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To the Editor:
Those protesting the new House budget in Concord last week have one thing in common, they want NH taxpayers to open their wallets for their personal benefit.
Most protesters were public employees demanding no changes to their cushy, secure, low stress, highly compensated (compared to similar private sector) jobs, nor to the corrupt system that maintains their great jobs, benefits, and consequently grows the cost of government .
So in the face of this economic catastrophe, which the democrats happily sold as a disaster not unlike a Biblical plague, what did NH Democrats do? They decided that despite that we were going to take in 23% more revenue than we did when times were “good” and went on a grow government spending spree. You could call that a revenue problem, but I think it is really more of a democrats are selfish, ideological, tax and spend A-holes problem.
Budget – will it go up, or down. Here in NH, like most states, the budget HAS to be balanced. During the last 2 legislative sessions, the Dems pushed spending up 25%, using a bunch of accounting gimmickry and taking advantage of the mean trick on the backs of our grandkids by accepting "free Federal money" to help support that spending frenzy. Well, the bill came due and the Republicans in Concord have done the adult thing and said "no mas" to that unsupportable amount of spending.
Problem still remains: that of the Federal Govt. There, the Dems have held sway and true to form, they just threw not dollar bills into the air, but thousand-dollar bills into the air, thinking "there, great governance on our part". Yeah, Hope on a massive scale. What’s it gonna give us if nothing is done? Yeah, massive debt, as seen by this chart:
The right side of the chart? If we leave the current spending by Obama and his merry band of Progressive / Marxist / Socialist cohorts alone, that’s where we end up -> a bigger version of Greece. Same result, however, less spending and more hurt. That’s what happens when children-politicians decide to no longer delay self-gratification (or in this case instant gratification of their sycophant unions that keep them in power). As any family knows, spend beyond a certain point, and all the family income goes to debt service – it DOES affect the things that a family can then do (trust me, when TMEW became ill and I had to shut our small biz down, I know what it is like).
That green part? Congressman Paul Ryan’s blueprint for a more adult way of…
Bookmark this
NH House Republican Press conference on the Budget and their legislative accomplishments this year.
Someone asked…who didn’t vote on HB1 and HB2. Who are these reps anyway? OK, we’re here to deliver. HB 1 here, HB 2 on the jump!
[update] So everyone knows, I am not passing judgment here, just posting the list. Plenty of these folks will have been excused, or approved absences, even important or necessary business that kept them away or took them away from the State House. Your job is verify the absences of your reps if they concern you, and if you are unable to find good cause, discuss it with them as time permits.
Only four democrats skipped the vote on HB 1 while twenty six Republicans did not cast a vote.
| House Rep | Party | County | District | Vote |
| Beattie, Thomas | Republican | Hillsborough | 17 | Not Voting |
| Belanger, Ronald | Republican | Rockingham | 4 | Not Voting |
| Brosseau, Charles | Republican | Grafton | 6 | Not Voting |
| Coughlin, Sean | Republican | Hillsborough | 6 | Not Voting |
| DeJong, Cameron | Republican | Hillsborough | 9 | Not Voting |
| Dowling, Patricia | Republican | Rockingham | 5 | Not Voting |
| Dwinell, Richard | Republican | Cheshire | 5 | Not Voting |
| Eaton, Stephanie | Republican | Grafton | 1 | Not Voting |
| Emerton, Larry | Republican | Hillsborough | 7 | Not Voting |
| Flanders, Donald | Republican | Belknap | 4 | Not Voting |
| Hawkes, Samuel | Democrat | Cheshire | 3 | Not Voting |
| Hogan, Timothy | Republican | Hillsborough | 23 | Not Voting |
| Hutchinson, Karen | Republican | Rockingham | 3 | Not Voting |
| Huxley, Robert | Republican | Hillsborough | 3 | Not Voting |
| Keane, Thomas | Republican | Merrimack | 13 | Not Voting |
| Kingsbury, Robert | Republican | Belknap | 4 | Not Voting |
| Larsen, Kirst en |
Republican | Strafford | 2 | Not Voting |
| Moody, Marcia | Democrat | Rockingham | 12 | Not Voting |
| Parison, James | Republican | Hillsborough | 3 | Not Voting |
| Peckham, Michele | Republican | Rockingham | 13 | Not Voting |
| Pelletier, Marsha | Democrat | Strafford | 5 | Not Voting |
| Pepino, Leo | Republican | Hillsborough | 11 | Not Voting |
| Quandt, Matt | Republican | Rockingham | 13 | Not Voting |
| Roberts, Kris | Democrat | Cheshire | 3 | Not Voting |
| Sapienza, Marie | Republican | Rockingham | 8 | Not Voting |
| Simpson, Tyler | Republican | Belknap | 1 | Not Voting |
| Souza, Kathleen | Republican | Hillsborough | 11 | Not Voting |
| Stroud, Kathleen | Republican | Hillsborough | 19 | Not Voting |
| Summers, James | Republican | Hillsborough | 26 | Not Voting |
| Terrio, Ross | Republican | Hillsborough | 14 | Not Voting |
Click through for HB 2
VISIT NHCORNERSTONE.ORG >> This Legislature has put our money where their mouth was… And we should thank them for it! Dear Tim, The message was LOUD and CLEAR last November – Stop the Spending. More importantly, government needed to live within its means. If deficit spending does not work on the home front, then there is no reason our government should … Read more
The Sunday Union Leader had a letter to the editor titled "2012 can’t come fast enough." It suggests that New Hampshire did not vote for a majority and leadership intent on stripping collective bargaining agreements from 70,000 New Hampshire workers…" which is a number I would contest given this data. (Where we may be hiding 70,000 public sector union workers is a question worth exploring, but not right now.)
