If you read the new state budget you will still see a millions of dollars being spent on a lot of the same old bureaucratic bloat, social experimentation, and nanny state nonsense. But as Howie Carr points out the biggest fraud is the claim that there's a "severe budget crisis". A lot of people wish they were in such "bad" shape!
Taxation without representation was a better deal
By Howie Carr, Boston Herald
Sunday, June 21, 2009 [Column on Herald web site]
What state budget crisis?
This year the hacks had $28.1 billion to squander. In the new fiscal year they’ll have $27.4 billion. In other words, for every $39 they wasted in FY 2009, they’ll have to get by on $38 in FY 2010.
If the commonwealth were a person with an income of $50,000, he would be looking at a pay cut of $1,282. A lot of people right now in the Dreaded Private Sector would call a 2.5 percent pay cut a reprieve, a godsend.
The real crisis is the tax bender they’re on at the State House. To deal with this infinitesimal cut, the taxaholics are going to jack up the sales tax 25 percent. They’re allowing local hacks to impose a new meals tax. They’ve invented a new tax for satellite TV. They’re increasing the hotel-motel tax. Registry fees are going up.
The tax-fattened hyenas are hitting us with a new 6.25 percent tax on alcohol, though they and their brain-dead enablers in what’s left of the mainstream media refuse to call it a tax. They describe it as eliminating the exemption.
There’s an exemption on booze taxes because there’s already an excise tax on alcohol. The tax is included in the cost of the bottle. By imposing the new, jacked-up sales tax, the solons are taxing a tax, just as they did with cigarettes a few years back. That’s been great for sales - in New Hampshire.
From the news accounts, you’d think this new budget was the end times. Words like “slash” and “lean” and “deep cuts“ and “steep” and “belt-tightening.”
Why, the state hasn’t had a budget this low since October 2007.
Look on the bright side though: They saved Bunker Hill Day. The hackerama was shocked - shocked! - that Republicans would suggest rescinding a day off for hacks only - and without public hearings.
Odd, though, how these same layabouts couldn’t be bothered with any public hearings when they decided to raise the sales tax 25 percent to grab another $900 million. They had no hearings or roll calls on the new 6.25 percent alcohol tax-on-a-tax - wouldn’t want to put any of the Democrat sheeple on the hook, would we?
Simultaneously, they’re using an updated version of the Prop 2 override playbook. Whenever a town wants to scare the voters into increasing their own property taxes, they begin to cut services, in the order in which taxpayers care: fire, police, high school football, garbage, libraries.
Now it’s the state’s turn to play Chicken Little. They’re going to close a dozen Registry of Motor Vehicles branches - places everyone has to visit at least occasionally. That’ll teach a good lesson to those taxpaying bastards who actually have to work for a living!
Whatever the state is saving by closing the RMV branches, they could have saved five times as much by closing the sleepier district courts, and no citizen would have noticed. But they’d never shut down those plush payroll patriot palaces, because that’s where the solons have stashed all their unemployable friends and kinfolk.
So the sales tax goes up Aug. 1. Which means that this year the annual August sales-tax holiday comes early, and it lasts the entire month of July. Stock up on everything, folks, especially booze. You can store distilled spirits forever.
Meanwhile, Gov. Deval Patrick, who by the way has nothing on his public schedule today, is threatening to veto the tax increases unless he gets a so-called ethics bill. Yawn. Say goodnight Deval.
