The New Media Militia

I have argued at great length on why relying primarily on local property taxes are the best mechanism for keeping government small.  But no matter how often I bring it up someone always tries to make the point that it’s not fair.  Why should the people who actually own the physical land in the state have to bear the burden of the costs associated with the governance of that land and the people who live on it? (That’s not exactly how they say it, I’m just translating it into common sense.) 

I happen to think that question answers itself, and as I’ve stated before should act as a necessary mechanism for filtering out unnecessary spending and over aggressive revenue seeking by busy bodies at every level of government.  Yet I am still confronted with the issue of New Hampshire’s unfair property tax burden–to which I now respond, what burden? 

Who does not pay property taxes in New Hampshire?   I can’t think of anyone.

Businesses factor in costs of goods and expenses into their operations of which a portion is property taxes.  The cheeseburger, the spa treatment, that coffee—every item or service includes the cost of property taxes.  That means residents, and tourists alike, even people just passing through are bearing that burden in everyday commerce already.  

Renters pay property taxes as part of their rent.  They are no more able to escape them than the guy or gal who owns the property—the same guy or gal who might improve the rent they charge (as a matter of competition for people who rent property) by running a more efficient business or by holding the government they pay taxes to more accountable for the cost of that government. 

Business and industry from phone to internet to electricity, all roll property tax costs into the prices we pay.  And home owners, most of whom make up the majority of registered voters in most towns, see the cost of government twice a year in two lump sums right where it needs to stay.  In their face. 

So we have a sales tax of sorts—embedded in the more obvious and visible property tax.

We also have an income tax, as property taxes affect how much business can pay employees, and in how much of your take home income you get to keep and how much of it you have to set aside for the cost of government .  

Regular Sales and Income taxes act upon you like the frog slowly boiled in water.  Property taxes are more like being thrown into a freezing lake  every now and again.  The latter allows you to see the shock of how much government really costs,–which is more likely to inspire you to ask questions and hold officals and bureacrats accountable,  the former strives to intentionally hide those costs and the revenue needed from you until it has fiscally killed you. 

So as you can see there is no such thing as an unfair property tax burden.  There is only “the tax burden.”  “The tax burden” is the real cost of government.  The real cost of government reflects the desire of politicians to spend more and more of your money, and in the case of some politicians to then find ways to continuing doing that so that you are less and less inclined to notice either the taking or the spending of your hard earned dollars.

One is direct and more transparent.  The other is intentionally deceptive.  (And in case you’ve forgotten, the liberals and Democrats overwhelmingly prefer the latter.)

And yes, people who pay property taxes on their homes, also pay those tiny fractions of other peoples taxes in goods and services but this is not an undue burden.  It acts as an additional incentive to keep government smaller, limited, restricted to only what is really necessary.  It motivates free market competitors to find efficiencies that keep their costs down to attract your business.  Then there’s that whole New Hampshire advantage thing we’ve got going for us.  That didn’t happen because we have an additional sales or income tax.  It happened because we don’t.

We should at every opportunity act to deprive government of more avenues for revenue, and your represntatives should promise to make this a priority.  Limiting government’s primary revenue streams to local property taxes reigns in wasteful government because it is that much harder to hide the cost of that government.   They are not a burden, they are a godsend.

Recent discussion about opposing opinions being mandated alongside existing internet content got me thinking.  Could we apply this to everything on-line?  Ads for fruit would need to include references to candy-bars of salty snacks.  Omaha Steaks would need to include a click through to Purdue chicken.  Every business would need to permit you to access competing products.  Porn sites would…actually I don’t want to go there.  The New Hampshire Democrat Party Web Site (oops I went there anyway) would have to allow links to the GOP web site.  And the GOP web site would need a disclaimer at the bottom.

“You are all a bunch of lying, white, racist, mysogynistic, bigoted, Bush loving, gay-bashing, A#$>(*!!@, who hate Obama.”

And when you click on that it takes you to the on-line copy of Das Kapital.

Here’s reform for dealing with illegal immigration we can all get behind.

-An illegal immigrant who sneaks into the country, or fails to file his papers, will face fines, jail, deportation, or a combination of the three.

-An illegal immigrant who forges his documents, or falsifies them by lying when he fills them out, will face fines, jail, deportation, or a combination of the three.

-An illegal immigrant who takes a job faces fines, up to six years in prison, and deportation.

