Governor Hassan made a mistake by nominating someone engaged in an ongoing lawsuit against the state to regulate the area over which he’s still suing. The mistake is not one of policy but one of propriety. The nomination can and should be withdrawn before tomorrow’s vote of the Executive Council.

The $400 million hole in the state’s budget I described two weeks ago has caused the state to be placed on a negative fiscal watch. Some would ignore or minimize the crisis but the problem is large, structural, and will require more than a small tweak to fix.

Bobby Jindal and the ACLU are having a fight in these opinion pages. Guess whose side I’m going to take? I agree with Gov. Jindal and we both agree with the Washington Post which said “What shouldn’t get forgotten in this seemingly endless fight are the people with the most at stake: parents who simply want what’s best for their children.” The issue which unites me and the Washington Post is the lawsuit over the state’s much admired school choice scholarship program.

The survey found that 97 percent of parents of scholarship recipients are satisfied with their chosen private or home schools, 68 percent noticed measurable academic improvement since receiving the scholarship, and 74 percent of private school parents reported that they would have been unable to afford tuition without the scholarship. These findings are consistent with previous research and demonstrate once again the promise of educational choice programs.

Proposals at the state and national level to increase the minimum wage will hurt the job market, decrease the number of jobs available, and hurt the people advocates are trying to help. Specifically, the higher wage will make it more expensive to hire entry level workers and reduce opportunities for lower skill workers trying to build job experience.

New Hampshire is complacent. As a state we seem to have accepted stagnation as a way of life and are just trying to figure out how to adapt to it. The vision of New Hampshire as an island of prosperity is receding as policymakers increasingly decide they must adopt rather than fight economic mediocrity.

A Superior Court ruling just created a $400 million hole in the state’s budget. A fake tax little understood by most policymakers and almost unknown to the public started as a scam to leverage more money from the federal government, turned into a clearly unconstitutional real tax, and has created New Hampshire’s own fiscal cliff.

Most of us would not want to be judged for the rest of our lives based on what we did when we were 17 years-old. Unfortunately, this is the reality for too many youngsters in New Hampshire since the state lowered the maximum age of juvenile court jurisdiction from 18 to 17 in 1996.

New Hampshire adopted the Medicaid Enhancement Tax as a means to leverage federal matching funds without imposing any real tax liability on state hospitals. After two decades, budget writers finally ended the practice of MediScam by turning this phantom tax into a real one

I hesitate to say this but Washington should be more like Concord. Discussions about federal budget and policy changes take place in a language completely divorced from reality and designed quite purposefully to keep anyone from figuring out what is going on. Language and culture matter. The language of Washington creates a culture designed to make us all cynical and apathetic.