No, I’m not going to guess how New Hampshire will fare on tax revenue. I am going to predict how democrats will respond to the news of a surplus and business tax revenues over estimate.
From Heritage. This is the timeline of events related to the Democrat narrative blaming Republicans for blocking disaster relief. (See also Women and Children hit hardest.)
Turns out Reid knew FEMA had adequate funds but put on his floor show anyway. So once again. Why does anyone trust these people? Why?
Here’s the timeline from Heritage – On the Jump!
And before you leftists try to write this off like all the other gaffes, just imagine Sarah Palin had said it and then write the first thing that comes to mind. Now replace Palin’s name with Obama and see how it reads.
Democrats thought they had something for a minute. After the GOP majority reduced the cigarette tax the revenue didn’t shoot right up the next day. It actually did not shoot up the first month either. Naturally this made knees jerk all over the party headquarters and the muttering began about how decreasing the tax forced us to reduce valuable government services. (Women, children, and public union employees hit hardest.)
The media permitted them their druthers, for good or ill, and it became a matter of public record that the NHDP had embarked on a nah-nah told you so PR campaign about taxing tobacco products.
Then tobacco revenues went up. They went up 1.8 Million ahead of plan last month. What was more important was that this increase ended what the NH House majority claims was a five year downward trend. 2011 minus five carry the tax deduction…well, since just about the time the democrat majority experiment began. (And hey, someone please call Rep Christine"Nostradamus" Hamm, D-Hopkinton, and rub it in her face.)
So why bring it up? One month, 1.8 million over plan, not that much really. I mention it because Big Government.com just posted a piece that references data from the CDC and other sources on the ongoing futility of using cigarette taxes as a source of state revenue. Smoking is still on the decrease, which is good. I count myself among the legions of former smokers, though cost was not then a factor. The number of cigarettes smoked per day is down, which is also good but reductive from a revenue perspective. And a majority of cigarette tax increases never really produce the expected revenue. This is partly due to the affects of taxation, and to some degree due (apparently) to smuggling. High taxation and regulation lead to illegal behavior–which adds costs to deal with the "crime " created by them–so feel free to postulate the downsides yourselves; but raising taxes is no guarantee of more revenue, so I think it is time for another discussion about tobacco taxes, and why we need a long term plan to cut them until they are not taxed at all.
Stopping the spending and the out of control growth was and is exactly what you need and want from your US congress, but cannot yet achieve with a Democrat Senate and a Democrat President. And you will never get it as long as the left controls any those parts of your Federal government.
I appreciate it when democrats give you the rope with which to hang their half baked ideas. Take Mark Fernald for example. Mr. Fernald is a sometime New Hampshire Democrat candidate for this or that, and prominent member of the left wing Granite State Fair Tax Coalition (GSFTC). He recently (sorry, frequently) forwards partisan, left wing economic spin, to justify his pet obsession with rising taxes and class warfare.
This most recent email to the arm chair central planners in his fan base is just another in a string of left wing editorials that attempts to contrast democrat spending against that of our previous president. It is typical Fernald; an oranges to rotten apples comparison that uses incomplete data, wild assumptions (about Obama’s future affect in every case), misleading graphs, cherry picked data, and resulting percentages that stretch the fabric of reality so thin that you could easily pass into the alternate dimension in which Democrats and faeries dance widderershins around the deficit mound, as money appears out of nowhere to pay for whatever theirr tiny, narrow, Marxist minds can imagine.
This particualr faerie story centers around three graphs from the Government Printing Office (GPO). Not the fed, the treasury, or even some fruit-loop left wing think tank, but the GPO. The GPO prints stuff, and answers to the Executive branch. So right out of the toy-box we have to question these partisan stills, presented as they are in a partisan manner, bearing guestimated facts and assumptions, with no basis in reality any greater than anything that has ever escaped Mr. Obama’s teleprompter; you do recall all the Obama the non-partisan, deficit cutting, cost reducing, globe saving, health care giving, unifying, auto company saving, mortgage rescuing, goodness? How about the transparent lobbyist-less, open to ideas, new tone, we need to work together Obama? No? You probably remember the we won, closed door, partisan, hate those bankers, Tea Partiers are terrorists, intimidation tactics, don’t interrupt my vacation, Arrest Ron Paul supporters, dozens of lobbyists, shadow cabinet, Attack Arizona, hunt down my enemies, anti-free speech, black panthers can scare away voters, give guns to Mexican drug lords, nohting is my fault Obama with the double action golf-club grip? Well his printing office is the source. Are we surprised it tries to make him look good?
So what can we glean that goes beyond the objective of showing your Republican friends that they are wrong about Obama? How about using facts to show that those Republicans are actually right?
There are a number of groups that the Left wing Granite State ‘Fare’ Tax Coalition highlights on it’s web site. It’s your typical collection of "non-non-partisan" interests like the State Employes Union of NH (That’s the local SEIU 1984). The AFSC-which is the NH Chapter of a global leftist movement supported by all the nicest left wing foundations. The League of Women Voters of course. And there is even a who’s-who of left wing, NH social justice churches and their political arms, all promoting socialist activism and statist policy from the pulpit down to on the ground left wing activism.
All of these groups warrant, and will receive, a proper vetting, but today I would like to focus on a special cog in the leftist machine of the so-called non-partisan GSFTC, one that happens to be very active in New Hampshire on its own; the NHCA. The NHCA is the New Hampshire Citizens Alliance. (You may remember their executive director, Sarah Chaisson Warner? She received some unwanted attention after some remarks she made back in March of 2010. See also Here from the NHTPC.) The New Hampshire citizens alliance is…(drum-roll please)
…a statewide nonprofit, nonpartisan organization devoted to social, economic, and political justice.
A Non-partisan organization devoted to social, economic, and political justice? Too bad that’s just not possible. There are no right wing groups seeking these ethereal ends. These are buzz-words, Orwellian constructs, created by statist agenda-driven socialists to mislead people. So the NHCA couldn’t be "non-partisan" if they tried. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Just look at who they associate with and what they support.
The Granite State Fair Tax Coalition (GSFTC–Greedy Socialists Frisking TaxPayers Cash) is a partisan non-profit, which for years has insisted it is a non-partisan group advocating an income tax in New Hampshire. But the GSFTC is non-partisan the way MSNBC is. They use the dark side equivalent of the Jedi mind trick. ‘The force can have a strong influence on the weak minded.” And while there is nothing wrong with being a left wing partisan group, started by a social-justice driven religious organization, to advocate for a top down income tax, there is something wrong with acting like this is a non-partisan effort.
Our first look at the partisan make up of the GSFTC (God Says Fleece Taxpayers for Christ) was a rundown of their advisory board. This revealed a panel of progressive and left wing water-carriers, who provide cover and material support for a specific leftist agenda: a state income tax. They are democrats and democrat supporters, willing to use class warfare and a faux-morality-cum-guilt complex media campaign, to advocate for that state income tax. Fish swim, birds fly, democrats spend and so must tax. To insist they are non-partisan suggests a mental state that is non compos mentis. Or to be a bit more colloquial; They are just a bunch of typical leftists.