Charging residents for government transparency (see HB1002) increasingly sounds like a bribe to me. Yes, we created these documents at your expense, but if you want to see them, you’ll need to slip us a little cash. It might be a lot of money; we’ll let you know.

The bill passed, was reconsidered, then did not pass but did not fail. It has been rushed back to the Judiciary Committee for emergency resuscitation. The goal of its sponsors [(Prime) Kuttab (R), Michael Cahill (D), Ball (R), Maggiore (D), Ankarberg (R), DeSimone (R), Dunn (R), Nelson (R), Bill Boyd (R), Edwards (R), Grassie (D), Carson (R), Gannon (R), Watters (D), Lang (R), Avard (R)], all of whom have put the state before the people (IMO), is to rearrange the words until it passes the NH House.

The buzz suggests easy passage in the Senate (like sh!t through a goose), and Gov. Sununu signing it seems likely, so this bilking citizens is a wholly endorsed project of the Republican Party.

They are making public document access and, therefore, government accountability a potential hardship.

Ua Nemhnainn, commenting on an earlier article about HB1002, observed that Article 8 of the NH constitution clearly states that “the public’s right of access to governmental proceedings and records shall not be unreasonably restricted.”

The only remaining argument against my … points is possibly over the word ‘unreasonable’ in Art. 8. If a fee would impact even a single citizen from accessing government records, it is unreasonable. Overall, this bill would have a chilling effect on low-income and ordinary citizens even making requests, as they would have no way to know ahead of time if they would suddenly be charged $25 or $300 for a request.

This is a point we’ve also made, but Ian Underwood added a new dimension to the conversation – as we expected he would – by pointing out that the system we have without the need for bribes (my words, not his) has things backward from go.

The problem with the current RTK setup is that you have to already know there’s a problem before you can start looking into it. If you want to find the problems, you have to be able to look at everything.

Actual transparency would require towns, municipalities, school districts, and agencies to make all documents that could be subject to an RTK available online as soon as they have been created. That would include all official emails, all RFPs, all bills, all correspondence… everything.

That’s what a Right to Know (RTK) law would require. What we have now is a Right to Ask (RTA) law, which is a very different kind of thing.

We have a “right to ask” but not a right to know, to which the HB1002 sponsors and supporting members of the legislature would like to add a fee, fine, tax, or, as I’ve now suggested, a bribe.

Yes, you can ask, but before you can know, we’ll need some as-yet-to-be-determined sum of money upon whose payment we may then provide the documents we think you requested (if they get it wrong, you’ll likely have to grease their palms again).

All we’re missing is a muscly gold-chain-adorned leisure suit-wearing guy named Vinnie the fixer and a shadowy alley reeking of garbage and piss.

The post HB1002 and Bribery: Give us Some Cash and We Might Share Some Documents You Already Paid For… appeared first on Granite Grok.

Since attaining supermajority status in Montpelier, the Democrats’ education policy can be explained as “give the government school monopoly (the VTNEA, superintendents association, etc.) whatever they want!”

This included universal “free” school meals, expanded pre-k spending and control over birth to five care, and a new pupil weighting system guaranteeing more spending on certain classes of students. This cocktail exploded in their – OUR – faces in the form of an anticipated 20 percent plus property tax increase.

Now, they are desperate to paper over this colossal political screw-up, and their plan to do so is not to spend within our means but rather to raise more taxes to feed into the education fund to “buy down” the impact on property taxes. In other words, continue to take more and more money from taxpayers to give to their political cronies, just out of different pockets, in the hopes we can be fooled into thinking we’re somehow getting a deal.

It’s not a new strategy. The Education Fund is currently fed by the property tax, 1/3 of the sales & use tax, ¼ of the meals & rooms tax, the state lottery, and a handful of other minor sources. My friend John McClaughry dubbed the public-school special interests “The Blob” after the 1950 horror movie monster that grew ever larger by subsuming – killing and destroying — everything in its path. It’s an apt description, and The Blob is on the move again!

The House Ways & Means Committee is currently debating what other new revenue sources can be thrown into the expanding path of The Blob. Here are the top candidates:

• Higher and/or expanded sales taxes. Vermont’s sales tax is currently 6 percent, with some communities adding a local option tax on top of that. It raises $607 million.

