Distant Dome: Christmas Comes for Some in New Hampshire

By GARRY RAYNO, Distant Dome

Christmas in New Hampshire is upside down if you are the Granite State’s government.

New Hampshire lawmakers have decreed that most of the “gifts” from the state do not go to the needy, but to those on the other end of the economic spectrum.

With Republicans again firmly in charge of the legislature and governor’s office, the “mandate” according to House Majority Leader Jason Osborne, R-Auburn, will focus on “lowering taxes, cutting wasteful spending, growing our economy, empowering parents with the Parents Bill of Rights and expanding the wildly successful Education Freedom Account program.”

The question is who benefits the most from “lowering taxes” and “cutting wasteful spending,” and what is “wasteful spending,” services for poor women who go to Planned Parenthood clinics because they cannot afford to go to a private practice physician?

For the better part of a decade now, Republicans have voted to cut the rates of the state’s two business taxes, the business profits tax and the business enterprise tax.

The larger collector, the business profits tax, receives the vast majority of its revenue from multinational corporations not based in New Hampshire, but who do business here.

The business enterprise tax is a value added tax on every business in New Hampshire although many very small businesses are exempt from paying.

Now you might think lowering the rate of the business enterprise tax would benefit local businesses more than cutting the rate of the business profits tax and that would be a no brainer for lawmakers, but no, they lowered the rate for the business profits tax more frequently and far greater than they did the tax rate of the business enterprise tax.

Who did that help more? Large multinational corporations received the bulk of that benefit not your local business owners who do not reach across continents and cultures to soften the blow of taxes.

And in a little over a week, the one state tax that actually taxes wealth will be eliminated although it produced $185 million in revenue last fiscal year. Can you imagine what $185 million would do spread across the university and community college systems to reduce tuition for New Hampshire students?

Who pays the interest and dividends tax? About 90 percent of the revenue comes from the top five percent of wealth holders in the state. That is not most of us or our neighbors.

Well you might say, what about property taxes which every home, building and land owner pays in the state, surely they too should have a lower tax rate.

Have you checked the tax bill you are about to pay in a little over a week? I don’t know about your tax bill, but mine had a hefty increase this year, and I suspect yours did too.

And with the state facing a budget crisis not seen in two decades, you are likely to see it go up even more after the lawmakers are finished crafting the next two-year budget this spring as more state costs are likely to be downshifted to local property tax payers as they were two decades ago when the state stopped paying its share of the retirement system costs for municipal, school and county workers as they had since the unified system was created during the last century.

That sifted tens of millions of costs to local property taxes that the state once paid.

There are two Christmas presents the majority of local property taxpayers sort of received in the last year, two superior court decisions declaring the state’s education funding system unconstitutional, inequitable and too meager to cover the cost of an adequate education, which is every child’s fundamental, constitutional right.

Those two decisions in the ConVal and Rand cases — if acted on by lawmakers — could have lowered the property taxes of the poorer communities hit hardest by the state’s education funding system like Claremont, Berlin, Franklin, Newport, Pittsfield and others.

But that change would increase the property taxes in communities with the lowest rates in the state with the greatest property wealth, so in New Hampshire’s upside down Christmas world, lawmakers did not take the bait and instead did nothing keeping the current system in place.

We don’t want the taxpayers in those property wealthy communities saying “Bah Humbug” this time of year lawmakers might as well have said.

Elementary and secondary education is not the only place New Hampshire lawmakers traditionally shortchange the poorer residents, they do so in post-secondary education as well with tuition costs that are second only to Vermont for in-state students in the country.

Is it any wonder New Hampshire students have the highest debt load of any in the country when they graduate from college?

While the university and community college systems have held tuition costs near steady for in-state students for the last few years, they cannot do that forever with shrinking enrollments, reduced programs and fewer full-time faculty members.

There is a Christmas flavored program that began four years ago, the Education Freedom Account program that was sold by Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut and others as an alternative for poor families whose children have trouble in the public school environment.

However 70 to 75 percent of the students were not in public schools when they joined the program, they were in private or religious schools or homeschooled.

In other words, parents already sending their children to private or religious schools or homeschooling have been able to gain a state taxpayer-funded subsidy to cover the costs the parents were paying.

The program is currently capped at 350 percent of poverty, which is a salary of $71,540 for a family of two and $109,200 for a family of four.

The legislature defeated an attempt to raise the rate higher last session to 425 percent of poverty level, or up to $133,600 annually for a family of four and $86,870 for a two-member family.

The federal government estimates the median income in New Hampshire for a family of four is $133,447.

One bill in the upcoming session would do away with any income cap which would allow anyone with school-age children to apply for a grant of about $5,200 per student, a provision that is bankrupting Arizona, North Carolina and several other states with no cap.

But the program has gifted many religious and small private schools struggling to survive with a great deal of state money, money that once was forbidden for religious schools.

And another beneficiary of the program, the single biggest vendor for the parents using state money, is Amazon.

Does Jeff Bozos really need any more of your state tax dollars? I doubt it, especially at Christmas time.

Merry Christmas and to all a good night.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn in New London