This is a chart of the tax rate for the top 25 towns.
Here is a graphic of similar data. Although the Monadnock School district is down just over 500 students from just a few years ago, we have had virtually no reduction in teaching or support staff, or administrative staff.
People thought the last administration spent too much money. But in the last six months spending has increased at a dizzying pace and has spiraled out of control, massively increasing the deficit.
The Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy has come out with a report that outlines the State Budget featuring 38 new taxes and fees.
July 19, 2009
New York Post
“It is spending, and then more spending, at all levels of government that has led us into the abyss.”
– MSTA
Congress is burning through the nation’s community chest, spending trillions in tax dollars as if it were Monopoly money.
The legislators are on pace to burn through a record $4 trillion in fiscal year 2009 — approximately $1 trillion more than 2008’s history-making expenditure, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Data published by the White House show federal spending has inched upward annually since 1965.
But no other year comes close to matching 2009’s $3.997 trillion gusher — a spending binge that’s helped put Congress on track for a record $1.8 trillion deficit.
By way of comparison, in fiscal year 2008, Congress tore through a total of $3 trillion with a then-record deficit of $458 billion, according to White House figures.
And the amount of government debt held by the public will have ballooned from $5.8 trillion to $8.5 trillion in less than a year.
“That really tells you a lot about our current situation,” said Tad DeHaven, a budget analyst for the libertarian Cato Institute.
“These massive deficits represent a burden that Washington is foisting onto the backs of future taxpayers. They also crowd out private investment and could eventually push interest rates higher and stoke inflation,” he said.
The $4 trillion that Congress may spend by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, breaks down to a daily outlay of $11 billion every 24 hours.
Congress is now spending about $3 trillion more than it did in 1945, at the end of World War II, once numbers are adjusted for inflation.
“The bottom line is that it’s a very large number. Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t be there,” said Nicholas Economides, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
Since taking office, the Obama administration has been saddled with a moribund economy that’s sent government revenues plummeting. To combat the recession, the White House poured $700 billion into bailout projects and another $787 billion into a stimulus plan — while funding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
“This is an extraordinary crisis, and we need to spend money to get out of it fast. The positive side is this spending will make the recession less severe, and that’s better for the average person,” Economides said.
But the rising percentage of government spending as it relates to the size of the economy, as measured through Gross Domestic Product (GDP), has some economists worried.
Spending in recent years has been around 20 percent. But for 2009, government spending is forecast to be 28.1 percent of the GDP, a 34 percent increase from 2008 and the highest since 1945.
As a result of the record spending and mounting deficits and debt, some Democrats last week began to express concern about the potential cost of health-care reform.
President Obama yesterday sought to reassure the public that his overhaul plan was financially sound and asked lawmakers not to “lose heart.”
“This is what the debate in Congress is all about — whether we’ll keep talking and tinkering and letting this problem fester,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address.
“Or whether we’ll seize this opportunity — one we might not have again for generations — and finally pass health-insurance reform this year, in 2009.”
See Related: Reality Bites Into President’s Pipe Dreams
July 17, 2009
Wall Street Journal
Democrats want to ram through one of the greatest raids on private income and business in American history.
Say this about the 1,018-page health-care bill that House Democrats unveiled this week and that President Obama heartily endorsed: It finally reveals at least some of the price of the reckless ambitions of our current government. With huge majorities and a President in a rush to outrun the declining popularity of his agenda, Democrats are bidding to impose an unrepealable European-style welfare state in a matter of weeks.
Mr. Obama’s February budget provided the outline, but the House bill now fills in the details. To wit, tax increases that would take U.S. rates higher even than most of Europe. Yet even those increases aren’t nearly enough to finance the $1 trillion in new spending, which itself is surely a low-ball estimate. Meanwhile, the bill would create a new government health entitlement that will kill private insurance and lead to a government-run system.
