I had the pleasure recently of attending the Granite State Fair Tax Coalition training for candidates: Talking About Taxes. While I have had a lot of experience with town budgets, as a selectwoman and a member of the budget committee, the state budget is of course bigger and more complicated, although a lot of the basic issues, such as revenue, are the same. Thanks to an excellent presentation on what we spend money on, where it comes from, and what parts of the budget are growing fastest, I have a clearer picture. We also had a presentation on education funding, which for the first time gave me a sense of the narrative of the issue over the past few decades. I came away with a sobering view of what I and my fellow candidates will be facing over the next two years if we are elected.
I would like to address some of the issues and perceptions related to NH taxes over the next couple of weeks on this blog. I will also give you a link to an article I wrote for The Forum on the Pledge and how I see it affecting the small towns in NH.
And that’s a good place to start. We often hear that if only we could get all our elected officials to take the pledge and live by it, our tax problems would be solved. But the pledge to enact no new taxes really means a pledge to have the taxes we already have go up. We all know where most of the money for town and state budgets comes from in NH, the property tax, approximately 60%. So the pledge is a promise to raise our property taxes as the state grows. We aren’t making any more land. Property taxes made sense when your property was the source of your income. While I hope that agriculture makes a big comeback here for a lot of reasons, I hope we aren’t all going to be farmers.
The other solution we are hearing a lot about in political ads this year is cutting spending. Since NH has the 4th lowest per capita STATE spending in the country, I really, really wish the people who call for this would explain exactly what they would cut. I have watched towns do this sort of budgeting, and I hear some of our solutions, like un-paving the town roads, are spreading across the country. Either they are just plain uncaring about their fellow humans, or they simply have never had to be responsible for a budget bigger than their household or small business. They certainly are not people who think about the future of their communities when they propose putting off maintenance and capital investments to lower this year’s tax rate, and next year’s, and the year after, until the chickens come home to roost.
Next time we’ll talk about local control.
