Feb
24
2025

Yes, This is Really How These People Think

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An eye-catching headline on an LTE in my dying local paper, Foster's Daily Democrat: NH GOP gave $150M to the rich at property taxpayers' expense. The letter is from Portsmoutn (NH) resident Walter Hamilton. In its entirety:

In 2023 the GOP controlled state legislature voted to end the interest and dividend tax by 2025. A tax which brought in $150 million a year. This tax was paid by the richest people in New Hampshire. I was one who paid that tax and believe the state will now cut spending benefiting the poor and middle class and push more burdens onto cities and towns resulting in higher property taxes.

When you pay your property tax, remember to thank former Governor Sununu and his party for the annual $150 million gift to the rich paid for at your expense.

Dire warnings, indeed. But I just want to focus on Walter's Orwellian logic: Government really owns your money. Letting you keep some is a "gift".

I can't understand that thought process, but I can't help but acknowledge it: this is really how these people think.

Fun fact: According to Official Government Figures, NH's Interest & Dividends Tax only represented 3% of the state's "unrestricted revenue" in FY2025. This leads me to suspect that Walter's dire warnings are more than slightly overblown.

And I should admit a bit of self-interest: I've paid the I&D tax for years. You don't need to be "rich" to pay it; all you need is investment savings that throw off a decent amount of taxable income.

Not that I'm a fan of property tax, by the way. As Walter Block observed: property tax is government charging a person rent to stay on their own property.

Also of note:

  • I like this "far more modest" proposal. Robert F. Graboyes has it, under the headline: We Beg Your Pardon, We Never Promised You the Rose Garden.

    The assembly line production of pardons and commutations by Presidents Biden and Trump in recent weeks has made many uncomfortable about the very existence of this uniquely sweeping power—a relic of Seventh Century England’s perception that kings were God’s equivalents on earth. Stripping the presidency of this unfettered privilege has merits, but doing so would require a far-reaching constitutional amendment that would be impossible to enact and ratify in today’s environment.

    But here’s a far more modest proposal that might just make sense to both parties—requiring a 90-day Public Comment Period for any names under consideration for clemency, along with the specific terms of the action being considered. Biden could still have given preemptive pardons for any crimes committed over the previous eleven years to son Hunter and five other Bidens, but he would have to have announced that possibility no later than October 22—over two weeks before the 2024 election. Donald Trump would still be free to pardon those January 6 rioters accused of violent assaults on police officers, but only after enduring 90 days of criticism by enraged Democrats, unnerved Republicans, outraged law officers, families of victims, and a lean and hungry press—all asking what happened to J. D. Vance’s January 12 statement that, “if you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”

    This would probably require a constitutional amendment. And the president might not approve, but that's the genius of the amendment process: the president has no role in it whatsoever.

  • I rag on the University Near Here a lot, but… at least it's not the University of Colorado Boulder. Roger A. Pielke Jr. takes to his substack to tell of his experiences there: How to Get Rid of a Tenured Professor. It's a long story, but an infuriating one. (Infuriating for me, that is. Roger seems to keep his equanimity.) Sample:

    At CU, everything changed for me in 2015 when Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) asked my university to investigate me — He alleged that Obama White House criticism of me indicated that I may have been secretly taking money from Exxon in exchange for the substance of my Congressional testimonies, in which I reported consensus scientific findings of the IPCC (but I digress).

    Of course, I was not taking money in exchange for testimony or anything else. What was odd — to me at least — was that after the investigation was announced and conducted, no campus administrator ever spoke to me about it, not even to check in and see how I might be doing. I only heard from university lawyers.

    Not long after, I was told that university support for the science policy center that I had been recruited to CU to found in 2001 could no longer be guaranteed, and the center might be closed. No one linked this explicitly to the Grijalva investigation, but I could not help but think they were related.

    And then things escalated. And escalated.