Hyperbole? That’s what people said when we warned about this last fall in “A Liberal Supermajority,” but even we underestimated the ideological willfulness of today’s national Democrats. Consider only a few of the details:
A huge new income surtax. The bill’s main financing comes from another tax increase on top of the increase already scheduled for 2011 under Mr. Obama’s budget. The surtax starts at one percentage point for adjusted gross income above $350,000 in 2011, rising to two points in 2013; a 1.5 point surtax at incomes above $500,000, rising to three in 2013; and a whopping 5.4 percentage points in 2011 and beyond on incomes above $1 million.
This would raise the top marginal federal tax rate back to roughly 47% or 48%, if you include the Medicare tax and the phase-out of certain deductions and exemptions. With the current top rate at 35%, this would be the largest rate increase outside the Great Depression or world wars.
The average U.S. top combined state-federal marginal tax rate would hit about 52%. This would be higher than in all but three (Denmark, Sweden, Belgium) of the 30 countries measured by the OECD. According to the nearby table compiled by the Heritage Foundation, taxpayers in at least five U.S. states would pay higher marginal rates even than Sweden. South Korea, which Democrats worry is stealing American jobs, would be able to grab even more as its highest rate is a far more competitive 38.5%.
House Democrats say they deserve credit for being honest about the tax increases needed to fund their ambitions. But then they also claim that this surtax would raise $544 billion in new revenue over 10 years. America’s millionaires aren’t that stupid; far fewer of them will pay these rates for very long, if at all. They will find ways to shelter income, either by investing differently or simply working less. Small businesses that pay at the individual rate will shift to pay the 35% corporate rate. When the revenue doesn’t materialize, Democrats will move to soak the middle class with a European-style value-added tax.
Phony numbers. Democrats will have to come up with something, because even the surtax puts their bill at least $300 billion short of honest financing. The public insurance “option” doesn’t even begin until 2013 and the costs are heavily weighted toward the later years, but the tax hikes start in 2011. So under Congress’s 10-year budget window, the House bill is able to pay for seven years of spending with nine years of taxes. Andy Laperriere of the ISI Group estimates the bill would add $95 billion to the deficit in 2019 alone.
Then there’s yesterday’s testimony, from Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Doug Elmendorf, that ObamaCare’s cost “savings” are an illusion. Mr. Obama claims government can cover more people and pay less to do it. But Mr. Elmendorf told the Senate Finance Committee that “In the legislation that has been reported we don’t see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health-care costs.”
Further on the public plan: “It raises the amount of activity that is growing at this unsustainable rate.”
No matter, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is whisking the bill through House committees even before CBO has had a chance to score it in detail. As Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan put it to us, “We will not have read it, and we will not have a score of it, but we will have passed it out of committee.”
A new payroll tax. Unemployment is at 9.5% and rising, but Democrats will nonetheless impose a new eight percentage point payroll tax on employers who don’t provide health insurance for employees. This is on top of the current 15% payroll tax, and in addition to a new 2.5-percentage point tax on individuals who don’t buy health insurance. This means that any employer with more than $400,000 in payroll would have to pay at least 25% above the salary to hire someone. Result: Many fewer new jobs, with a higher structural jobless rate, much as Europe has experienced as its welfare states have expanded.
Other new taxes, including an as yet undetermined levy on private health plans. This tax, which Democrats say could raise $100 billion or so, would make it even harder for private plans to compete with the government plan, which would already benefit from government subsidies and lower capital costs. For good measure, the House bill also gets the ball rolling on tax increases on foreign-source corporate income.
We could go on, and we will in coming days. But the most remarkable quality of this health-care exercise is its reckless disregard for economic and fiscal reality. With the economy still far from a healthy recovery, and the federal fisc already nearly $2 trillion in deficit, Democrats want to ram through one of the greatest raids on private income and business in American history. The world is looking on, agog, and wondering why the United States seems intent on jumping off this cliff.
July 17, 2009
American Conservative Magazine
Al Gore and his allies know the color of money.