The author is Kevin Foley. Kevin is a great guy. We worked together at UPS for a number of years, he was a driver, and I was a package car loader–including his. But Kevin has been a well paid union organizer with the Teamsters for years, as an IBT Business agent, and earns more than double the national average in income and compensation for the privilege. Kudos to Kevin for the sweet gig. I bet he works hard for it.
Kevin has donated hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars to democrats and the local Teamster PAC–(Granite State Teamsters DRIVE) which supports the national union and democrat candidates in the state (one local example from NH S.o.S.); the same ones who grew state government, added public union employees, some of whose dues pay Kevin’s salary, and the same democrats who left us with a nearly one billion dollar budget deficit as a result.
RALLY AT THE NEW HAMPSHIRE STATE HOUSE IN CONCORD TOMORROW MORNING, March, 31, 2011 from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon. SUPPORT THE RESPONSIBLE REPUBLICAN MAJORITY! From Nick Pappas, Jeff Chidester, and Chris Bucik: Please join us in support of the all the State Representatives who will be voting on the current budget with HB 2. We … Read more
WOW! On March 24, 2011 the State House Finance Committee—which prepares state budgets—met to vote on a budget bill. Rep. Neal Kurk proposed an amendment that would put an end to the so-called "Evergreen Clause" that gives public employee unions huge power in spending negotiations, and an incentive to "stonewall" in order to get what they want. With … Read more
The non-partisan Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, headquartered in Concord, leads the way with THIS ONLINE TOOL. State Senator Andy Sanborn has been agitating for some time for the state to do this in real-time, totally and completely. The cost will be trivial. The usefulness? It’s useful just to know that the members of … Read more
If the democrats in New Hampshire want anyone to take them seriously on why we should not lower the cigarette tax, they had best find a better spokesperson than House rep. Christine Hamm from the Peoples Republic of Hopkinton.(PRH)
From this mornings union leader..
Rep. Christine Hamm, D-Hopkinton, argued against the change. She said no state has seen tobacco tax revenue increase after a tax cut.
“This is yet another expensive exercise in futility,” she said. When it comes to tobacco, she said, “Every tax hike produces new revenue, and every tax cut reduces it.”
Oregon tried a 10-cent cut, and saw revenues fall by 10 percent, she said.
“To do the same thing would be fiscally stupid,” Hamm said
You know what else is stupid? Listening to Christine Hamm. Oh, and comparing Oregon to New Hampshire? There are almost no demographic similarities, the most important of which is the sheer size of Oregon and the proximity of neighboring states which are also huge.
No one is driving across Washington State, or up from California, or Idaho, or anywhere else to buy cigarettes in Oregon. Only Washington State taxes them more (the last I checked.) No incentive, no gain.
But here in New England, where people can buy almost everything cheaper in New Hampshire, the classic New England maxim does not apply–"you can get there from her," or here from there, and they do. People shop here from other states to save money. So reducing taxes on cigarettes (or anything else) gives them one more incentive to make the trip or to buy more while they are here.
Need proof?
Raising the tax already cost us revenue. Last August Maine announced that it’s sales had increased 20%. That is most likely money that used to get spent here but which the tax hike diverted back to Maine. (I wrote about it here)
And more Proof?
This Union Leader Editorial in today’s paper does exactly what we should all be doing. Pointing out the obvious hypocrisy of democrats who ignore actions by their Democrat governor. It used to be that the “essential” level of funding for state health and social services was whatever the commissioner of Health and Human Services said … Read more
Mark Fernald is pimping for the misleadingly named Granite State Fair Tax Coalition (GSFTC). This is a group of tax and spend liberals (their fellow travelers and useful idiots) who are trying get an income tax.
To sell you on this Utopian elixir of piss, GSFTC argues that New Hampshire’s property taxes favor the rich, and most recently have sent out a pile of nonsense with some misleading graphs, through Fernald’s email list to make the sale. But as usual it is spun upside down and backwards and ignores one very unassailable fact. New Hampshire has one of the lowest overall tax burdens in the nation because it relies on property taxes. And the rich are not paying less for their share of State government.
Government is a necessary (preferably limited) evil, laid out like a salad bar. There are all kinds of services your tax dollars pay for. Some of them are for “just in case kinds of things” like public safety. Then there are roads and schools and clerks and so on. And then there are unemployment, welfare, heating aid, and a host of social support services, and the cost of the bureaucracy itself.
