In her proposed budget, Gov. Kelly Ayotte opens New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Account program to all students who’ve been enrolled in a New Hampshire public school (including chartered public schools) for at least a full academic year, the Josiah Bartlett Center has confirmed. The expansion would take effect July 1, 2026. Students who currently have […]

New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Account (EFA) program is restricted to families that make no more than 350% of the federal poverty level. (That’s $90,370 for a family of three and $112,525 for a family of four.) Republicans in the state Legislature have proposed removing the income cap and allowing all students to participate in the […]

Most U.S. states (26) have a right-to-work law. They’ve proven effective at expanding worker freedom and improving state economies, which has made them popular across most of the country. But they have yet to expand into the Northeast, which now has lower economic growth than the South. If New Hampshire becomes the 27th state to […]

New Hampshire’s housing shortage, and the price spike that it created, has made housing the No. 1 problem facing the state, according to University of New Hampshire polling. Fixing the state’s housing shortage is such a priority for voters that a 2024 UNH poll found more than 1/3 of voters rating it as the top […]

From local elections to legislative debates to legal challenges, discussion of public education in New Hampshire has been dominated by two persistent myths.  The first is that more spending is the primary means of producing better educational outcomes.  The second is that our educational outcomes are stunted because funding for K-12 public schools has “been […]

Labor unions negotiate benefits on behalf of all employees of a collective bargaining unit, not just their own members, unions say. Since non-members receive the benefits, they should be compelled to pay the union for negotiating them.  Because right-to-work laws forbid non-union employees from being compelled as a condition of employment to pay any portion […]

The State New Hampshire and its towns and cities provide the opportunity to obtain a publicly funded education to every school-age child, regardless of income. And no one complains that this unfairly benefits higher-income households. To illustrate the point, the median household income in Hopkinton is $130,216. That’s 55% higher than in Concord ($83,701) and […]

People have always relocated between New Hampshire and Massachusetts, for a variety of reasons. But the flow from Massachusetts into New Hampshire is larger than the outflow, and it has been increasing, an analysis from the Pioneer Institute in Boston shows.  From 2010-2023, New Hampshire gained a net total of 98,879 immigrants from Massachusetts, nearly […]

New Hampshire is the freest state in the country and on the continent. But on some measures of economic freedom, we do poorly. Most Granite Staters would probably be surprised to learn that New Hampshire is in the top 20 most regulated states in the nation. New Hampshire’s recent regulatory growth Researchers at the Mercatus […]

Reviving American manufacturing is a hot topic in the nation and New Hampshire once again. A new Department of Business and Economic Affairs report on the state’s advanced manufacturing sector has drawn attention to that field’s recent growth here (well above the New England average) as well as its economic benefits (tens of thousands of […]