Maggie Hassan keeps saying we need to have a conversation about taxes. We have them all the time. The difference is that Democrats talk about raising them (hundreds of them), and Republicans talk about controlling or lowering them. And then there are the conversations about taxes that slip out when you are least expecting them to.
We get just such an example from the September 19th Gubernatorial debate on business and the economy; when asked about RGGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas initiative, Candidate Hassan said this…
I was proud to be a sponsor of that tax, eh, the energy efficiency program because it has saved businesses millions and millions of dollars and created over 400 jobs.
That’s a notable quote right there.
“I was proud to be a sponsor of that tax” – Maggie Hassan
Is she also proud of the fact that she abrogated a portion of the legislatures taxing power, and the people’s ability to control that through elections, by handing it over to an unelected board at RGGI? How about after this bit of recent news that between 1997 and 2012 the earth has warmed zero degrees? Is she proud of a tax based on a scheme that serves no practical purpose other than to redistribute wealth so it can be “managed” by Democrats like Maggie Hassan?
And maybe she’d like to explain how “taxing” every business and individual in the state under such circumstances (through forced rate increases) is anything but the coercive will of the state redistributing wealth to advance it’s own agenda?
As it happens, I just posted a quote today that perfectly describes this and informs us of what it is Maggie is actually proud of…
As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power. There will be no economic or social questions that would not be political questions in the sense that their solution will depend exclusively on who wields the coercive power, on whose are the views that will prevail on all occasions.
-F. A. Hayek
Maggie insists her tax created jobs and saved businesses millions, but even if that were true–even if it were possible–she would first have to remove those millions of dollars (and by default potentially suppress, prevent, or delay job creation) when her tax extracted it from the hands of those who earned it in the first place, denying them the opportunity to freely make those decisions for themselves.
Maggie Hassan is, as Hayek describes, more interested in wielding the coercive power of the state so that her views may prevail on all occasions. If she were the opposite, she would oppose taxes like RGGI and instead incentivize small businesses to do their own energy optimizations by offering to have the State tax them less for making their own effort. To encourage them to use their own money, to save more of their own money, to then invest however they like.
But she is a Democrat. She does not trust them to spend their money on her priorities, so she is proud to tax it from them instead so that she can decide how they should “save money” or what will “create jobs”–as if she can answer these questions for every business owner in the entire state who must pay her tax instead of investing those earnings as they will.