By law these services are made available to everyone equally based on need so the folks most likely to consume government services are lower income residents. Statistically, the less you earn, the more of the salad bar you are likely to need or eat from and the more trips you are likley to make in a given year. But no matter what you earn, or where you live, or how well you live, you still only get one plate–and you pay for that plate in the form of taxes.
The GSFTC would like you to believe that the rich are paying less for that plate. To perpetrate this deception they use "taxes paid as a percentage of income" to make their case. Their argument is that the rich only pay about 2% of their income as taxes while the poorer folks pay over 8% (Roughly), and that this is unfair. But is that really the case? Are the rich paying less money for a trip to the New and Improved State Government Salad Bar or is GSFTC just playing class warfare games?
I was just thinking back to all the loose talk from the left about ending the gun ban in the New Hampshire State House. How they imagined someone just unloading over testimony supporting same sex marriage–to use one example–kids getting cut down in the cross-fire. And how they fell over themselves trying to scare parents into keeping their children from ever visiting the place because it was now just too dangerous.
Then I look at the way the union run leftists in Wisconsin are acting. How they are storming the state house, climbing in through windows, and forcing people to flee for fear of their well being. These pro-union forces are pushing against state troopers trying to get past them. Maybe being let in by union cops. Just because they demand the ability to collectively bargain for benefits (not wages–they still have that privilege as far as I know.)
What is perhaps more instructive is that the left in New Hampshire supports them. I’d bet money you will not hear a peep in opposition to any of this from the state leadership of the democrat party. Nothing about State Senators running away like spoiled children. Nothing about the hate speech, the Hitler signs, the threats or the aggressive mob tactics and intimidation. They support that–and by their own rules support it through their silence.
So what of it?
A funny thing happened on the way to the ‘off-hand comment’ on the Merrimack TEA facebook page. I was accused of not using "real and accurate data" and that my "rhetoric was not doing anyone any good."
Nothing surprising there I suppose but to stay on point–what was it I said that earned me such a response?
I announced that if you took the total Merrimack School budget and divided it by the total student enrollment that it cost more than sending your kid to UNH. This appears to have riled some people up. In fact someone sent me a nice itemized list of the "costs" of sending your kid to UNH for a year just to prove I was wrong, and to justify how Merrimack’s cost per child wasn’t as much.
The US House just finished it’s work on HR1, cleaning up after democrats who in 2010 abrogated yet another obligation when they found themselves incapable of writing the budget they really wanted right before an election.
The liberal-progressives wanted more spending but that was not politically advantageous. And since the single driving-force behind all Democrat decisions is politics the budget got relegated to the back of the bus, where the electorate’s short attention spans were meant to forget that democrats were never fiscally conscious representatives–they just tried to play them on the campaign trail.
But avoiding the high profile budget battle was more evidence that they had something to hide. The Democrat House majority was appropriately sedated and placed under observation, while the Senate saw minor adjustments but no change in leadership. So the process of changing our spending ways would still have to go through a Democrat controlled Senate and across the desk of a President who thinks the words "spending cuts" are just a rhetorical flourish used to provide cover for more spending.
Obama’s budget is proof enough of that.
But Obama only proposes a budget. The House is in charge of spending. So the new Republican congress went to the back seat of the Hopey-changey bus and picked up the budget obligations abandoned by the 111th congress. This wwas a free shot at changing the fiscal direction of the country before writing their own first official budget, which was not due until later in 2011. It was a gimme, a free throw, but one that had to survive the democrat Senate and the Spender in Chief.
So how did it turn out?
Too much going on to sit and write a decent post so let’s point you to a few conversation starters.
The Union Leader has a great editorial in this mornings Sunday News titled "Free Trains." It is great for several reasons the least of which is that it mirrors concerns I have been expressing for years. That no matter who pays to build them, someone has to pay to keep them. That would be New Hampshire Taxpayers. But Democrats are aghast that the NH House would dissolve the New Hampshire Rail Transit Authority–the head of a beast seeking to force commuter rail upon us–because hey it doesn’t cost anything.
But it does cost and it could lead to something that costs us even more in the future. A lot more.
December 2009 at NH Insider – I hit it out of the park when someone compared road taxes to rail taxes.
Passenger rail costs are not limited to the root infrastructure itself. That would be rails versus roads. Taxpayers would have to subsidize passenger rail-cars, fuel the cars, maintain the cars, probably pay the workers and their benefits, and support the entire system when it fails to turn a profit, which will be always and probably forever. While roads have some other infrastructure nothing compares to rail.
In contrast people buy their own cars, and pay for their own fuel and maintenance. They may buy the car to get to a job that’s probably not funded by taxpayers either. (Except in Concord) Taxpayers do not need to subsidize any of that where with rail we’re supporting all of it. So there is no possible apples to apples comparison to road and rail taxes.
The state also makes a lot of money on registration fees and fuel taxes for road vehicles, tolls and license plates, and some towns rely so heavily on registration fees that even minor reductions can cause budget issues. Passenger rail offers no comparable net increase in revenues and in all likely hood a net loss. So Passenger rail risks reducing revenues and increasing tax obligations for no significant greater good.
But that’s hardly the most pressing point about the ongoing illusion of free commuter rail…