Editorial

The Spirits of Massachusetts are bought in New Hampshire

How our state leaders made our Granite State neighbors richer

This is the New Hampshire State Liquor Store 1 mile over the Massachusetts border, and yes, the car and most the others are from the Bay State not the Granite State. Walter Brooks photo.

Tax-Free Savings - Stock Up and Save, or Live (tax) Free or Die

By Walter Brooks

The new sign is easily read from the highway. The Mass. Sales Tax was recently increased and added booze.

That's what the big new signs reads at New Hampshire State Liquor Stores just over the border from Taxachusetts.

The liquor prices were always cheaper in New Hampshire, but the just added Massachusetts 6.25% tax on booze makes it irresistible.

When I stopped to check this it out this past weekend on my way home from Maine, every car I saw in the parking lot was from Massachusetts where our one-party Democratic State Legislature just increased our sales tax 25% and included alcohol in the items taxed for the first time adding 6.25% to the cost of liquor and wine bought locally.

Our Democratic Governor signed the bill demonstrating to one and all that he is as removed from the "real world" as our long-discredited, corrupt and dictatorial one-party legislature.

These wealthy political poobahs are too well off personally to mind a Draconian tax increase, and they are totally indifferent to your needs, problems or welfare.

The fact that unemployment is almost 10%, the worse it's been in decades, means nothing to these rich, fat political hacks who are completely insulated from your retribution because of our de-facto one-party system on Beacon Hill.

They can NOT  be touched, and it's YOUR fault

The last Governor who called Cape Cod his home was Francis Sargent. He founded the Goose Hummock Shop in Orleans and lived at the tip of Barley Neck in East Orleans. His ilk included US Senator Ed Brooke of Oak Bluffs, US Attorney General Elliot Richardson of Eastham and Shirley Gomes of Harwich.

Thomas Jefferson said that "a people get the government they deserve", and Massachusetts deserves these narcissistic nabobs because you and I put them in office by our votes.

And the Republican party in Massachusetts is just as guilty.

The GOP POGs, "Petrified Old Guard", which control the Republican party machinery, is more interested in foisting conservatives who are stuck in the GOP past, than offering voters the kind of Progressive Republican men and women whom this state regularly elected a generation ago, men and women like Governor Frank Sargent (Orleans), Ed Brooke (Oak Bluffs), Elliot Richardson (Eastham) and Shirley Gomes (Harwich).

Independent and Democrat voters supported these Progressive Republicans every time they ran for office.

That was then, this is now

A perfect example of the state GOP's fascination with bourgeois capitalist conservatives instead of people-friendly pols is the party's present back-room fostering of an large insurance company C.E.O., probably the least popular job in America today.

Reminds us of the 2004 Gail Lese Cape Cod carpet bagging flop by Mitt Romney.