Monadnock School Taxpayers Association News

Due to a legal quirk, the death tax is scheduled to come back to life in 2011. The renewed death tax would once again inflict serious harm on family businesses, workers, and the economy. Congress should act before the end of the year to repeal this economically harmful tax permanently, says Curtis S. Dubay, a senior analyst in tax policy at the Heritage Foundation.

The death tax slows economic growth, destroys jobs and suppresses wages because it is a tax on capital and on entrepreneurship. In fact, there is a general consensus among economists that there should be no taxes on capital, says Dubay.

The death tax discourages savings and investment:

* The tax sends a signal that it is better to consume today than invest and make more money in the future.

* Instead of putting their money in the hands of entrepreneurs or investing more in their own economic endeavors, Americans are encouraged to consume it now rather than pay taxes on it later.

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What’s happening in Washington gives investors, entrepreneurs and other job creators little reason to feel optimistic, says Daniel J. Mitchell, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute…

President Obama has failed spectacularly on his promise to deliver jobs. What were his biggest mistakes?

Let’s start with two commonsense observations:

* Businesses are not charities; they only create jobs when they think that the total revenue generated by new workers will exceed the total cost of employing those workers.

* Also, it takes money to create jobs; more specifically, labor isn’t very useful or productive unless investors are providing capital.

Businesses have plenty of extra cash — the key issue is whether companies have a reason to invest. In other words, if they start spending money and hiring workers, will they make money?

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The New Hampshire Attorney General’s office has issued a cease-and-desist order to five people, including a Moultonborough selectman and a former school board member, for their roles in distributing political flyers last year.

Assistant Attorney General Matthew Mavrogeorge said the five violated the state’s election laws by failing to identify the flyer as “political advertising” and not including information identifying who was sending it out.

Read more at the UL….

Other stories related:

Moultonborough Officials Get Cease and Desist Order from AG

Cease and Desist Order Given to Former School Board Chair

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How to Lose an Empire

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Hilaire Belloc saw Obama coming.

The best book on Obama’s America has already been written. The president has two more years in office, six if he’s lucky, but already we know enough about the contours of his mind, his governing instincts, to predict that the volume in question will not be bettered. This is a large claim for a book that never once mentions Obama or America or the gushing wells of oil and words that seem to be, so far, his chief gift to us.

Written in 1912 by Hilaire Belloc, an Anglo-Frenchman whose true home was the Middle Ages, The Servile State is an unlikely vade mecum for 21st-century Washington. Yet men with French names have a way of understanding the inner life of this country. The Servile State is not quite Democracy in America—for one thing, it is less than 200 pages long—but it has the prophetic power and moral imagination, the sustained intelligence and insight of that earlier volume. Like Democracy in America, it harbors a healthy skepticism of the political class, deplores the corrosive effects of money, recognizes the value of restraint and self-control. Above all, both volumes lament the seemingly inexorable growth of the state.

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Even lifelong Democratic pol Steny Hoyer, majority leader of the U.S. House, is balking at Barack Obama’s latest bailout proposal.

“I think there is spending fatigue,” said Steny. “It’s tough in both houses to get votes.”

Hoyer was referring to Obama’s weekend letter to Capitol Hill calling for a $50 billion bailout of state and city governments, to spare our elected politicians the pain of balancing their budgets with their own tax revenues.

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Budget-cutting Chris Christie is conservatives’ new favorite governor.

New Jersey governor Chris Christie wasn’t supposed to become a hero for the Right. He wouldn’t even accept the label “conservative” during his campaign.

He was a washed-up local pol turned lobbyist but with enough connections to become George W. Bush’s top attorney in Jersey. Christie made some headlines going after political corruption; to no one’s surprise, prosecutable officials are more common than tollbooths in New Jersey. Then he beat an incumbent governor in a terrible year for incumbents. So what? Christie was an overweight, less heroic, bridge-and-tunnel version of Rudy Giuliani.

But soon videos of his confrontations with teachers, unions, and reporters began making their way onto YouTube, and Christie became a conservative sensation. The most recent has him calling the state’s powerful teachers’ union a bully, with children and taxpayers as its victims. “You punch them? I punch you,” Christie threatens, pointing his finger. Former Bush spokesman Ed Gillespie says Christie’s fight to tame the public-sector union “may be the most important public-policy debate in the country right now.”

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Milwaukee shows that unions will keep resisting concessions if Washington rides to the rescue.

The Obama administration is pressuring Congress to spend $23 billion to rehire the more than 100,000 teachers who have been laid off across the country. Before Congress succumbs, it should know about the unfolding fiasco in Milwaukee. Wisconsin is a microcosm of the union intransigence that’s fueling the school funding crisis in so many cities and states and leading to so many pink slips. It also shows why a federal bailout is a mistake.

Because of declining tax collections and falling enrollment, Milwaukee’s school board announced in June that 428 teachers were losing their jobs—including Megan Sampson, who was just awarded a teacher-of-the-year prize. Yet the teachers union, the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, had it within its power to avert almost all of the layoffs.

Read more WSJ…

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The future of ObamaCare is unfolding here: runaway spending, price controls, even limits on care and medical licensing.

President Obama said earlier this year that the health-care bill that Congress passed three months ago is “essentially identical” to the Massachusetts universal coverage plan that then-Gov. Mitt Romney signed into law in 2006. No one but Mr. Romney disagrees.

As events are now unfolding, the Massachusetts plan couldn’t be a more damning indictment of ObamaCare. The state’s universal health-care prototype is growing more dysfunctional by the day, which is the inevitable result of a health system dominated by politics.

In the first good news in months, a state appeals board has reversed some of the price controls on the insurance industry that Gov. Deval Patrick imposed earlier this year. Late last month, the panel ruled that the action had no legal basis and ignored “economic realties.”

Read more at WSJ…

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Since the recession first started in December, 2007, it has often been referred to by economists and politicians as the greatest economic crisis this country has faced since the Great Depression. Yet, as menacing as this description may be, few ever dared to use D-word to describe the current economic crisis, at least until now.

Last month, Paul Krugman, a Nobel-prize winning economist and regular columnist at the New York Times, declared in an article that we are now in the midst of a depression. “We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression,” he wrote. “It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.”

Read more at Mainstreet.com

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