Every election cycle, Republicans tell voters to vote Republican because Democrats will bring higher taxes. The argument sounds good because we all want lower taxes and Republicans seem to offer such an easy fix. But the core of their argument is that Republicans are better for our wallets. The question we should ask is whether that premise is true.
Democrats and Republicans – we are all Granite Staters who are not fans of higher taxes. We all benefit from the New Hampshire Advantage and neither party is in favor of broad-based income or sales taxes. There is no greater misdirection in politics than the idea of the ‘tax and spend’ liberal because the job of every Legislature is to tax and spend; both parties do it liberally.
Recent election charges are that ‘Democrats voted for an income tax’. But an income tax is a tax paid to federal or state governments that is used by the government to fund government. Democrats voted for Paid Family Leave insurance – a payroll deduction, similar to workers compensation benefits, which is also not an income tax. The bill meant workers would receive pay when they needed time for their own, or a family member’s, medical care. It would be enacted as a payroll deduction true, but the money would not go to the state and would be used to pay the workers of NH via an employee-funded insurance. It was a family-friendly policy that many states already offer and would enhance our competitiveness to attract a modern workforce. We did not vote to bring in an income tax. If that bill had passed into law, we would still qualify as a state without an income tax.
Our state’s budgets have been adversely affected by the number of extreme libertarians who have entered into the ranks of the NH Republican party. These folks are pursuing the elimination of existing state revenue streams, over and above avoiding new taxes. This “starve the state” mentality is a major driver of cost-shifting onto our local taxes. It does not represent the fiscal responsibility, or Yankee thrift, we should expect from those in charge of our tax dollars.
Free State Project member and House GOP Majority Leader Jason Osborne (formerly of Ohio) is leading a lawsuit to challenge the state’s obligation to fund public schools, at all. He also spearheaded the aggressive phase-out of the Interest and Dividends tax in 2025, a whole two years before it was it originally planned to sunset in 2027. Free staters do not care if NH state budgets break, or if our bond rating is downgraded, or if a rural school closes under the weight of their mismanagement. But we should, because poor fiscal management raises our taxes. There is nothing conservative about Free Staters and fellow anti-government libertarians running the show in Concord.
The state is currently paying millions in attorney fees to defend against its constitutional obligation to provide adequate state funding for our public schools. Republicans have chosen to siphon public dollars into private hands while fighting against recent court decisions that say the state should be contributing more for NH’s public schools; in effect, they are fighting the decision that could bring permanent property tax relief. The average national ratio of school funding is 11% federal, 46% state, 44% local. In NH, GOP rule has pushed over 70% of that cost share onto property taxes (we should be closer to 44%); then they declare victory because they shifted the state’s contribution to our local tax bills. This tax kabuki theatre isn’t working and they should own their part in it.
Democrats have a plan to provide greater school funding and bring property tax relief. That is our commonsense approach to address unsustainable property taxes rather than making voters angry on an issue without supplying an answer.
Here is a link to my testimony on the idea of adding more education expenses without additional state funding to back it up (in the HB20 House Education Committee hearing on Education Freedom Accounts in 2021), which was quoted by NHPR: ‘We always had school choice, but we never pretended that our tax dollars could support both public and non-public education at the same time. That was never the deal, and I don’t think we have any more money than we did before.’
That is me, a democrat, arguing against an unfunded mandate that would continue the pressure on local schools and local property taxes. In fact, the goal of the anti-state, anti-public-good libertarians is to create competing interests so that people fight their local schools. I advocate for public education as essential to maintaining a civil and democratic society. I also advocate for public schools because they are the beating heart of our exceptional community.
Quote from Kevin Landrigan’s column last Sunday in the Union Leader:
Republican State Rep. JR Hoell (House Finance Committee, not running for re-election), sounded the alarm saying ‘with state revenues clearly on a declining trajectory and the federal money going away, we face a huge hole in the next budget.’ – Union Leader 10/13/24.
Ask yourself if it is fiscally responsible, in a climate of declining revenues, the exhaustion of the $1 billion in federal funding, and the depletion of a record-breaking $15.2 billion dollar GOP budget, that existing revenues (Interest and Dividends tax) have been deleted without a plan to make up for the losses to future budgets. This short-changing of the New Hampshire Advantage (which included I&D) purposefully leaves subsequent legislatures with fewer options to bring property tax relief.
So next time a Republican boasts of their prowess on taxes, ask them: what monies they will use to pay for private education when they are not even paying their legal obligation to public schools? Ask them: why spend so much time finger-pointing when they have no plan to address rising property taxes? Ask them: why are they so insistent that the state should struggle to make ends meet on the advice of extremists they let lead their party in the State House? And finally, ask them: when those ends don’t meet, who’s picking up that tab?
— — Hollis Brookline News Online
By State Representative Kat McGhee
October 22, 2024
https://hollisbrooklinenewsonline.com/whos-picking-up-the-tab-p9095-300.htm