InDepthNH.org asked you to share your opinions on taxes in New Hampshire. We we want your voices to be heard. Thanks and keeping them coming. email me at nancywestnews@gmail.com. Thanks Nancy West
We will post the last group of opinions here and tomorrow. You can read Monday‘s and Tuesday‘s here.

PAUL FIONDELLA
NH should think more deeply about taxes. For example, when we pay for education. Lumped together are administration, operations, teachers’ salaries and capital expenses. Paid for by one tax, the property tax.

This gives the public little control over actual expenditures and how they relate to results. Results are success of graduates. Do they get jobs? Do they graduate from college if they go to college? Who is keeping track of the skills that they need to be taught? The answer, in my experience, is no one. Instead, education is run on a political basis. The school administration defines an edifice project which requires capital expenses. They mobilize parents, teachers, and contractors, and they get another building or program for their empire. On the other side are the proponents of vouchers. These are people who have had the public school system fail their expectations for their children. They similarly have created a cost structure which, on the one hand, merely duplicates all of the above costs, but in the private sector so that we now have the taxpayers burdened with duplicate systems, or they homeschool and reject the professional abilities of the teaching profession. In this later case, we can have a landscaper teaching physics.

So, how to proceed.

First, the voucher system should only pay teachers’ salaries and nothing else. It shouldn’t pay for the receiving school systems operations, administration and construction costs. If you want to send your child to a private school, be prepared to donate as you would to your college alma mater. Don’t expect the taxpayers of your community to pay for those costs.

Secondly, a dedicated broad-based tax is needed to pay for just the teaching portion of education. Non property owners send their children to school. They must also pay.

How?

A broad-based tax should similarly only pay for teachers’ salaries and be a dedicated tax. Each student in the state would receive a voucher which would essentially be all teachers’ salaries in the state divided by the number of pupils. Yes, this would be some form of an income tax. Property taxes would pay for public school administration, operations and the edifice complex. Private education would simply receive the student voucher for teacher salaries. No town would have its property taxes pay for private running or building private schools or schools in another community.

So, if you want to build a football stadium in your town, you pay for it in your property taxes.

The side benefits of such a system are more uniformity in teachers’ salaries statewide and thus more help to small communities in attracting teachers. By separating teacher costs and funding them from a dedicated broad-based tax and leaving property owners to pay for local administration, operations and capital costs, the burden on property taxpayers should be reduced and the accountability of the local school system to the taxpayers more narrowly focused. In such a system, teachers would be held accountable to professional standards at the state level, where there would be a higher level of supervision than a local school board can supply.
I hope this is helpful.
PAUL FIONDELLA 

LUCY WYMAN
It is clear to me that the wealthy should pay more, nor is there any reason for the kind of wealth they have accumulated. But that is a conversation for another day!

NH needs an income tax. I support Volinsky’s 3.3 idea. Massachusetts has collected billions from the wealthy and put it to good use. We could sure use that here!

I believe in local and federal taxes. That said, I wonder how it would play out if taxpayers could elect to support what they care most about with their tax dollars, infrastructure aside, perhaps.
LUCY WYMAN

DOUGLAS MCILROY
The NH tax system is the biggest New Hampshire disadvantage. It depends largely on taxing nominal wealth (real estate) and must be charged at fantastically unequal rates to provide equal services, depending on where you live.

The disadvantage is exacerbated by The Pledge, which vows to keep the present tax regime or make it worse, as when the tax on unearned income was phased out.

The state has “sin taxes” on alcohol, tobacco, and gambling. The road-fuel tax (no longer a good surrogate for a road usage fee due to the advent of electric vehicles) has some flavor of a sin tax to mitigate climate change. A radical reworking into energy-use and mileage taxes merits consideration.

In any event, the tax burden, whether it’s levied on income, wealth, sales, or “sin,” needs to be more equitably distributed.
DOUGLAS MCILROY

DEBORA HATCHER
Most NH residents and businesses struggle to survive under the status quo. Businesses say their biggest problem is hiring and retaining qualified workers. But we don’t invest in education. Workers are hard to recruit because they can’t afford to live here, and property taxes and housing are key components of our high cost of living. But Concord politicians do nothing to solve these problems. They pass law after law damaging public education and increasing property taxes. No business says their concern is high NH business taxes, and they do not expand or hire when taxes on their profits are reduced. But Concord keeps cutting business taxes. This is stupid. NH needs voters and elected officials with brains and spines. