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State Representative Tom Hackbarth
100 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
651-296-2439
For more information contact: Austin Bleess 651-296-5529
OP/ED COLUMN
TOO MUCH SPENDING
By Tom Hackbarth
State Representative
This past week the House spent many hours debating numerous omnibus bills. For those not familiar with the legislative terms an omnibus bill is simply one that deals with several separate but related items. And all of those items include spending the tax dollars which everyone works hard all year long for the state to take.
I voted against most of these omnibus bills because the government is not being responsible with the tax dollars in these bills. The spending in the bills is not sustainable for the future. They want to spend money the state doesn’t have, and they want that spending to increase by nearly twice that of the average citizens’ paycheck.
Take for example the Health and Human Services bill. That bill requires a 24% increase in spending over the next 2 years. In 2010 and 2011 it requires a 43% spending increase. Those kinds of increases are simply crazy. At the current rate of increases, we would have to double the income tax rates in the next 10 years to fund these health care programs, and Democrats are adding even more spending.
In the area of transportation the Democrats want to raise our taxes by $880 million when we have a $2.2 billion surplus. With that kind of surplus we can put more money into transportation without raising taxes.
The Higher Education Omnibus Bill would have used tax dollars, which you work hard to pay, to give illegal immigrants in-state tuition prices at our local colleges and universities. We should not be using tax dollars to reward people who have broken the law. It does not make sense to me to reward people here illegally when citizens from Kansas or Colorado do not pay in-state tuition costs.
The Omnibus Tax Bill, which is being touted by some as “permanent property tax relief” is nothing more than white washing a problem. If we are going to provide permanent property tax relief we need to place caps on property tax rates. This bill will buy back some levies for a few years, but after that property taxes will rise once again. I believe that we should use some of the surplus money and give it back to the property tax payers for an immediate short term solution, and work together to provide real, permanent property tax relief.
In this legislative session we should be using the tax payers’ dollar wisely. We should work to fund the necessary portions of our state government, and not allow portions of the budget to grow so quickly. We need to keep government spending in check so that we can keep taxes low. When government spending goes up, taxes go up, and the only winner is the government.
All of these omnibus bills spend money without a thought about who will pay for it and where this money will come from. That is not the way to govern. We have just brought the state out of a multi-billion dollar budget deficit, and if the Democrats have their way they’ll spend us right back into one.
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