New Hampshire can and has bucked the national mid-term trend, but not always. Turnout, of course, is the thing that matters. Issues and debate are important, but turnout decides who wins. In the Granite State. Despite being saddled with useless left-wing tools in Congress, it has consistently preferred Republican Governors and Republican legislative leaders for the majority of the past decade. The results, locally if not always perfectly, have consistently moved in the right direction.
We’ve reduced taxes and eliminated others. Economic, educational, and health freedoms have all improved. We are attracting businesses and investment from neighboring states thanks to these advances, which increase jobs, broaden the revenue streams and the tax base, which means we can keep lowering or eliminating taxes, which, by design, is meant to lead to a reduction in the size and scope of state government.
The Statewide Education property tax is open to attack on Constitutional grounds, as are local taxes to fund government schools. I would not expect much new on either anytime soon, but the matter stands to change learning and how it gets funded, which could reduce taxes further without adding new ones.
Republicans tried repeatedly to pass resolutions and amendments to ban income taxes in the Granite State. Democrats couldn’t bring themselves to support that because they can’t.
Whatever you may think the election in November is about in New Hampshire, it is about taxes.
Andru Volinsky and other leading Democrats have figured this out and proposed, on the State House steps no less, implementing a 3 percent income tax and a $ 3-per-$1,000-of-valuation new state property tax. A $ 3-per-$1,000 state property tax could, for many homeowners, increase their property tax by $1,800 on a home valued at $600,000. Volinsky, to his credit, is being honest — funding the court mandate means an income tax and a state property tax.
This is the extraordinary dilemma of the court funding mandate and why voters should take with more than a grain of salt any Democrat who claims it can be done easily. It will require many new or higher taxes: business taxes for starters, then a state property tax and an income tax.
And that is before taking into account the wild spending blitz proposed by Democrats in the New Hampshire Senate over the previous two years. Democrats actually proposed a spending spree — not just $536 million — that topped out at $1.75 billion, with barely a word about how to pay for it. If that’s not a direct road map to an income tax and a state property tax, what is?
Comrade Volinsky sells his street Mountebank tonic as a cure for local property tax ills, but he is either lying or bad at math. Local spending isn’t going to magically go down. In fact, I’m not familiar with any examples of that, and school funding is 70% of local taxes. You can’t say we need more money for education and claim that this will lower the tax burden.
Volinsky is also very much a product of his party; he must therefore know that government always grows, spending rises, budgets bloat, and whatever deception his magic formula pretends, reality will soon expose. That its actual purpose is to create by law the mechanism to tax income and commerce so that the state has the means to turn New Hampshire into Connecticut or New Jersey, two states who used the same lie as Volinsky and NHDems) or Massachusetts Vermont, New York, Californian, or any of the Blue states bleeding residents and wealth creators to states like Florida, Texas, and for the moment, New Hampshire.
Democrats will grow government, but they need to steal money from you to do it. To get that money, they will lie about anything, but especially taxes.
Democrats admit to wanting to raise taxes and reinstate old ones that have been repealed.
Democrats admit by their priorities that they think government is a better conduit for your money than you are, and they are right in one respect. They will spend your money on things important to them that you never would, so they want to use force to make you pay for them.
There is no end to the list of things, so they will, if given the opportunity, take more of your money by whatever means are available. Income tax, sales tax, hike transaction, license, and registration fees. Create new fees and broader, more broad-based statewide taxes. And in doing so, because we’ve seen this before, they will have to lower reimbursements to the local level to pay for the ever-increasing size of state government.
They will overestimate revenues to create shortfalls to justify new and higher taxes. They did it after they won in 2006 and in 2008. We have them quoted on these pages. We have the lists of taxes they tried to create to fill those budget holes. The $ 800 million structural deficit they created with one-time Federal money to pave the way for higher state taxes.
There is no form of Democrat-led anything that doesn’t result in more and higher taxes, and in the case of New Hampshire, an effort to create taxing authority and government infrastructure that will make New Hampshire as undesirable as New York, Vermont, California, and Massachusetts.
If you want that so much, you can just move there, but instead of doing that, NH Dems would rather ruin the New Hampshire Advantage. It makes you wonder what else might be wrong with them.
