The fool’s gold budget and our response: Vote ‘em out!

The fool’s gold budget and our response: Vote ‘em out!

I’m not happy.

The General Assembly passed a budget this year that cut funding to local cities and towns to the tune of $150 million, balanced itself on $100 million that never came (thanks Rep. Steven Costantino, House Finance Committee Chair, for selling us that one), and increased taxes for just about every Rhode Islander. Costantino even touted that taxpayers were “the winner[s]”. Winners?! Hmm if a car tax bill on my old vehicles and higher property taxes [again] constitute winning, then I feel like I hit the lotto!

I’m not reporting anything you don’t already know, but my question, Rhode Island, is what will be our response to this? Costantino’s making a bid for mayor in Providence; is he the person you’d like making financial decisions for the city for the next four years? How about other members of the General Assembly who passed this budget?

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My answer is no and you gotta be kidding.

Rhode Island we have a unique opportunity this election season to do something radical and that is vote everyone who voted for this budget out. Every single one.

I understand it was one vote during a very difficult economic time, but that’s precisely the point. In a very difficult economic time this General Assembly decided to pass on the budget deficit to you and I by cutting funding to already cash strapped cities and towns knowing that those same cash strapped cities and towns would in some form, need to recoup the lost revenue by increasing our taxes.

And for assemblymen and women like Costantino to call us winners, insults our intelligence and so we need to take action. We need to vote them out and elect people who are not going to pass the buck to the taxpayer year after year but are willing to say enough is enough.

But and this is a big but, if we continue to elect the same officials hoping for change, Einstein called that insanity. We literally can’t afford to elect these folks again and I say let’s give some new people a chance. Can they be any worse?