BY BRENDAN O’NEILL
The word “environmentalist” usually conjures images of dreadlocked campaigners in tie-dyed T-shirts who eat only organic muesli and never travel by car. Or of that painfully PC couple from Park Slope who carry their kids marsupial-style and make monthly donations to NPR. Or of earnest Greenpeace activists denouncing big corporations for killing polar bears and claiming that “The Science” shows we’re all doomed —Greens always use the definite article in relation to science.
Those views are so 1970s. Or at best 1980s. Environmentalism may still have a somewhat edgy, down-at-heel public image, but going green has become big business, and there are buckets of cash to be made from “saving the planet.” In fact, we are witnessing the emergence of a Green-Industrial Complex—an alliance between national governments, enormous corporations, and powerful individuals that uses the politics of fear to procure public money.
This new axis discourages healthy debate (accusing those who question it of being “climate-change deniers”); thwarts individual initiative (treating saving the planet as something that can only be done by central bankrollers); and helps to keep the Third World in poverty (encouraging it to remain “carbon-lite” in order to offset the “carbon heaviness” of the West). It’s time to toss an intellectual hand grenade into this network.
For a snapshot of the federal and business interests intertwined in the rise of green capitalism, consider the best-known environmentalist, Al Gore, director of the film that has informed so many people’s views on the future of our planet, “An Inconvenient Truth.” To many, especially those still convinced that he was robbed of the 2000 presidential election, Gore is simply a super-committed individual determined to make the planet a better place. But there is far more to him. Gore is getting rich from environmentalism, not just by being paid a whopping $175,000 per speech but by using political pressure to force government policy in a direction that benefits his business interests.
Gore is founder and chairman of the Alliance for Climate Protection, an outfit that seeks to “persuade people of the importance, urgency and feasibility of adopting and implementing effective and comprehensive solutions for the climate crisis.” It has launched a $300 million advertising campaign to coax Americans to embrace the carbon-lite lifestyle and to put pressure on their political leaders to lower national carbon emissions.
But Gore is also chairman of a green investment firm called Generation Investment Management, which is a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, an international collaboration of businesses and science bodies that promotes climate-change mitigation strategies and invests in companies that are environmentally friendly—including firms that produce renewable energy and low-carbon technology. So Gore uses one of his multimillion-dollar organizations—the Alliance for Climate Protection—to put pressure on government to promote the low-carbon lifestyle, which furnishes one of his other multimillion-dollar organizations—General Investment Management—with booming business.
Gore is also at the forefront of a very vocal effort to encourage the Obama administration to put a price on carbon. That is, to follow in Europe’s footsteps by creating a carbon-trading scheme whereby the wasteful byproduct of everyday manufacturing would be priced. Only those who pay for the “right” to emit carbon would be allowed to do so. When this was first introduced in Europe in 2005 under the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, a “pass” cost 30 euros per ton of CO2. When you consider that a large coal-fired power station can produce 20 million tons of CO2 per year, you see how the carbon levy works as a Big Government tax.
Gore and other members of the Copenhagen Climate Council, including the world’s largest producer of wind turbines, Vestas, present their demands for carbon-trading schemes as altruistic efforts to clean up the planet. In truth, these green-leaning profit-making machines stand to gain significantly if the activities of their less green competitors are hampered by government demands.
Gore’s activities provide only a glimpse into this new collusion between the green lobby, business interests, scientific research, and government policy. So speedily has this network come together that according to one critic of the politics of environmentalism—Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist—it is not going too far to liken the new Green-Industrial Complex to the Military-Industrial Complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned of in the 1950s. “[T]he potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist,” said Eisenhower, referring to the close relationship between weapons-makers, military researchers, and the U.S. military itself. He said of the resulting complex: “[T]here is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.” This is also the core belief of the Green-Industrial Complex, that collection of green activists, scientific researchers, and federal officials. It believes that government investment in narrow green concerns—“green jobs,” “a green New Deal,” “carbon trading”—is the simple and spectacular answer not only to the recession but to the future of capitalist society itself.
The Obama administration sees “green jobs” as a route out of the recession. On the campaign trail, Obama spoke of a “green revolution” in which his administration would spend $150 billion to boost America’s energy efficiency and in the process create 5 million jobs. These “green-collar workers” would install insulation to make homes more energy efficient, build wind turbines and greener buildings, and improve the electrical grid.
