ISSUES
EDUCATION
Why Education Savings Accounts should not trigger property tax hikes
A report by the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy and EdChoice shows that New Hampshire public school spending and staffing increased much more rapidly from 1992-2014 than student enrollment did,…
HEALTHCARE
Expanded Medicaid’s permanence
The case advocates make for reauthorizing expanded Medicaid is exactly the same as the case for rejecting it: Nearly 53,000 Granite Staters are now dependent on the program.
Supporters don’t use the…
ENERGY
Burning money
Every time you pay your electricity or heating bill, you’re lighting your money on fire. That is, you’re trading money for the energy released by burning some combustible material — natural gas,…
STATE BUDGET
Attack of the Turnspike
It’s been a decade since New Hampshire increased turnpike tolls statewide, which means that the Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Turnpikes has awakened, like the mythical Kumbhakarna, ravenous…
TRANSPORTATION
Pie in the sky train estimates will bankrupt us
The Pappas-Van Ostern Express is a good example of bad math driving debt and leaving taxpayers with an empty wallet. Last week’s news release was not a new train plan but simply the old unaffordable plan with all the estimates revised down to make it appear cheaper but grotesquely unrealistic. This sort of new math is how governments go bankrupt.
TAXATION
Why the ARMI subsidy is so important
Making exceptions to general rules can seem harmless or even essential in the moment. When exceptions are made to achieve a short-term goal, the argument is that this one little violation of our collective…
REGULATION
The minimum wage is virtue signaling
As of July, the average hourly wage for private employment in New Hampshire was $26.22, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
In February,…
LOCAL GOVERNMENT
NH Should Not Offer Incentives to Amazon
CONCORD — Under no circumstances should state officials offer special economic development incentives to try to land Amazon's newly announced second headquarters (HQ2), Andrew Cline, interim president…
BETTER GOVERNMENT
January 2017 By Michael Sununu Among the many drivers of unsound public policy in this day and age, perhaps the most odious is the alarmism over changes in climate that are supposedly driven by human activity. Time and again, we have seen costly, unjustified, and economically destructive public policy implemented in the name of climate […]
State employees to save $1 million a year after Janus ruling
BETTER GOVERNMENT, BLOG, FEATUREDThe top two contributors to the re-election campaign of U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster, D-N.H., in this quarter are public-sector labor unions: the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Each union has given Rep. Kuster $5,000 this quarter (not 5,000 quarters). And until June 27, each […]