-All immigrants must provide proof of their legal status if the authorities demand it.  Failure to do so will result, once more, in fines, jail, deportation, or a combination of the three

A doctor who persuaded millions of parents worldwide that a common vaccine could cause autism was barred from practicing medicine in his native Britain on Monday after the country’s top medical group found he conducted his research unethically.

The anti-terrorism strategy so far has been to bow and scrape, and admit faults, and hope nothing bad happens.  The product of that failed policy has been for our enemies to take advantage of us while continuing to hate us more than ever, with a jihadi gunman successfully killing at fort Hood while two Bombs that were meant to kill hundreds (fortunately) failed.

This hands off approach (coincidentally?) appears to be the same strategywhen dealing with BP.  After a week long silence we were barraged with speeches about how they’d all been responding “from day one.”  Well its been thirty days or more since “day one,”  and the Obama administration has done nothing except blame BP, ask BP what they were going to do about it, and wait for them to do it. 

Now we have oil on the Louisiana Coastline.

What happened to the ‘From Day one’ people?  Where’d they go?  They went into the situation room to plot the media strategy on how to use the crisis of oil washing up on coastal beeches to advance their left wing energy policy.

You doubt me?

A bank gets a bonus and we’ve got union activists on the doorsteps of bank employees and legislation already written coming out of committee. 

The supreme court overturns federal speech restrictions and there’s a massive outcry, constitutional amendments, and bills in both houses of congress the next morning.

The race pimps are on standby 24/7 to promulgate a massive media blitz against anyone and anything that demonstrates any behavior that could be construed as racism–to the point of making it up when it fails to happen when they’d like it to.

If Obama wanted SEIU guys on the coast building barriers and spying for oil slicks, you don’t think he could make it happen overnight?  Damn right he could, but he didn’t and you know why.  He needs big oil to look bad and if he has to give up some coastline (the way he gives up democrat legislators, for examle) then that’s the price we’ll have to pay to advance his agenda.

That’s just the kind of guy he is…from day one.

On the morning of the New Hampshire Democrat Convention Ray Buckley took the opportunity to send out a press release on the recently passed vote on what is being called ‘Wall Street Reform.’

“The vote in the United States Senate to close debate on Wall Street reform is a critical step in once and for all fixing the disastrous Republican policies that drove our economy into a ditch.”

Mr. Buckley doth protest too much.  The democrats are more than adequately complicit in captaining the economy into the rocks.  Of course Buckley and his party embrace failure as the solution because Big Government is their verb.  They are the Glee club for top down inefficiencies, addicted to Government—obsessed with securing its monopoly on the commerce of everything from ideas to markets to the very words used by the republic.  But that reality shines poorly on the party in an election year so instead he takes a shot at Senator Gregg for voting against it.  I take that to mean that the New Hampshire democrat party supports this bill?  I know soon to be citizen Hodes does so let’s open the hood and take a look at the NHDP’s idea of “reform?”

First up, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:  These two entities–now financial utilities of the Peoples Republic of Obama, are understood to be the primary drivers of the credit crisis and housing bubble.  They remain tax payer supported money pits wasting billions of your dollars, then as now, for what is and has always been a goal of the left and the democrat party; the right to own something without having to actually pay for it.  The new ‘Reform Bill’ does nothing to improve this relationship or the taxpayer’s exposure to rampant incompetence and cronyism.  Result: They are re-inflating the housing bubble with the blessings of Buckley’s Democrats and on an even bigger taxpayer dime.

Next, Goldman Sachs: Goldman–happy campaign supporter of future citizen Paul Hodes–owns or is connected to most of the major players in DC and in the Obama White House as part of the charade against Goldman meant to make hacks like Hodes look hawkish on banking.  But this all for show.  You think China has an arm to twist, take a closer look at Goldman.  These Hodes like banking hawks are just playing bit parts in the political meat puppet theatre becasue of the trillion dollars in US bonds Goldman is sitting on.   So the so-called crack down on Goldman and the timing as it relates to the lefts interest in ‘reform’ are sadly obvious.  It’s another Potempkin Village.  But what is less obvious—and by that I mean less advertised—is that the bill is good for big banks and bad for taxpayers.

Kevin Williamson in the May 17th issue of National review put the Goldman charade this way

It is a red herring, a distraction from the fact that congressional Democrats, the Obama administration, and the big Wall Street players are colluding to make the present system of ad hoc and ad infinitum bailouts permanent, codified in law, with practically no accountability in Washington and no oversight from our elected representatives.

