Your Roots Are Showing
by Steve MacDonald
Keep Manchester Moving and Granite State Progress want the state (and Manchester) to spend your money and with good reason. Their reports are funded by unions using dues money paid by taxpayer funded teachers. Put simply, you paid for reports whose goal was to demonstrate why you should not be allowed to vote on how they spend your money. You have paid to be convinced that you do not deserve to limit the cost and growth of government to the cost of living. You have paid them to tell you that teachers can’t possibly do their jobs if you keep government funding in line with your ability to pay for it.
If you cap spending, it makes it that much harder for them to pick your pockets. And so they must object to a spending cap.
The union leader reports that the NEA-NH and the national NEA are funding the anti-spending cap campaign through Keep Manchester Moving, which is directly connected to Granite State Progress. Granite State progress is connected to its national mother ship Progress Now based in Colorado which is an extension of the Democracy Alliance. The Democracy Alliance, based on their reports and articles, is funded by a few score dirty-rich liberals including George Soros, Peter Lewis, Hollywood types including Rob Reiner, and of course the SEIU—who is fused at the hip to groups like ACORN, and Obama’s campaign arms along with Podesta’s American Progress, OAF, and so on.
So this local ‘grass roots’ group, who hides and obfuscates the sources of its actual funding from the Secretary of State (with good reason), is getting its money laundered through national unions and Liberal cash cows connected to well funded multi-state organizations working a shared left wing agenda. That agenda is to milk New Hampshire Taxpayers and build taxpayer funded union power to….tax and spend more of your money. And now their top-down collectivist out of state funded paymasters are trying to tell you whether you have the right to vote to control how your local government spends your local money.
Grass roots my… Grass.
They have of course rolled out the “teachers and students hit hardest” clause. But you already pay teachers an average of 48K per year in New Hampshire, plus benefits. In Manchester the average salary—based on their online pay scale records is just over 47k per year with starting pay at around 30K and top pay at 66.9K, before benefits. If you figure a 60 hour work week, (Five 12 hour days per week on average) they make about 20.00/hour, and average a 2.5-3.5% raise every year regardless of the economy. Do you do so well?
And what’s worse is the education infrastructure of government sucks up as much or more of your money, so they have as much to gain by free for all spending as anyone. You wan’t to help students, first prevent them from unrestricted spending, then force them to manage the money more effectively, by focusing on students and education instead of top heavy administration and union manipulated public contracts.
The spending cap keeps your government spending increases in line with the cost of everything else. It doesn’t stop increases. It won;t prevent budget growth. It doesn’t’ hamstring the teachers. It puts government in line with the real world. It does that because the average taxpayer’s ability to pay for it is similarly restricted. The cap includes a provision to override the cap in the event of an emergency, by a 2/3rds vote of the city or town government, so at no point will necessary expenses ever be hamstrung by the spending cap. It also prevents the local government from tweaking the property tax rates to get around the cap, abusing your ability to pay for more government than you should ever really need.
But Granite State Progress, Keep Manchester Moving, and the long arms and deep pockets that fund them, don’t really give a damn about what you can afford. They just want to enrich their union supporters so they can in turn give them a portion of the tax dollars you pay them as union dues, which they will then sprinkle throughout to the left wing progressive universe to support more tax and spend activism.
It’s fiscal suicide, death by your own dollars. But you can stop the cycle of abuse by voting for the same spending cap that has been both legal and effective in towns and cities across New Hampshire. Make them as accountable with your money as you have to be.
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