Like I showed here, Obama and Pack of Progressive Pukes have been all agog about the parade of horribles in what the impending DEVASTATING cuts are going do to us all…oh wait, it’s only $44 Billion this year and in the chart in the post shows how small this 2.4% cut really is. Finally, the truth of this has been evident and and the pushback has started on this Obama created crisis. Funny how he has been “called out” by the House Republicans – they basically ignore him. Obama is always a Community Organizer and has to have a cudgel in order to be effective. Once again, he tried to make the Repubs “the enemy”, but when famed journalist Bob Woodward dropped the dime that it was the White House’s idea originally, the Repubs “went dark” and refused to play. Tomorrow we start finding out how much Obama hates the Republicans by seeing how much pain he’s about to unleash on the public. Will he tell non-essential bureaucrats at the EPA to go home or keep the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln from sailing to the Middle East? Will he furlough Border agents or send non-essential Commerce employees home?
Growing up and later in the ring side seat as a local Budget Committee, I’ve heard (and been yelled at) the screams of Government workers “how DARE you cut my budget”! “What do you MEAN I have to pay more for my own healthcare costs”? “Do you know what 5% will do to my department”?? It is always: “why should I have to have my paycheck cut?” or “Don’t you see how crime will soar”? or “You wouldn’t want it to be YOUR house that catches fire”?…..you get the idea. It just seems that at any level of government, how DARE a sacred dollar be removed!
Of course, Guv Maggie has been crying in her cups as well about how the Federal monies are going to affect NH. Isn’t she doing a similar thing on her own with her own budget?
Six thousand people are supposed to have their jobs affected. Having been laid off multiple times as the computer industry has had several disruptive technologies run through it and the companies I worked for imploded, I know what it is like, but please, do the math: 6,000 out of 1.3 million people in the State. The truth is the chart here; NH is well “positioned” to weather this “financial sprinkle” better than most other states. School districts, National Guard, towns, State employees – there is risk to some degree.
I decried, two biennials ago, that the supermajority Democrats in Concord were mimicking supermajority Dems in DC. Now, we see it all over again – raise taxes and submit bad budgets. The US Senate with Majority Leader Harry Reid (Democrat-Nevada) has yet to pass a budget in 1,400 days – disobeying the law (after all, laws are only for the little people). Now Maggie is playing the same Pied Piper game – except she’s following the example of Harry (which makes her….). And there is also that small little detail that she deliberately has put an $80 million hole (let’s call it for what it is, shall we? When the entity that is supposed to be throwing off all that money can’t even legally exist yet, well, how is that any better than getting mad at DC, eh Maggie?
While on my town’s Budget Committee, and being a political blogger, it was not difficult to see the financial storm clouds gathering. Concord was making all kinds of efforts to extract more money from taxable entities and making all kinds a slick accounting gimmicks to hide the deficit. I kept telling the locals “this is not sustainable, keep the budget tight as we CANNOT depend on, we cannot trust, that Concord will continue to send the money it has promised. I warned them over and over – this downturn is going to last for a few years yet and MAY get even worse. It is time to make the town self-sufficient with respect outside money, because when it crashes, I will say “I told you so”. And then it started two years later when the news came down that the State wasn’t going to “keep their promise” with respect to how much it was going to pay towards the retirement of local employees (consider this a warning when it comes to Social Security) as the now-in-charge-Republicans had to set things straight. I just sat that…would have been smiling if it wasn’t so serious. Things did have to get cut to to meet that new (and high) burden.
Free money only breeds dependence.
And now Maggie is complaining about the consequence of the State being dependent on the Feds? And she STILL put in that $80 million of faux bucks into her first budget? At the risk of offending everyone in a single post, we come back to one of the words that political animals hate the most: Consistency
You dance with the devil, you enter that hot, hot kingdom and you get burnt. When you take the money, you dance the dance that’s called – there are ALWAYS strings attached. And we all know that free money to a politician is “political crack” – one taste and you gets hooked. Long ago, the Feds gave a sniff to NH Pols and they got hooked and the State is in the state of dependance. $1 Trillion / year deficit for the last 5 years running – and looks like a few more years at the same pace. How LONG can the Federal Government continue to borrow before it runs out? Mark my words, the “rain” that has been falling down to the States from the Feds will soon be slowing down.
Will our “smartest people in the room” see the Sequester, not as a time to kvetch, not as a Chicken Little time, but a wakeup call to say “um, there is a BIG storm coming down and time to batten our State’s system”.
Live Free or Die; sometimes to be Free one has to be willing to live on just a little less. But continuing to Live Dependent will surely trigger that second clause.