Articles tagged as

New Hampshire

The Shower Muse Asks An Important Question About the Left Wing

Shower HeadInspiration comes in strange places.  Dots connect, ideas coalesce, thoughts combine.  These kinds of events are most common for me in circumstances where it is almost impossible to write them down.  I often get revelations driving and have to pull over to write them down.  But the other morning it was in the shower.

I was getting ready to head up to the Nullify Now Tour event at SNHU in Manchester, on Saturday, when I had a thought.  It wasn’t a new thought, but somewhere between rinse, lather, and repeat what had previously been random musings got together to form a new way to present the idea and I was soaking wet with neither paper nor pencil anywhere nearby–not that I could use them in the present circumstances.

So I figured the thought was doomed.   Thousands of other things would crowd my mind, mug the thought, and leave it to die in an ally.  There it would lay slowly bleeding to death, unable to survive on the insubstantial life support of short term memory, unless I found it and resuscitated it.  

Writing it down usually allows me to preserve the thought so hours or days later, when I find it in my pants pocket while folding laundry fresh from the dryer, I can look at the pulpy looking turd with a furrowed brow and try to recall what the hieroglyphs meant when I committed them to writing.

(Sometimes the pulpy pocket turds are yellow; shout out to 3M for inventing Post-It notes.)

Well this thought must have been made of sturdy stuff.  Days later it was still alive.

So what was it?

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Want to know specifically how they squander our money?

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

A Global Warming Alarmist In ‘Efficiency Sheeps’ Clothing?

GoreJim Grady, President and owner of LighTec in Merrimack, has a letter in the Sunday Telegraph on the current effort in the New Hampshire legislature to drop out of RGGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.  He expresses some concern over Republican objection to the plan, points out what he sees as inconsistencies in objections to it, and does not believe it should be mothballed.

But there are problems.

Jim argues that the fee created by RGGI is actually a small cost that benefits all of us, and that we should not object to such a tax because we have had something similar in place in the State for 12 years now.

Most House members seem utterly unaware that for the past 12 years the state has levied a “tax” on the many that indisputably benefits the many: the Systems Benefit Charge (SBC). If you look at your electric bill, you’ll see a tiny charge of $0.0035 per kilowatt-hours of energy usage to pay for state-sponsored energy efficiency. This SBC “tax” (like RGGI, bipartisan) benefits the many by reducing the need to make multi-billion dollar investments in new power plants and electricity transmission and distribution systems.

But Jim never explains why, if we have that tax in place to benefit state sponsored efficiency projects, why we signed onto a separate system that adds an additional tax, supervised by an out of state entity, that skims a portion of that "tax" off the top for administrative costs?  How does that help everyone in New Hampshire when it diverts some of that so-called benefit away from the state. 

Why not make a case to raise the SBC to fill the stated need?  Why add a separate system, run by an outside third party, based on the questionable need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions?

Because Jim Grady was a member of the working group for the Carbon Co2alition, whose goal is or was…

… to advocate for a national energy policy that protects our communities and environment from the ravages of global warming caused by carbon pollution.

That affiliation might have been good to know in advance.  But we can take a look at that right now…

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GrokTalk! Saturday March 19th, 2011 Live From The Nullify Now Tour

GrokTalk!Live Streaming local and National News with opinion you could only get from GraniteGrok.

It’s GrokTalk!     This Saturday from 10am-6pm…

EMail: GrokTALK@GraniteGrok.com      Call us!  603-626-6275

GrokTALK! and GrokTV will be broadcasting live, all day long, from the Nullify Now Tour at SNHU in Manchester. 

Strap yourselves in…

Time change–starting around ???

(Event Speakers List on the Jump)

Live stream:


Live TV by Ustream

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Mike Brunelle’s Jobs Program

In true class warfare passion the prominent democrat schemster Mike Brunelle saw his minimum wage bill go down in flames yesterday, which was exactly the point. But all the politicking and future sound biting aside, what is the point? Democrats either don’t give a damn about jobs or are to daft to know any better.

How About Some Cheese With Your Hamm?

Tax TrapIf 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?

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Union Leader Hit’s It Out Of The Park

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

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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It’s The Christian Thing To Do.

Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson’s remarks, as expressed in a Sunday Union Leader staff editorial, suggest that it is immoral to reduce what the government spends on health and social programs.

As quoted, "When sacrifice is perpetrated on the vulnerable and weak by the strong and prosperous, it is social abuse."

He goes on to include the poor, the disabled, the blind, the unemployed, the impoverished elderly, the uninsured and children living in poverty.

His point (one of them at least) is that by reducing government’s fiscal contribution to bureaucracies established to manage such things, that governor John Lynch and the New Hampshire legislature are considering immoral choices to balance the state budget.

So where do I begin?

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GrokTalk! Saturday March 12th, 2011

GrokTalk!Live Streaming local and National News with opinion you could only get from GraniteGrok.

It’s GrokTalk!     This Saturday from 9-11AM…

EMail: GrokTALK@GraniteGrok.com      Call us!  603-524-7478

Jenn Coffey, NH state House representative and vice chairman of the Commerce and Consumer Affairs committee.  

Tom Woods— yes, that Tom Woods; best selling author, and senior fellow at the Ludwig con Mises Institute…

And, House Rep’s George Lambert and Andrew Manuse of  our very own New Hampshire Natural Rights Caucus.  Plus  (perhaps) a special guest co-host or two.

(More about some of our guests on the jump)

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US House kills TARP

I’d be interested to hear the rhetoric from Political consultant and former congressman Paul Hodes who claimed he was against TARP but voted to spend paid back TARP funds on other left-wing stimuli.

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