NH law prohibits our joining the Transportation Climate Initiative (TCI). But that protection is one majority away from being gone, and if a Democrat is Governor, they’ll hitch us to this sick horse.
If you need to catch up on TCI, look here, but the problem is this. TCI, like RGGI, abrogates taxing power to an unelected board with a promise that it will reduce emissions. Another laundromat for processing new money into old political hands. In both cases, once joined, the Initiative managers decide when and how much fuel providers will be taxed, a number that never goes down and always hits low and middle-income workers and families hardest.
You can’t remove them from their “office” or elect replacements.
Related: Massachusetts Climate Change Apparatchik Says the Quiet Part Out Loud.
Across our unprotected Southern Border, the progressive Cartels in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut have embraced the agreement in principle and are eager to join. But a group of activists in Massachusetts is trying to build a wall between progressive Republican Charlie Baker and a new revenue stream.
The referendum calls for updating state law to declare that gas and other fuel supplies “will not be reduced or restricted by the imposition of any tax, fee, other revenue generating mechanism, or market based compliance mechanism.”
Paul Craney, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, said the pro-business group co-founded by billionaire Rick Green supports the effort because, the group believes, the climate pact will “force working families and middle-class Massachusetts to subsidize electric vehicles for the affluent.”
A ballot question is no guarantee of success in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts. Past legislatures have seen fit to override or ignore ballot questions, but there’s not much else hope. The state well is poisoned with progressive politics. People in Massachusetts vote Democrat because that’s what people do.
And there is ample evidence to suggest that past “incentives” by the government to “green” vehicles have benefited people who can already afford them.
TCI adds regressive price pressure on people who can’t afford it so politicians can pad their resumes to impress people who can.
It’s perverse, and Democrats in Massachusetts need to stop rubberstamping that by re-electing the same Democrats year after year or the same policies pushed by others.
Of course, if the ballot question fails to get approved or just fails when voters get their say, New Hampshire will welcome your drivers with open arms as even more of them stream across the border to buy motor fuel, cigarettes, alcohol, fireworks, and whatever else they can for less before trudging back home to Massachusetts.
Assuming we in the Granite State have the sense to keep that advantage alive.
