Exposing the Chicken-Little Political Hacks in State Capitals

Writing for the Boston Herald, Howie Carr eviscerates the state politicians that claim the world is coming to an end merely because they have to exercise a tiny shred of fiscal discipline. His prose is delightfully denigrating:

What state budget crisis? This year the hacks had $28.1 billion to squander. In the new fiscal year they’ll have $27.4 billion. In other words, for every $39 they wasted in FY 2009, they’ll have to get by on $38 in FY 2010. ...The real crisis is the tax bender they’re on at the State House. To deal with this infinitesimal cut, the taxaholics are going to jack up the sales tax 25 percent. They’re allowing local hacks to impose a new meals tax. They’ve invented a new tax for satellite TV. They’re increasing the hotel-motel tax. Registry fees are going up. The tax-fattened hyenas are hitting us with a new 6.25 percent tax on alcohol, though they and their brain-dead enablers in what’s left of the mainstream media refuse to call it a tax. They describe it as eliminating the exemption. There’s an exemption on booze taxes because there’s already an excise tax on alcohol. The tax is included in the cost of the bottle. By imposing the new, jacked-up sales tax, the solons are taxing a tax, just as they did with cigarettes a few years back. That’s been great for sales - in New Hampshire.

On a more serious note, he exposes the typical ploy of politicians, many of whom will deliberately try to cut the small handful of things voters actually like rather than the wasteful programs that fatten their friends and campaign contributors:

Whenever a town wants to scare the voters into increasing their own property taxes, they begin to cut services, in the order in which taxpayers care: fire, police, high school football, garbage, libraries. Now it’s the state’s turn to play Chicken Little. They’re going to close a dozen Registry of Motor Vehicles branches - places everyone has to visit at least occasionally. That’ll teach a good lesson to those taxpaying bastards who actually have to work for a living! Whatever the state is saving by closing the RMV branches, they could have saved five times as much by closing the sleepier district courts, and no citizen would have noticed. But they’d never shut down those plush payroll patriot palaces, because that’s where the solons have stashed all their unemployable friends and kinfolk.