in the regular trash without a worry.

I know, I know, but then you don’t get people used to a new tax that you don’t really need for that nonexistent problem.  A tax you could tweak later to pilfer for other spending, kind of the way the new gas tax works.

On the other hand, if there is no new tax for something we don’t actually need, then no future legislature could ever raise it a penny or two, here and there, to replace the money they pilfered, here and there, the way they always have, to pay for the pleasure of spending other people’s money.

After all, the new gas tax increase was the foot in the door the Democrats have been longing for, one they could never have gotten had the so-called Republicans in the so-called Republican state senate, not been the leg attached to the foot a foot that made that tax increase even possible.

The end of the paint tax does not absolve them of that heresy, but it does irritate the Nashua Telegraph, which means it has to have been a good vote.

And I suppose I should ask them the same question I posed for the Concord Monitor.  If the Legislature added a dime to the cost of the Nashua Telegraph, would that be a tax?

H/T – Feedly, since I can’t link to “nothing,” might as well give credit to my newsreader.

>