So now the race is on among green-leaning businesses to snap up the new government contracts—and among not-so-green businesses to improve their Green-Industrial credentials in the hope of reaping government cash. This despite the fact that international evidence suggests that the attempt to create green jobs will hamper economic recovery.
Obama cited Spain as a country where the focused creation of green jobs has improved economic matters. In fact, according to a study by Gabriel Calzada, a professor of economics at Juan Carlos University in Madrid, for every green job created by the Spanish government in recent years, an average of 2.2 other jobs were destroyed to make way for it. Furthermore, green jobs tend not to be permanent: in Spain, only 1 in 10 green jobs exists for a significant period of time. “Spain’s experience cited by Obama reveals that the U.S. should expect a loss of about nine jobs for every four [green jobs] created,” said Calzada. He warned that his study demonstrates how the narrow focus on green jobs has “clearly hindered Spain’s way out of the economic crisis, even while U.S. politicians insist that rushing into such a scheme will ease their own emergence from the turmoil.”
In the UK, the Green-Industrial Complex is in full swing, seeing in the recession an opportunity to tighten its grip on public money. Activists have used their political clout and scientific research, much of it derived from studies that underpin the powerful business-science alliance of the Copenhagen Climate Council, to pressure the government to adopt a Green New Deal. The government has been keen to accommodate them. Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced in April, to much fanfare and nods of approval from the Obama administration, that he would create 400,000 green jobs and a “low-carbon economy.”
Yet as in Spain, Brown’s figures do not add up and actually reveal the deluded nature of the Green-Industrial Complex’s conviction—mirroring that of its military precursor—that “spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.” The Brown government imagines that by 2015, it will have created 39,600 new jobs in geothermal energy, 74,900 in the development of alternative fuels, 25,300 in solar power, and 69,300 in the construction of wind turbines. What this overlooks—fatally—is that as a result of Britain’s debilitating crisis of credit, the renewables industry, in which tens of thousands of new jobs are apparently going to be created in the next six years, is in a dire, if not collapsing state. Five of Britain’s biggest wind-energy projects have been abandoned or put on hold indefinitely, and British Petroleum recently cut 620 jobs in its solar-energy division because it wasn’t profitable. And we’re expected to believe that thousands more people will be employed in wind and solar power by 2015? As author Christopher Booker argues, Brown’s “green revolution” is “babyish make-believe.”
The Spanish and British experiences—fantasy figures; more jobs lost than created; “green-collar workers” on short, unpredictable contracts—suggest that Obama should not so enthusiastically sign up for the creation of a post-recession America informed by the politics and prejudices of the Green-Industrial Complex. But then, much of the to-ing and fro-ing over the allocation of public money, the vying for influence in a new green America, is not about taking practical measures to combat hardship and generate wealth. It is a political campaign designed to reinvigorate American society, and contemporary capitalism itself, with a new sense of purpose and values.
For Obama, it is the public impact of terms like “green jobs” and “green economy,” and the ability of such new terms to force corporations to compete in a new way, that is really key. His embrace of the Green-Industrial Complex is not about affecting real change, far less about restructuring the economy in a way that might make it more productive. Rather, it is about instituting a new political outlook, one in which government intervention on the side of science-exploiting, globally-conscious corporations becomes the solution to contemporary problems. It is an outlook that both evades responsibility for overhauling the economy in a meaningful way and demotes individual initiative in favor of this burgeoning business/ science/government alliance.
Indeed, green activists now talk openly about the recession being a “good thing. ” Not only will it lead to less “destructive” human activity because people will be so financially restricted they won’t be able to consume and pollute in a wanton fashion, it will also elevate the policies of the Green-Industrial Complex to the center stage of public debate. A leading European scientist whose views inform the Copenhagen Climate Council recently said, “It’s a cruel thing to say … but if we are looking at a slowdown in the economy, there will be less fossil fuels burning, so for the climate it could be an advantage.” This captures both the Complex’s cavalier attitude toward individual hardship and its disdain for anything other than Big Government/Big Business solutions. This is about creating a new mission for the elite while enforcing a culture of low horizons, if not outright fear-induced paralysis, among the “little people.”