What Ray is applauding is the successful investiture of permanent bank bailouts by law at your expense with little or no accountability to the people paying for it.

…the Dodd bill creates a system of shadow bailouts. Example: The bailout of insurance giant AIG wasn’t really a bailout of AIG—AIG is a dead corporation walking, and everybody knows it. Rather, it was a bailout of all the firms that would have taken losses if AIG had gone into bankruptcy. The Dodd bill’s defenders protest that the bill will end bailouts, but it will only hide them. That’s because firms that might have been sent tumbling into insolvency by a failure elsewhere in the financial system—by a repeat of the Lehman Brothers fiasco, for instance—will be protected by the Dodd regime from default and bankruptcy. And Congress will be protected from having to go on the record supporting such actions in each case. The Dodd bill is a blanket backdoor-bailout authority.

More…

…the bill would allow—in fact, appears designed to ensure—bailouts for the creditors of troubled firms. Under the Dodd bill, Wall Street firms (or unions, or sovereign wealth funds, or anybody else with the right political connections) who are ex – posed to losses on failing financial companies will be able to collect significantly more money than they would be able to under normal bankruptcy

Given this small sample of reality pie, Buckley’s closing remarks are that much more entertaining.
 

“Republicans need to stop looking out for their Wall Street donors and start caring about the voters that sent them to Washington to look out for their interests.”

Look out for their interests?  Buckley—if he is speaking for all NH Democrats—has just implicated the lot of them in a massive scheme to obscure how and how much of the taxpayers dollars his party will distribute in bail outs to favored unions, and connected insiders.   Any republican in the state can effectively run against any democrat on that, and they should.

If you were not clear about just how wretched the lot of left wing America haters on Capitol Hill are, the Vodka is not going to get any clearer.  These dirt bags applauded the Mexican president while he tore their country down.  They were happy to hear a foreign dignitary from a two-bit third world dumpster take cheap shots at us.  And they rewarded him with their praise and adulation.

It is the sound of two hands clapping, the siren song for the democrat majority in congress.  As if we needed another one.
 

This editorial from today’s Union Leader on Commuter Rail caught my attention.

PETER BURLING, head of the New Hampshire Rail Transit Authority (NHRTA), was in Manchester this week to promote his dream of building a commuter rail line from Concord to Boston.

He suggested that operating commuter rail would cost taxpayers less than maintaining the highway.

Nonsense.

The rail line would cost $5 million to $8 million a year to run, Burling said. (The NHRTA officially estimates a total cost of $10 million a year, with 50 percent covered by fares, but all these numbers are guesses.) “Compare that to the cost of maintaining our highway system,” he said.

OK. According to the state Department of Transportation, I-93 costs roughly $10,000 per lane per mile to maintain. At four lanes, I-93 between Concord and the border would cost about $1.6 million a year. After the Manchester to Massachusetts widening, it would be about $2.6 million a year — roughly half of Burling’s lowest estimate for operating the train. Double the I-93 maintenance figure, just to be safe, and we’re still at the low estimate for the state’s portion of operating a train.

And the train would carry only a tiny fraction of the traffic the highway carries.

That makes it enormously more expensive per passenger- mile. Financially, highways make more sense.

Last December I suggest that rail would cost us more here, not just for the system but as an impact on the budgets of local towns…

Passenger rail costs are not limited to the root infrastructure itself.  That would be rails versus roads.   Taxpayers would have to subsidize passenger rail-cars, fuel the cars, maintain the cars, probably pay the workers and their benefits, and support the entire system when it fails to turn a profit, which will be always and probably forever.   While roads have some other infrastructure nothing compares to rail.

In contrast people buy their own cars, and pay for their own fuel and maintenance.  They may buy the car to get to a job that’s probably not funded by taxpayers either. (Except in Concord) Taxpayers do not need to subsidize any of that where with rail we’re supporting all of it.  So there is no possible apples to apples comparison to road and rail taxes. 

The state also makes a lot of money on registration fees and fuel taxes for road vehicles, tolls and license plates, and some towns rely so heavily on registration fees that even minor reductions can cause budget issues.   Passenger rail offers no comparable net increase in revenues and in all likely hood a net loss.  So Passenger rail risks reducing revenues and increasing tax obligations for no significant greater good.

Add to that details from a report released in February 2010 on the potential plans to pay for adding the benefit of commuter rail here…