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.
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.
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?
And when I talk about the Granite State Fair Tax Coalition (not to be confused with the Americans for Fair Taxation, commonly known as 
A 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."
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.
Right off the bat, thanks to Matt at Red Hampshire for reminding me about Ken Wyler’s bill to cut the cigarette tax by $0.10 cents per pack. (
Zandra Rice "The Huckster" Hawkins of Granite State Progress (an out of state funded left wing group) staged a bake sale based on words she put in State Rep Jeanine Notter’s mouth. 
The Union Leader has a 
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!)
The New Hampshire democrats have a name for their new 501(c)(4) non-profit. It’s the July Fourth Forum. What, “We just lost The Whole Damn State” was already taken?
There are plenty of towns like mine trying to figure out where they can cut costs. But every conversation seems to end at cutting education or safety services. While I find it hard to believe that there is nothing else in a budget you can trim, I think I have come up with a reasonable compromise (if not just for the sake of our own rhetorical amusement) that can cut at least a little bit of money from the budget without affecting staffing or resources.