Granite State Fair Tax Spins And Spins And Spins

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.

TaxesGovernment 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?

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Union Thuggery -Coming Soon To A State House near You.

WI ThugsI 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?

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The Cost of Defining “Adequate” In Merrimack NH

AppleA 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.

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Two Congressmen And A Free Throw

HR 1 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?

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Democrats, Trains And HB 218

De railedThe 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. 

Read the whole thing here. 

But that’s hardly the most pressing point about the ongoing illusion of free commuter rail…

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Supporting A Corrupt Business

Would you stand up in a public hearing and defend an organization implicated in aiding illegal activity, sexual abuse, statutory rape and sex trafficking?  What kind of people would?  How about democrats, union members, and greedy corporate stooges on the take? (oh, my!)

If it was anyone but Planned Parenthood, the national media sensation that admits it has a ‘training’ problem, the professional left would be storming the castle not just to demand why taxpayer dollars were begin given to these criminals, but when the bastards were going to be rounded up and put on trial.

There would be bus loads of angry folks protesting outside executives homes, harassing staff and customers.

Left wing bloggers, even at that sad little web site Blue Hampshire, would be disconnecting their brains from their keyboard, bellowing about the injustice and abuse, the violation of civil rights, and another destructive association by a political party full of hateful bigots and misogynists who view women as second class citizens.  A few of them might even ponder running a few people down in the crosswalk.

But this is Planned Parenthood, a national business, a big business, that makes plenty of money while using its status as a “health care provider” to milk taxpayers for money it does not even need.  And there are still a few people here in New Hampshire willing to stand up and say incredibly stupid things in defense of a business model that seems incapable of protecting the interests of the young girls it claims to champion from a life as an underage sex slave.

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Norelli Tries To Feed You The Blue Pill (again)

Democrats latest rallying cry is that we can’t cut the state budget if it means downshifting costs on the towns.  But they didn’t seem to care too much about all the downshifting when they were doing it. 

But that is what you get when you let left wing clowns run your state.  Larsen/Norelli/Suckley Investment Advisers Inc, the Fat Cat Executives of the Tax and Spend Democrat Party of New Hampshire, gave the state government a one billion dollar bonus ($1,000,000,000.00) on the backs of the towns and the taxpayers during a job shedding, wage declining recession.

And we are now to believe this concerns them?  The only thing that concerns the Democrats is if and how they can blame someone else for their destruction, and find a way back into power so that the lefts only solution to a billion dollar deficit can be enacted as swiftly as possible.

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A Guidebook for the New Hampshire Legislature!

Absolutely everything they need to know for 2011 is to be found IN THIS GUIDE.  All they need to do is print it out, read it, understand it, and design a new tax system for New Hampshire this coming session. Excellent!

How About Some Irony?

The Bedford school board has announced staff and program cuts to address problems with the next school budget. They are looking to trim $750,000.00 off the bottom line, $200,000.00 of which–it has been proposed–will come from eliminating full time teaching positions.

Fiskal Konservative

…a diarist from the Daily KoS, expects you to believe that he is actually been undercover, hiding so far up under the left wing, that he would be permitted to keep and maintain a diary at the Daily KoS.

The Lynch Budget Lie

Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory 

A balanced budget is a technical term for making the numbers add up.  The amount you say you have to spend simply matches what you claim to have spent.  So if you borrowed some millions that you would later have to pay back, and you found a few hundred million more on the sidewalk (maybe in Washington DC), if it added up far enough to cover how much you spent, you could claim to have a balanced budget.

The difference is that being at zero, and owing tens of millions you never had is not balanced.  Add to that the reality that you now have a larger bill to pay every year but can’t expect to just find a few hundred million laying around every year, and you have what is called a structural deficit.  Your political lifestyle vastly exceeds your expected revenue.  Call it a state wide mortgage that exceeds our ability to pay it by hundreds of millions annually.

This is called incompetent.  It is also the Lynch budget.  And even though an account or two may have pulled in more revenue than expected, there is still a massive debt due in the next budget, created by democrats, and signed off on by John Lynch, with no money to pay for it..

Why else proceed in contradiction to the supreme court, on the politically poisonous path of robbing $110 million in private property unless you really need that 110 million to start stuffing the sink hole of a massive structural deficit.  And even if you get this one time money, where’s the line of suckers you plan to screw after you are done with them?

If we had a real surplus they wouldn’t need to rob the JUA fund.  They would drop the idea of selling off 60 million in state land.  In fact, they’d stop all the hand-wringing about the budget.  They have not.  The deficit is real.  And the democrats are to blame, and John Lynch and it is one more reason why John Lynch has been the governor for too long.

 

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September 15th.

Do we have the sense to realize that with at least three to five well organized groups already keyed in to the base and in contact with the independent voters for every race, that by shifting these supporters into a massive push on September 15th to back each of the primary winners (along with a focused and parallel GOP effort in every local race), all the way to November, that we will not only take back the state, but take it back with huge margins?

NH House Dems Travel To Oz

The New Hampshire House democrats have themselves a new web page and I think someone needs to contact the Attorney General; they are guilty of false advertising.

Cost of Government Day

According to the Center for Fiscal Accountability, New Hampshire residents work 226.8 days to pay for the cost of government this year. So go ahead and celebrate. Everything you earn after August 14th is technically yours to keep.
Who would have thought they’d let you keep 138.2 days worth of income from a years worth of work? What a bargain.

How Many Employees Do You Have?

After posting this on Wednesday–the discovery that New Hampshire has the third highest number of welfare employees per 100,000 residents in the nation (More than California by the way which, if you noticed is a tiny bit bigger than New Hampshire)–it occurred to me that this may not be the only circumstance in which the … Read more

Creative Options Wanted

The headline reads (Today’s Union Leader) "Panel Hears Creative Options For Closing Budget Hole."

Someone call governor Lynch, the Nashua Telegraph,(Keene Sentinel, etc) and the NHDP–last I heard the democrats and their media friends were claiming we had a "surplus."  Of course the ‘surplus’ was never sold in its proper context–as in, "hey I just found twenty dollars in the front pocket of my hoodie, another 100 million and that just leaves us with all the other debt we bonded and passed on to the next bunch of suckers."

No, they were plying media spin for weeks by impregnating the punch drunk minds of the public with the word "surplus."  Poppies…Poppies…. But the only surplus was surplus spin, which to those of us who have been paying any attention at all correctly identified as BS.

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Blame Lynch

Blame%20Lynch.JPGCourtesy of haystack over at RedState (Dave Poff, who lives in New Hampshire now by the way) we get word of the particulars on the passage of a funding bill in which was stuffed a union hand out disguised as a job creator along with federal money for Medicaid payments.

How many times have you heard people say, "Well the state can’t print its own money?"  Well J-Lynch and the democrats have found a suitable equivalent; just pretend it’s there anyway and call it even. But it’s not enough to just pretend you balanced the budget, you have to follow it up with a cover story and … Read more

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