Jim 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…
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. 
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.