Dances With Bureaucrats - Granite Grok

Dances With Bureaucrats

bureaucracyNew Hampshire’s Senior Senator, Jeanne Shaheen speaks for every Congressional delegation, and most if not all Democrats in our state, when she talks about New Hampshire being a donor state. For those not versed, it means we give more tax dollars to the Federal Government than it gives back. The Democrats, with Shaheen in the lead, evoke this disparity as justification for whatever  legislative gymnastics may be required to correct the described injustice (created, ironically, by generations of like-minded, meddling, top-down, progressives like Jeanne Shaheen).

But just last year the Senior Senator had an opportunity to do something to correct this–to some  degree–by keeping more money from leaving New Hampshire in the first place. Something that could free her to attend to more pressing matters than chasing money around Washington DC if–in fact–there is anything more pressing than that for a US Senator to be doing.

But when given the opportunity to keep a majority of the Federal gas tax dollars from ever leaving New Hampshire, Senator Shaheen voted against the measure.  She chose to fund an unnecessary and incompetent bureaucracy at the expense of her own taxpayers.

Had it become law, instead of hiking a regressive tax that hits our”most vulnerable” the hardest, we might have found ourselves flush in Highway fund money; an additional $141 million a year, as much as the existing (circa 2014) state tax of 0.18/gallon is estimated to have scooped up annually.

In exchange we’d do our best on our honor to care for all the surface roads, bridges, highways, and by-ways within our political borders without the added expense of a massive Federal bureaucracy nibbling away at our contributions. A savings that could have made it equitable to lower the state gas tax and give some money back to the people “hit hardest” by regressive taxes.

But there are side effects to voting based on your rhetoric.

Doubling your highway fund take-home pay without having to court a sitting US Senator or pig-wrestle with distant pencil-pushers devalues their currency. It also obviates the need for the annual Concord gas-tax dinner and dance, an affair that like the song Hotel California, is one you can check out of (anytime you like) but you can never leave. Oh, and an entire chapter in the Ray Buckley Book of Class Warfare Rhetoric would be as out-of-date with reality as that Constitution-thing those ancient, white-male-powdered-wig-wearing slave-owners thrust upon the public back in 1787.

But to borrow from John Lennon, Imagine?

Imagine the reality of it all, and not just the bit about the Feds no longer sneaking off with $141 million in gas taxes every year. If New Hampshire really is a donor state, then were the Feds to abruptly end the practice of forced extraction of wealth we’d have more money than we have now for whatever it is everyone who likes that sort of thing insists we need  more of it for–without actually paying more taxes.

Sure, we’d need to figure out how and where to recollect some of that sum to address spending based on money we currently tithe to the pit-monster in DC, but there’s already that much and more here before they take it. By removing thousands of post-trans-racial-genderless-taxpayer-funded-bi-pedal-carbon-based-life-forms (see also, bureaucrats, federal overhead, waste, fraud, and abuse) the net result would be more money in the hands of the people who earned it, the potential for an even lower overall tax burden, and a lot more local control.

There is another opportunity for the Senior Senator Shaheen to support legislation that would embrace a keep the money here strategy. A Senate bill that prevents a majority of the gas tax dollars collected from ever leaving New Hampshire is back on deck.

Does Shaheen trust her own state’s legislature enough to support such a thing? Does she trust members of her own party in elected government to apportion such funds without the guidance of bureaucrats who like monks in distant abbeys interpret byzantine tomes filled with regulatory dogma.

Dare she cut out the thousands lined up at the trough between the point of taxation and the stated expense for which the tax was levied?

I can tell you with certainty that Jeanne Shaheen will vote against it because she prefers to dance with Lobbyists and Bureaucrats than commoners (In fact, that could be her Indian Name–Dances with Bureaucrats–were she to discover she is 1/164th native American or something.)

All you need for proof is to make an honest list of all the truly public events, personal appearance’s or physical town halls that Senator Shaheen has held (not by invitation or controlled by the party) since elected to the US Senate. None?

Whatever the tally is is a very (very) small number.  It is a small number because she only needs you to be convinced to not vote for her opponents and to tolerate the massive theft of your rights by state election policy (her nod to local control) that allows anyone from anywhere permission to show up on election day to keep her down in DC so she can direct the money to all the right people and projects from as far away from you as possible.

 

 

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