Dave Solomon at the New Hampshire Union Leader is reporting that New Hampshire state revenues are $100 million over budget for the year. And guess what?
Business taxes account for the largest share of the state’s revenue, and have brought in much more money than budget writers anticipated, …Receipts from business taxes are $74.5 million over plan for the 12 months, or 13.2 percent, accounting for three quarters of the surplus.
That is after Republicans insisted on a cut to business taxes that state Democrats poo-pooed. Democrats State Senator Jeff Woburn, speaking for the collectivist mind of his party, opposed the reductions saying, “we should be building the economy from the bottom up.”
Isn’t that what small business owners do when they hire people?
For those unfamiliar, the Governor vetoed the budget because it had business tax cuts in it. A reformed version, giving her almost everything she wanted plus the business tax cuts, was signed into law. But let’s not get away from my point.
“The tax relief to employers that went in effect this year has been an unqualified success,” said Greg Moore, state director for the New Hampshire chapter of Americans for Prosperity.
“While Governor Hassan said these tax cuts would ‘blow a $90 million hole in the state budget,’ she couldn’t have been more wrong. Instead, our businesses have responded by hiring more staff and growing our economy at a rate we haven’t seen in decades. When we made the case for cutting some of the highest business taxes in the country two years ago, we said it would spur on a wave of growth, and the state’s revenue for this year absolutely validates our point,” said Moore.
Democrats are all for more tax revenue, but what they like the power taxation gives the government. The higher the tax or, the more complicated the method of applying it, the more power they have to control the behavior of both the people paying in and the people they are buying off.
I don’t have the quotes handy, but I bet more than a handful of New Hampshire Democrats parroted Governor Hassan’s “tax cuts will punch a $90 million dollar hole in the budget” narrative. Given how bad she is at math I would not be surprised if the Democrat state party apparatus fed her the figure.
An apparatus that, quoting the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute, insisted that the business tax cuts (which they identify as revenue loss) would only benefit a few companies in the state. That image fits nicely with their narrative that Republicans are corporate shills. Sadly for NHFPI and the NH Democrat party, the people who benefited most appear to be citizens who got jobs.
Over 9900 jobs have been added since January 2016, with the total labor force rising to 743,620, as of May of this year. Unemployment rolls are down by about 9300, year over year.
Did only a few companies hire almost 10,000 people since January?
Slay another political class meme, sold by a progressive policy institute and the State’s own Department of Revenue Administration–which also declared that revenue loss, as if the money belongs to them, would not be worth the trouble. Wrong!
Businesses built the economy from the bottom up, not through government handouts but by employing people who wanted work in productive jobs that generate, wait for it, more tax revenue. (Welfare recipients are notoriously poor sources of tax revenue but increasingly reliable voters for the Democrats who pay them off with your tax dollars.)
All without the “help” of resource sapping revenue milking bureaucratic middle managers (Democrat donors) working in government, and elected politicians like Jeff Woodburn and Maggie Hassan, who think they know better how to spend the money New Hampshire business owners create.
They don’t.
