The New Media Militia

• End the Bush-era tax giveaways to banks, corporations and wealthy individuals.
• Close corporate tax loopholes, especially billions in tax subsidies for the oil companies.
• Raise new revenues by restoring 70% tax rate on incomes over $1 million.
• Raise $150 billion a year by imposing a financial transaction tax on Wall Street speculation.
• Cut the military budget by half. Bring troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq.
• Create jobs in a major public works program to repair our nation’s infrastructure and to make our nation number one in “green industry.” Target the jobs to hard-hit inner city communities and the rural poor.
• Fully fund a national health care program and drastically increase federal aid to education, Pell Grants, and other vital human needs programs.
• Remove the cap on the Social Security payroll tax, so that CEOs and hedge fund managers pay the same rate as the rest of us.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected…They would still drink for free…But what about the other six men – the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’…They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33…But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer..So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before…And the first four continued to drink for free…But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

“I only got a dollar out of the $20,”declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,” but he got $10!” “Yeah, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man. “I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more than I!” “That’s true!!” shouted the seventh man. “Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!” “Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison. “We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!”

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

Using Fernald’s figures on percentages a person making $20,000.00 would be paying 8.3% of their income in taxes.  So the annual cost for their NH state salad bar plate is $1,660.00 per year.  Without even considering tax credits, rebates and so on for any income group, here’s the breakdown based on Fernald’s misleading percentages from the top of each of his income brackets, in terms of actual dollars.

$20K/year           $1660.00

$34K/year           $2244.00

$55K/Year           $3190.00

$159K/Year         $5565.00

$474K/year         $9480.00

And just for fun…

1.6million/year  $32,000.00

… same set of available government services, and the rich bastard has to pay $30,340.00 more every single year for the pleasure.  So in one respect, Fernald is right.  It is unfair.  Lower income folks get more for their dollar. 

You’d get screwed and the left doesn’t care.  Once you build more government there’s no going back.

The Granite State Fair Tax Coalition claims to be a non-partisan, non-profit group whose mission is to convince the people of New Hampshire that we need a broad based income tax. 

What that works out to is using percentages and formulas with a focus on deception, misdirection, and Alinsky-like class warfare rhetoric, to corral (see also ‘Guilt’) enough support to dismantle a system that for years has made the state of New Hampshire one of the best places to live and work in the nation; for quality of life, low overall tax burden, health, safety, low crime rates, job opportunity and freedom.

You might as yourself why someone would start a non-profit to mess with that kind of success?  What kind of crank sees a state ranking on top in almost every category and decides, let’s mess that up?  The answer? Democrats and social justice junkies who can’t advance a a massive and nearly irreversible spending agenda without a broad based tax.

So to get to Moscow on the Merrimack the partisan, left leaning, New Hampshire Council of Churches formed what is now known as the Granite State Fair Tax Coalition (GSFTC). It is run to this day by social justice-activist clergy and radical leftists and progressives ‘attracted to the idea’ of pretending an income tax would not ruin the New Hampshire Advantage.

Of course the only people it “attracted” were tax and spenders.

There is not one person on their staff, their advisory board, or leading their list of affiliated groups that is not either a democrat, working for the democrat social-justice agenda, or who is not a large dollar donor to democrat candidates or causes.  How you can possibly claim to be ‘non-partisan’ under these circumstances defies belief, yet they continue to make that claim and it is time to call them out on it.

My mission here, and in posts to follow, is to show you who runs this scam so that you can grasp what their real motivations are.  To grow the size and reach of government by defining ‘fair’ to mean more taxes and more spending on the radical left wing agenda.

Part I  The GSFTC advisory Board: “More Progressives than you can shake a stick at.”

“This is a long-term plan,” notes Mayor Pregent. “If we start with the kids, we can get to the parents and, ultimately, move toward a healthier lifestyle.”

Ellen is now putting her skills as leader to work for the Obama campaign as a member of our New Hampshire Child Advocacy Task Force.  “Barack Obama is a committed advocate for children. 

He embraces the essence of the American Dream—that every child should have the chance to reach his or her full potential,” she said.

…

Ellen was born in Connecticut, but moved to the Granite State after law school. 

She was drawn to the study of law because of its power to protect the vulnerable and advance social justice. 

Why can’t democrats trust their own constituents to do the right thing?  Their first response to every problem is to institutionalize it with more government, typically as far up the legislative food chain as possible.  That means as far away from you as they can manage, even to the point of giving control to unelected bureaucrats you can’t punish, just to keep you from messing with it.  They entrench it in a bureaucracy, make it impossibly inefficient and expensive and then refuse to let anyone touch it ever again, while charging you more and more to maintain it.

The only reason I can think of for that kind of knee jerk behavior is that Democrats use themselves as the template for the rest of us. The left by their very nature must be selfish, insecure, inconsiderate and un-trusting. Only people so un-giving of themselves or simply incapable of volunteering their time and energy would have to mandate volunteerism and “giving” by legalizing the taking of other peoples time or property through mandates.

Taxation is a legalized theft with no limit; Ask Mark Fernald, the current titular class-warfare mouthpiece of the left in New Hampshire, how much property he needs the state to confiscate to end the class warfare he wages?  What are the terms of peace Mark, or are they terms of surrender?  Every month you go on and on with your class warfare but tell us, how long and how much?  At what point is government large enough to solve all the problems you imagine it must confront?

Steve Vaillancourt is a prodigious source of State House commentary and quick to put digital pen to virtual paper to keep us informed of events in Concord.  This invaluable service has today provided us with his remarks on yesterdays veto-palloza; what he calls “the worst day in Lynch’s historic tenure in office.”

The parental notification veto was overridden 266-102 (72.3%).  Six Democrats (6-89) joined 260 Republicans (260-13) in disregarding Lynch’s veto language.  Especially effective was Judiciary Chair Robert Rowe who responded to a section of the veto message that the Governor was willing to work with the Legislature in crafting a better bill.  No one from the Governor’s office ever came forward to work on a better bill, Rep. Rowe insisted.

The good news is that the Obama administration is in full defensive mode on Project Gunwalker and people with brighter minds, more free time, and a much broader reach than I are making the same connections I posed back on May 21st.

ATF and Holder, and all the rest of the cranks, insist it was to track the guns to the bad guys.  But given the way democrats feel about gun rights you have to wonder if they had other motives.  “Finding” American guns in the hands of drug cartels plays right into their rhetoric.

Being who they are, that would demand that they short-stroke this “discovery” into expanding gun control legislation, and I’m not convinced that this was not a convenient side effect if not the entire point of the program.

ATF agents testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee could not explain how the operation was supposed to succeed when their surveillance efforts stopped at the border and interdiction was never an option.

ATF Agent John Dodson, testifying in front of the committee, said that in his entire law enforcement career, he had “never been involved in or even heard of an operation in which law enforcement officers let guns walk.” He continued: “I cannot begin to think of how the risk of letting guns fall into the hands of known criminals could possibly advance any legitimate law enforcement interest.”