New Hampshire has been doing something crazy. Lowering taxes. Business taxes have systematically been reduced for years. Small. Incremental. Persistent. Drew Cline wrote a piece debunking the lies that this harmed New Hampshire somehow.
The Republican Legislature also repealed the state’s only tax on income (we don’t have a traditional income tax on individual wages) — the interest and dividends tax. And while many people invest and earn on those investments, this tax has the side effect of hitting older residents most often. People who took risks to grow the wealth they’d need after retirement.
The Interest and divided Tax is a tax on retirees who have already paid taxes all their lives. Taking more from them now just doesn’t seem fair. That’s how the left would sell it if they were not a bunch of crooks obsessed with stealing other people’s stuff. They want to tax, but we have this tradition.
New Hampshire has had no-tax and no-income-tax pledges for years. Many candidates for higher office (mostly) line up to sign them or plant some sort of no-new-tax flag—even the liars who intend to tax us anyway. Now and again, someone (a Democrat) will refuse to make a no-income-tax pledge. Or, they make fun of the pledge (which makes sense for Lefties who have the intention of honoring it).
Some promise taxes but that they will reduce other taxes, which is a bald-faced lie. Democrats always grow government and are always looking for more revenue. Therefore, the total tax burden will always rise when they have power and taxes with them. Democrats only have one budget strategy: Spend more. And then more. That means more and higher taxes.
Former Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig is running against former US Senator Kelly Ayotte to replace His Excellency Governor Sununu. Craig has insisted she would veto any tax hike, but that’s an obvious lie. She is a Democrat. Growing government and spending your money are her verbs. If they had the votes, the party leadership would push tax after tax at her and pressure her to sign them. A few would be head fakes, but she’d sign most of them. She’d have to, to pay for a bloated budget – dems can’t write any other kind.
We’d see a repeat of the 2006-2008 years with little hope of another O’Brien supermajority in the next election to cut all that fat. The Republican class of 2011-2012 cut the state budget by over 1.2 billion, all one-time money Democrats had spent on things they meant to make permanent line items.
Craig, for her part, is no different from those Democrats, nor are any others in the state much different from her, but she has persisted in her claim that she’d veto tax hikes. The only exception appears to be the interest and dividends tax. According to her opponent, Kelly Ayotte.
- In August, Craig told the Keene Sentinel she would roll back the I&D income tax repeal and raise taxes by $160 million.
- In September, after coming back from fundraising in California, Craig doubled down on her support for a $160 million tax hike for New Hampshire seniors, retirees, and small businesses.
- During a debate last week hosted by the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce, Craig said she was “open to increasing the threshold” for her tax hike and said it would only be $80 million.
- During an interview on The Pulse of NH with Jack Heath, the Union Leader’s Kevin Landrigan called Craig’s tax hike a “moving target” because of Craig’s inability to say what her plan would cost.
Moving target? Rule number one for Democrat spenders (sorry, budget writers) is to estimate revenues as high as possible so that you can spend that money now and then insist that tax hikes are necessary to avoid budget cuts when the money never shows up. That’s how we got what we did by the spring of 2010, which led to proposed LLC taxes, Tent Taxes, and selling sections of highways between state departments and claiming it as revenue.
Democrats get into office so they can use the state to steal your money to fund things that are only important to them. There are no examples where this is not true, and there is no world in which they would not (at some point) try to use the government to take more from you, including your right to disagree or object, and they can’t deny either charge. To do so would mean opposing the Government Democrats built in DC. That’s the role model. To follow Vermont down the same dark bottomless hole. But New England has five states on that trajectory already. Do we need another one?
Don’t people deserve “choice?” How about we keep being different? And if you don’t like it, …move. You won’t have to travel far to find more taxes, regulations, crime, corruption, incompetence, homelessness, poverty, and the ceaseless nanny-state interference that follows Democrat rule. We’re surrounded by it.
And they’ll be happy to take more of your money.
