More on New Hampshire’s Budget Deficit

 Below is an editorial that appeared in today’s New Hampshire Union Leader in it’s entirety, it sums up Governor John Lynch’s budget policy perfectly:

CIGARETTE-SMOKING poker players beware. Gov. John Lynch has decided to balance the state budget on the backs of you sinners.

Facing a budget shortfall that grows by the week, Gov. Lynch surprised no one by proposing on Thursday to raise taxes on cigarette smokers and wine drinkers, and announcing his support for a hefty tax on poker players.

Instead of making possibly painful spending cuts, or spreading the tax-hike pain evenly and taking the heat for it, Lynch has yet again targeted small groups of people who engage in what might be termed morally questionable behavior €” smoking, drinking and gambling.

Lynch, the most popular guy in school, is sticking it to the unpopular kids. Which is one reason he became so well-liked in the first place. You don’t get popular by making a majority of people unhappy. You do it by giving most people what they want and making a small, politically powerless group pay for it.

That is how Gov. Lynch operates, we now know. We also know that the governor continues to assert that the state’s budget problem is the result of a drop in revenues even though state data show otherwise.

Total state revenues so far this fiscal year are about $40 million lower than projections. But they are $75.8 million higher than last year. The problem isn’t the revenue, it’s the budget, which contained unrealistic revenue projections €” just as many Republican leaders predicted last summer.

The obvious solution is to cut spending. But Gov. Lynch still insists, despite the numbers, that the state hasn’t enough revenue, so he is raising taxes. Again.

 That editorial sums it up perfectly, and hits the nail on the head. Governor Lynch is in effect a bully who is picking on groups who have no political organization behind them. He is picking on the weaklings, so to speak. He doesn’t have the balls to do the right thing and cut spending because the organizations he would have to cut spending from have political clout. So it’s screw the “sinner” once again as John Lynch just walks on water.

 The best point that this article makes is the fact that John Lynch is attempting to blame the national economy for his bloated budget problems. Yes the economy has slowed, but that is not the problem with New Hampshire’s budget. As the editorial states, New Hampshire revenues are up $76 million over last year because of all of John Lynch’s new taxes, yet New Hampshire has a deficit because Lynch bloated the revenue estimates that his new taxes would generate in order to justify his new spending. 

 New Hamshire doesn’t have a revenue problem, she has a spending problem.