According to the Joint Fiscal Office, each 0.1 percent increase in the sales tax would raise approximately $9.3 million. Of course, this would make Vermont even less competitive with neighbors New Hampshire, which has no sales tax, and New York, which has a 4 percent sales tax. It was also pointed out that the sales tax is a regressive tax hitting lower-income people harder than those with higher incomes.

Expanding the sales tax base – the things subject to the sales tax – could squeeze as much as $271 million by including groceries, medical products, residential energy, clothing, and footwear. These things are currently exempt from the sales tax because, well, people need them to survive. Taxing them would be cruel and unusual. But, you know, if the VTNEA wants the money….

• An Excise Tax on Sweetened Beverages.

The JFO ran the numbers on taxing just “sugar-sweetened” beverages – soda, sports drinks, energy drinks, ready-to-drink teas, and coffees, etc. —  at either 1 cent or 2 cents per ounce (so 12 to 24 cents per twelve-ounce can/bottle, but it also applies to syrups and powders to which water is added). This would extract an estimated $15.2 to $29.8 million from thirsty Vermonters. However, Rep. Peter Anthony (D-Barre) floated the idea of taxing ALL sweetened beverages, an idea the chair Emily Kornheiser said she could potentially get on board with, regardless of what the sweetener was. This would roughly double the take. Hey, why not? The VTNEA wants the money.

Of note, no other state has a sugar or otherwise sweetened beverage tax, although a handful of municipalities do. So, look for “Vermont will lead the way!” propaganda to come if this takes off.

• A “Cloud” Tax on Pre-Written Software Accessed Remotely.

Democrats in the legislature have been salivating about the Cloud Tax on software as a service for over a decade, and this might just be the year! (Because the VTNEA wants the money.) For the most part Vermont does not tax services (more on that in a moment). This tax, which would cost Vermonters roughly $20 million per year, would hit things like your Microsoft Office or Google Apps subscriptions, Quickbooks, Mailchimp, Toast or Square, Force, Amazon Web Services, and with cruel irony, TurboTax, so you’ll get to pay a tax to pay your taxes.

While this has implications for everybody, it will be particularly painful for small businesses that need these software services to operate competitively.

• Expanding the Sales Tax to Services.

Although a general expansion of the 6 percent sales tax on goods to include services – everything from school tuition, legal advice, hair salons, personal trainers, lawncare, etc. – was not part of the JFO presentation, it was raised by members of the committee. The JFO presenter referred them to the Rand Study done in 2023 to determine new revenue streams to fund expanded government-run pre-k. That study showed that expanding the sales tax to services at the 6 percent rate would extract $105 to $143 million, depending upon what and how many exemptions are allowed.

• Tax candy

Currently, candy is considered a grocery and is exempt from the sales tax. Taxing it at 6 percent would only raise $3.7 million, but as long as you’re stealing, you might as well do so from babies. The VTNEA wants the money!

The tragedy of all this taxing and spending – or perhaps the intent – was pointed out by Representative Scott Beck (R-St. Johnsbury). “Given how we define education spending and calculate the yield, this would be worse because you’d get all of the taxes and not get property taxes down at all.” Asked to elaborate, Beck went on, “If you pour all of this money into the system, the districts are going to spend it up because it’s cheap money. I mean, we’ve added in the last – with Wayfair [v. South Dakota sales tax SCOTUS decision] We’ve added $100 million in sales tax to the Education Fund, and look what’s happened to property taxes. The money’s cheap to the districts, and so they spend it.”

Just like The Blob monster that it is.

The post The Democrat Solution to High Property Taxes Is… More Higher Taxes! appeared first on Granite Grok.

It’s appropriate that the 28th annual meeting of the United Nations Climate Summit is called the “Conference of Parties.” Each year, they have a party destroying the liberty of the American people.

Most Americans remain ignorant that the U.S. delegates are among the cheerleaders clapping for the tyranny of the global domination goals to regiment the whole world with environmental controls.

President Biden immediately reversed the Trump Administration policies that slowed this process down. For at least 28 years, the globalist left has consistently put America at the forefront of promoting audacious controls. Do you realize that this past December, throughout COP28, in Dubai, UAE, the U.S. and Western governments pledged suicidal energy policies? All the communists, socialists, and Islamic nations celebrate how naive American delegates are at this Conference of Parties. This action to make America first will economically destroy us.

