Last week the New Hampshire House voted against a bill to let taxpayers adopt charter provisions establishing limitations on the growth of budgets and taxes. The actual short text reads as follows:
This bill authorizes cities and towns to adopt charter provisions establishing limitations on the growth of budgets and taxes.
For those not familiar with New Hampshire, residents can already adopt provisions to limit growth and taxes, but the teacher’s unions and the pro-government folks don’t like it. So they do everything in their power to make it as difficult as they can. They gum up the petition process. They try to intimidate people, mess with them about the procedure or the number of good signatures, or anything else they can think of. All this just to keep the thing from getting (what does Obama call it?) and up or down vote, in this case from the people (see also-taxpayers) who live in that particular town.
They can’t even trust the people to let them vote on it.
If that doesn’t work, the town selectman, councilors, alderman, will try to keep it off the ballot or schedule it when it has the best possible chance of failing. If that doesn’t work a well funded national union pr some faux-local non-profit NGO pretending to be a taxpayer advocacy group (as in they advocate taxpayers paying more taxes but won’t admit as much), files a lawsuit that no average bunch of citizens could hope to fight. It’s all very burdensome.
So much so that at the end of the day the mere weight of the process scares most people from even trying which is exactly the message the tax and spenders want to send. So its a form of intimidation to keep people from trying to limit the size and scope of government at its lowest level.
Such is the nature of man versus the machine. Town politics are not any different from national.
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