Far from offering salvation from our economic difficulties, the Green-Industrial Complex actually played a role in bringing on the downturn and damaging important public institutions. It’s worth remembering that the company whose collapse precipitated the credit crunch —Lehman Brothers—enthusiastically embraced the idea of “carbon trading,” or “carbon cap and trade” as it is sometimes known, that is now held up by green campaigners as a liberal, if not revolutionary, approach. In its 2007 report The Business of Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities, Lehman expressed hope that it might become a “prime brokerage for [carbon] emissions permits”—meaning it aspired to make money not only from speculating in mortgages but also from trading in thin air.
Lehman was inspired by European carbon-trading schemes, the kind that many want Obama to introduce in America and the UN or the World Bank to enforce on a global scale. Under the plan first proposed in the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and introduced in Europe in the early and mid-2000s, the European Union and UN allocate to industry legal titles to emit a certain amount of CO2. Because the titles are transferable, and because large numbers were allocated to large corporations when the licenses were first introduced, there arose a market in carbon-trading. Powerful businesses were able to sell their CO2 permits to smaller companies that needed to emit a certain amount of CO2. This created the bizarre, but apparently environmentalist, situation in which major corporations with extra CO2 titles were able to charge smaller organizations for the “right” to emit carbon.
In the UK, the University of Manchester, like so many other educational institutions, public buildings, and small businesses, had to pay up. It forked over £92,500 for CO2 permits—and when the carbon-trading market hit the recession and the value of CO2 permits fell, the university would be doing well, said one report, “if it managed to get £1,000 for the lot of them.” The Green-Industrial Complex’s transformation of CO2 into a tradeable commodity actually empowered large corporations and led to new forms of risky speculation.
Now, as well as demanding that Obama do something similar in the U.S., there are calls for an international carbon-trading regime. The World Bank has proposed that it broker “carbon rights” between the developed and developing world. This would recreate, in global dimensions, the restrictions on small-scale initiative and economic development that have already occurred in Europe. In the informal world of “carbon offsetting,” wealthy individuals in the West currently pay large sums to charities that fund “eco-friendly” farming and industry in the developing world. They can continue living carbon-heavy lives because “over there” some peasant is living a carbon-lite life. It was recently revealed that Prince Charles and David Cameron, leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, were making donations to a charity that encourages Indian farmers to use foot pumps rather than machinery to draw water for their crops. In short, guilt-ridden rich people are paying poor people to stay poor. Formalizing such an unequal relationship with international brokerage of carbon-emission rights would be a disaster—eco-slavery, as it were.
Far from ushering in a brighter future, the Green-Industrial Complex’s activities hinder economic experimentation, individual initative, and human aspiration. In problematizing the emission of CO2 to such an extent that one has to pay for the privilege, the Complex implicitly denigrates production, since all forms of modern manufacturing emit CO2. In racing to access green-allocated public money, it treats authorities as the solution to every problem. And how does it press the case for remaking society and the economy in its own image? Through the politics of fear, with science-tinged reports about imminent disaster if we do not take its advice.
This is a recipe for economic stagnation rather than recovery and for a new form of politics dominated by an elite green clique and closed off to us mere mortals.
The Josiah Barlett Center for Public Policy, a NH think tank, created this report that outlines at least 38 new taxes and fees that our current Democrat legislature and Governor has imposed on the people of NH.
Summary: So far this year, the legislature has passed 38 new or increased taxes and fees that are budgeted to raise $318.6 million over two years. For historical comparisons, there were 29 new taxes and fees passed in the previous two years. In previous legislative sessions, the low has been 9 in 2003-4 with 20 in both 2001-2 and 2005-6. The majority of tax and fee increases have been passed separately from the budget itself.