This action reminds me of a similar scenario going on in the 1937 Soviet Union. Standing in the crowd after listening to an impassioned speech praising Joe Stalin by his deputy, Alexander Solzhenitsyn stood among the fear and terror written on each man’s face, clapping long and loud for one of history’s most prolific and evil mass murderers. Fake enthusiasm, intimidated souls mimicking one another, fearing not to stop. Eleven dreadful long minutes passed. Finally, the director of the paper factory boldly sat down, and all the rest followed, ending the applause. That night, this man was arrested and, after interrogation, given ten years in prison. Their final warning to him: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.” In today’s America, it is concerning that the Democratic left and RINOs do not fake their enthusiasm for these liberty-destroying policies. They never stop applauding.

We want to thank Russ Payne for this Contribution – Please direct yours to Steve@GraniteGrok.com.
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It is obvious that the goal of President Biden’s policies is not to put America’s interest first. He signed unconstitutional Executive Orders to destroy the energy independence achieved under President Trump. Alex Newman’s TNA 1/29/24 article points out how our delegation to the COP28 Climate Summit puts America last: “Ironically, those coal-fired plants being built across China are powering the very factories producing the economical and environmentally devastating solar panels and windmills subsidized by struggling Western taxpayers — systems that will end up imposing even higher costs on American consumers.” What Hypocrisy? Communist, socialist, and Islamic regimes make oil deals at the UN Climate Summit to phase out fossil fuels, but America must be first!

The New American asks Senators Lisa Murkowski (R – Alaska) and Tom Carper (D-Del) a similar question, “Why does the U.S. government commit economic suicide to “save the climate” even as the regime ruling Communist China keeps building coal-fired power plants at an unprecedented rate?” Of the few answers given, they: “… simply insisted that Beijing should follow suit after the United States jumps off the cliff into economic oblivion.”

Something is terribly wrong when our government, elected by “we the people,” pledges its loyalties to the UNCOP28 plans without the permission of Congress. The silent majority must wake up and speak out when Congress ignores American interests. Contact state and federal representation — Senators and Representatives – with phone calls, emails, and snail mail — to warn them to stop representing the UN’s Agenda 2130 and COP28 pledges. Check out the facts at the Voice of Freedom: https://thenewamerican.com/print/phasing-out-oil-or-america/

The post Never Stop Applauding … Or Else! appeared first on Granite Grok.

Within weeks of the Biden Administration embedding itself in the Oval Office (Like a tick), it announced that the Houthi rebels in Yemen were not, as the Trump administration had declared, terrorists. Except they were.

The Houthi movement, which is officially called Ansarallah (or Ansar Allah, for “supporters of God”), brags a slogan which reads: “God is great, death to the U.S., death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam.” …

The obvious presumption was that the Bidenistas were tossing Iran’s Proxy and, therefore, Iran a bone, claiming it was about ensuring humanitarian relief. And why not? The Bidenistas hate America and Israel, so it was a better fit than OJ’s glove.

In exchange, the Houthis continued to recruit child soldiers, bomb airports, and kill civilians – they even raided the US Embassy in Yemen before the year was out.

Not much had changed in the intervening years until someone decided to report on the years of “almost peaceful protesting” as if it were something new. Forever wars, distraction from Team Biden failures during a presidential election year, corn pop? Any guess is as good as the next, but the US started bombing Yemen as a matter of policy (so much for the humanitarian aid), and Biden Inc. has had a change of heart on the Houthi. They are to  be rebranded as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.”

This decision comes after the group has repeatedly attacked United States interests, including commercial ships in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea. National Security Official Jake Sullivan stated that this move is aimed at impeding terrorist funding to the Houthis.

This fits (hand-and-glove?) with the Deep State theatrical presentation: we’re mad at Iran for something that reeks of some sort of John Kerry visiting the Mullah co-production stage play. Democrats love Iran and have longed for a shift in regional power away from Saudi Arabia. The distraction is an excuse to increase inflation by throwing billions at weapons makers (who love anyone that gives them money), while the depopulation left gets something the like. Wars kill a lot of people. Sure, they release a lot of carbon into the atmosphere, but someone did some math in case anyone asks.

The number of people killed offsets the CO2 released to kill them or something like that.

War is now a planetary good, so we should expect more of it, but you have to have an antagonist. In Ukraine it’s Russia, in Israel it’s both sides, and in Yemen it is now the Houthi, who Iran may have given up for the sake or perception. Trump winning is bad for Iran and the Democrats, so what’s a few martyrs? They can also find more.

The post Biden and the Houthis – Live Shows Daily! appeared first on Granite Grok.