Maggie Hassan wants to raise your taxes. She longs to do it. She cannot wait to do it. This is not a debatable assertion. It is a fact.

Hassan has repeatedly called the current state budget, which cut spending and reduced taxes and fees, “reckless” and “extreme.” On the campaign trail, she has made perfectly clear that she wants to “restore” not just the spending that was cut, but many of the taxes, too.

She told the Portsmouth Herald last month, “When you look at some of the back-of-the-budget tax cuts and other tax cuts the Republicans made the last two years, I think there are some things that most taxpayers of New Hampshire would agree that we could restore.”

Except for the tobacco tax, she won’t say what taxes she wants to raise. But you can get a good idea by looking back at what taxes and fees legislators recently cut. Lo and behold, you will see that many of them are taxes or fees that Hassan was instrumental in raising or creating in the previous two budgets, the ones she boasts of crafting.

Democrats raised or established dozens of taxes and fees in the last two budgets they controlled. Among them were the infamous income tax on owners of Limited Liability Companies, auto registration and inspection fees, the vanity license plate fee, expanding the rooms and meals tax to camp sites, medical lab work and hospital bed fees, court filing fees and the tobacco tax, which she voted four times to increase, raising it from 52 cents a pack in 2006 to $1.78 a pack.

Hassan voted for all of the tax and fee increases in those budgets, praised those increases (even calling the LLC income tax “responsible”) and criticized legislators for rolling back many of them in the current budget.

Make no mistake about it: Maggie Hassan has a burning desire to raise taxes. The only way to keep her from realizing that desire is to prevent her from becoming governor.