Bruce MacMahon for State Representative
Rockingham District 10 - Brentwood
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Help
me work to keep New Hampshire prosperous and free by bringing back common
sense ideas and solutions that work in the best interest of The People. |
The Economy (click here to return to the Home Page)
We’ve been hearing a lot
in the news lately about New Hampshire’s so-called “revenue problem”.
Contrary to what our Democrat-controlled legislature would like you to
believe, New Hampshire doesn’t have a revenue problem. What we have is a
spending problem. Over the last two years,
while individual state spending across the country was declining by an
average of about two percent, the Democrats in the State House were busy drafting
budgets to increase General Fund spending here in New Hampshire by nearly 25%,
knowing that the funds (incoming state revue revenue) were simply not
available to pay for it. If we are to have a
meaningful discussion of our state’s economic future, we must begin by laying
down a few common sense ground rules, the first and most important one being:
You simply cannot spend money you don’t have and expect to be in sound
financial shape when the bills come due. Anyone who’s tried to
manage a family budget or run a small business understands this principle
quite well. It’s sad that our state legislature has yet to wrap its
collective head around this concept. One “solution” being debated at the
State house is the expansion of legalized gambling as means of bringing more
money into the state coffers. While such a plan may
have the potential to increase revenue, it does little to address the root
cause of the problem – excess spending. If your boat’s taking on water,
installing a more powerful sump pump down below might keep you afloat for a
little while longer, but it’s certainly not viable as a long-term solution. Second, with
unemployment still hovering around 10% nationwide (despite the passage of a
trillion-dollar job “stimulus” bill), and a federal government doing every
thing it can to discourage economic growth in the private sector, it is
unconscionable to be considering, as some state lawmakers here in New
Hampshire have been doing for some time now, the implementation of
broad-based taxes, when there are so many families in the state already making
drastic cuts to their household budgets and living paycheck to paycheck. Third, we have to
recognize the simple fact that all the so-called “stimulus” money to have
come out of Washington has been little more than a Band-aid, used to
temporarily plug up holes in state budgets across the country (and fund
bonuses and retirement benefits for members of the ruling party’s preferred
classes). And, as everyone knows, the one inevitability with Band-aids is,
they all fall off eventually. We have to resist the
urge to accept any “free” money coming from Washington and all the strings
that will inevitably be attached to it. Every penny dished out by the federal
government these days comes with terms and conditions that are not favorable
to its recipient – conditions that seek to supplant local control of our
economy with strict, bureaucratic oversight from career politicians and, by
extension, their campaign financiers. Last, and perhaps most
important, at the state level, we must do everything we can to maintain our
local control economy, wherein taxation and spending are predominantly
controlled in each of the 234 cities and towns in New Hampshire by the
People, and not the politicians. If control of our tax
dollars were to be forced upward to a centralized and more powerful state
government, the damage caused would be threefold. Not only would it result
in a loss of economic freedom for the taxpayers, and hurt our state’s
competitiveness in the region, but it would also pave the way for outside
special interest groups looking to set up shop in New Hampshire and corrupt
our state government the same way they have in our neighboring state to the
south and elsewhere. The reason New Hampshire
has remained untainted by the political malfeasance that goes hand-in-hand
with the lobbying efforts of such organizations is that there is not one
single thoroughfare, through which all the state’s tax revenue flows. It’s
simply not feasible for them to maintain a presence in every city and town to
steer tax dollars toward their pet causes and projects. As your state
representative, I will work to the best my abilities to defend and preserve
the “New Hampshire Advantage” and our local control economy to help keep our
state prosperous and free. ~ Bruce |
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