New Hampshire Governor John Lynch’s Budget Plan: Tax, Borrow, Spend
Below is an editorial reprinted in it’s entirety from the New Hampshire Union Leader, it sums up our pathetic tax, borrow, and spend governor perfectly.
GOV. JOHN LYNCH was supposed to be a kinder, gentler Craig Benson. He’d be the millionaire former business executive who balanced the state budget without raising taxes, but also without angering state employees by slashing jobs or upsetting the apple cart too much.
Oops.
During four years in office, Gov. Lynch has shown that he has no interest in cutting taxes, but lots of interest in raising them to pay for increased state spending.
The governor cannot hide behind the excuse that he had to raise taxes because the economy is bad. He raised taxes his first year in office — when the state budget was in surplus. In 2005, he proposed and got a 28-cents per pack cigarette tax increase. Last year, he got another 28-cents increase. This year he proposed a 25-cents per pack hike. That’s three cigarette tax hikes in four years.
Last year the governor proposed — and got — tax increases totaling more than $100 million. They helped pay for the largest general fund budget increase in 20 years — 17.5 percent.
Unfortunately, they didn’t pay for all of it. The hole in the state budget exceeds $200 million and is growing. To fill it, the governor is raising taxes again. He’s pushed a new tax on charity poker, another cigarette tax hike, and raising the discount offered to wine dealers through the state liquor stores.
His enthusiasm for tax hikes has encouraged the Democrat-controlled Legislature to go for even more. In fact, the very first bill passed in the House after the governor’s State of the State address in January was a new tax on animal vaccines.
This new revenue is not enough to cover the massive spending increases approved last year. So the governor has recommended borrowing money to pay for $80 million in school construction aid that always had been paid with cash from the general fund.
Tax and spend? Gov. Lynch says, “OK!” Borrow and spend? “OK to that, too!”
This is not what the people of New Hampshire expected from the former furniture company CEO who famously made tough decisions to turn around a failing business.
The people expected the governor to make the same type of hard-nosed decisions he made then. Instead, he sold out to the Democratic Party’s host of special interest groups that directly benefit from increased government spending. And as a direct result we’ve seen our state budget and taxes grow at irresponsible and unaffordable rates. What a disappointment.
Governor Lynch is nothing but a fraud. He overspent New Hampshire’s means and to justify it he had his economists purposely inflate the incoming revenue projections. When these false projections were not met he blamed the president for the downturn in the national economy, rather than his own deceptive economic projections. The governor KNEW that New Hampshire couldn’t meet the financial expectations he projected, but he decided that he could pull the wool over the good people of New Hampshire. And he did. The truth is that incoming revenue to New Hampshire is up exponentially, but still not enough to meet the governor’s spending. The downturn in the national economy is not the problem with New Hampshire’s budget, as the record income proves. The problem is that the governor increased spending by an unsustainable 17.5%. Governor Lynch’s spending is to blame for the budget deficit, not the national economy. Be a man for once governor Lynch and admit you fucked up big time. You will feel better. Trust me.
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