Low Hanging Fruit

Last week the New Hampshire House voted against a bill to let taxpayers adopt charter provisions establishing limitations on the growth of budgets and taxes.  The actual short text reads as follows:

This bill authorizes cities and towns to adopt charter provisions establishing limitations on the growth of budgets and taxes.

For those not familiar with New Hampshire, residents can already adopt provisions to limit growth and taxes, but the teacher’s unions and the pro-government folks don’t like it.  So they do everything in their power to make it as difficult as they can.  They gum up the petition process.  They try to intimidate people, mess with them about the procedure or the number of good signatures, or anything else they can think of.  All this just to keep the thing from getting (what does Obama call it?) and up or down vote, in this case from the people (see also-taxpayers) who live in that particular town.

They can’t even trust the people to let them vote on it. 

If that doesn’t work, the town selectman, councilors, alderman, will try to keep it off the ballot or schedule it when it has the best possible chance of failing.  If that doesn’t work a well funded national union pr some faux-local non-profit NGO pretending to be a taxpayer advocacy group (as in they advocate taxpayers paying more taxes but won’t admit as much), files a lawsuit that no average bunch of citizens could hope to fight.  It’s all very burdensome.

So much so that at the end of the day the mere weight of the process scares most people from even trying which is exactly the message the tax and spenders want to send.  So its a form of intimidation to keep people from trying to limit the size and scope of government at its lowest level.

Such is the nature of man versus the machine.  Town politics are not any different from national.

So the bill, HB 1522, was meant to grease the skids so to speak. To make it easier for people to add a warrant article to better manage spending, so that any municipality could vote for itself to pass or kill the idea should someone even take the time to petition for it. Passage did not mandate anything excpet making it less likley you’d get sued for trying.  Unfortunately for us, we have a majority democrat legislature until November, and they don’t trust us to vote the way they would like us too, so they prefer to keep things all complicated and scary so that most people won’t bother to challenge the status quo of more government more often.

For a blogger like me, a vote like this is low hanging fruit, just waiting to be picked.

So as is my habit of late, I felt that you deserved to know who those people were that won’t trust you to vote for more taxes and spending than you can afford, and to be honest–it pisses off the liberals, and I enjoy that quite a bit too.

Here are the names of all the ‘elected’ officials in the NH House who voted yea (on the ITL) to kill HB 1522. All so that the process of just getting to a vote to establish limitation(s) on the growth of budgets and spending in your town government would continue to be as backbreaking as possible.