I’m confused
Okay so there was a special session of the NH legislature this week to decide how make the ballots for this November elects fair. In case you didn’t know the NH supreme court found putting the majorities candidate on the top of the ballot biased. (I’m not really sure why, but apparently people go into the polls not knowing who to vote for and then select the first person they see. Weird.) So the legislature met and decided on nothing. If you are going to do something like this at least get something accomplished. Fucking jerks. While they are at getting nothing done Gubenatorial candidate Jim Coburn decides to try and introduce a constitutional amendment that would keep the NH courts from forcing a sales or income tax to fund our education system.
In case you didn’t know the NH Supreme court was busy this year. They also decided that way NH funds (or does not funds) its education system is bad, and that they have 1 year to come up with a plan or the courts will do it for them. Now it could be that there is enough money in the system and that it just needs to be clearly defined who gets it and how towns can be held accountable. Or it could be that we need to spend more money on education (especially since the federal education funding is not enough to cover federally mandated programs). I personally like (progressive) income taxes better than property taxes, so if we do have to raise taxes we should do that. Who knows, NH been trying to deal with this problem since at least 1993 and no real solution has arisen. I personally think this is because of people like Coburn who think limiting government is more important than education, (our future economy).
[This sort of came out of reading the Scientist’s post on the Manchester education thing and sort of from all the news the special session is generating]
Quiet weekend. Did nothing. Nice for a change. Did not have any interest to work on the yard, however, the needles are falling and I will have to rake the yard sometime soon.
I personally like sales taxes. Though I would prefer an income tax and/or sales tax over the current property tax system. I would like to learn more about VAT.
The greatest resistance is not associated with defining education (although it is there) but with the existing advantages the wealthy have in the state along with the property rich towns, add that to the philosophical aversion to taxes of any sort, and a divided electorate on what form of taxes it prefers will lead to no action or weak compromises that we have seen in the past.
My theory is that the legislature will fail to decide anything controversial in the next session, see the recent fiasco on the ballot layout. The court will review the record and force the adoption of new eduction definition and a tax system to implement it which appears to be the most popular, i.e. most votes in the legislature which meets their test.
I haven’t followed the details of all the proposals, but I would not be suprised that a number of viable systems have already been proposed, costed and evaluated. Short of repackaging, or an inport tax on extra-terrestrial goods, I would be shocked if there were any new proposals out there regardless of what the “new idea” commentators love to say.
Hi! Ho! Hi! Ho! Off to work I go.
Comment by weird old guy — Monday, October 2, 2006 @ 9:17 am
Import not Inport. Though it does sound more logical.
Comment by weird old guy — Monday, October 2, 2006 @ 9:18 am
I think the guy in charge of printing ballots made the decision sans legislation and printed the ballots in alphabetical order - starting with the letter M. The alphabetization (word?) was carried throughout the whole ballot, not re-started for each contest.
Comment by The Scientist — Tuesday, October 3, 2006 @ 8:36 am
What I heard was that someone (the attorney general?) pulled a letter out of a scrabble box and said, “let those whose names start with this letter be first on the ballot! Then go back to ‘A’ and move on from there!”. And I think that letter was ‘L’. Either way it doesn’t seem much more fair than alphabetical, but I guess everyone then has a chance to be first (and not just the repuglicans). Eh, I think that decision got tossed anyway.
Comment by Z.Monkey — Tuesday, October 3, 2006 @ 9:23 am