Grant Bosse has a great piece over at NH Watchdog that addresses the hyperbole of New Hampshire Governor Maggie Hassan on the state budget and its priorities. Hassan has decided to ignore the striking similarities between her budget, the House version, and the Senate version, and has instead chosen to release her talking points to the professional left so they will be equipped to shout down anyone who dares point out the obvious.
Quoting Grant…
My colleague Joshua-Elliott Traficante at the Josiah Bartlett Center finds that the governor’s budget, the House budget, and the budget up for debate by the full Senate this week have nearly identical priorities for the critical areas that Hassan claims are at risk.
All three budgets would spend $138,486,334 on developmental services in Fiscal Year 2014 and $148,758,998 in 2015, up from $127,905,281 this year. How’s that for bipartisan cooperation? The Senate Finance Committee cut and pasted Hassan’s budget proposal, a 15 percent increase in two-year general fund spending on developmental services. How’s that for bipartisan cooperation?
Hassan and the House budget set aside $127,688,005 for behavioral health, a 16.77 percent general fund increase over two years. The Senate plan includes $127,606,940, a 16.70 percent increase. Apparently, that 0.07 percent makes all the difference.
So what is Hassan saying about that 0.07%?
“While the Senate Finance Committee has…unfortunately chosen the fiscally irresponsible approach of sweeping, across-the-board cuts instead of being forthright about the programs they would eliminate. These deep cuts to Health and Human Services and employees will cost hundreds of jobs and put at risk critical areas, including mental health care, funding the wait-list for people with developmental disabilities, the CHINS program, and the ability to deliver basic services.”
I think Maggie’s been reading to many DNC Sequester palm cards.
Grant goes on to point out that the only glaring difference in all three budgets is in the amount of Medicaid taxes that will be available. The Democrats are projecting huge sums, the Republicans are not. The difference is the distinction; we know the Democrats lie about revenue to spend money that does not exist as a motivating force to shift cost burdens on to the backs of New Hampshire families in future “necessary” tax increases. And New Hampshire Democrats have little to no credibility at all when it comes to revenue estimates while the Republicans can be expected (big picture) to come within a percentage point of bulls-eye.
Now use that as a filter against Democrat Governor Hassan’s demagoguery and it is safe to say who we should be calling Bullsh*t on in this scenario. And when it comes to the reality of revenues the GOP majority New Hampshire Senate is not alone on this matter. According to Bosse…(emphasis mine)
The major disparity between the House and Senate budgets is in uncompensated care. The governor and the House are counting on huge increase in the Medicaid Enhancement Tax, which the Senate, the New Hampshire Hospital Association, and Hassan’s own Medicaid director agree are unrealistic. With less revenue coming in, the Senate sends less money back to hospitals. This has nothing to do with the critical Health and Human Services programs Hassan cites.
Hassan ignores her own “‘experts,” and decides it is better to play politics, essentially lying to–and at the very least misleading–anyone who reads her complaints without further investigation. This is deceptive marketing. It is purely political, and it is not how you bring civility back to Concord?
So is the Hassan and the Democrat House’ Enhancement Tax over-estimate just a political ploy? Considering how late the budget was, can we surmise that the over-inflated revenue figures were planted with a full knowledge that responsible Republicans in the Senate would recommend a more realistic figure, there-by giving the lying leftists a talking-point chit to play against them in the next election cycle?
Listen again to the language the Governor uses when we know all three HHS budgets are almost identical…
Fiscally irresponsible. Across the board (meaning indiscriminate) cuts. Deep cuts. Cost hundreds of jobs. Risk to patients with mental health and disabilities.
And it is BS, every word of it. If it is not a blatant political lie for political points then is Maggie Hassan just some insane idiot?
Grant goes on to remind us that any back of the budget cuts Hassan might use to fuel her current smear are not dissimilar to her own, to ones she has supported in the past as a state Senator, to ones Governor Lynch actually asked for, and to what generally passes for run-of-the-mill New Hampshire budgetary mechanics.
And I’d point out that any discrepancy in revenue could easily be made up by asking the mass of HHS related employees to simply pay a little bit more of their own retirements instead of asking Taxpayers to do it for them. A one or two percent adjustment in retirement savings out of the HHS employees paychecks would free up loads of cash, save any mystical at risk jobs, fund whatever magical underfunded programs Hassan might be referring to, and maybe even cover some of that imagined revenue for uncompensated care.
Or am I right, and this is just another political chess move by the professional left in the Granite State?
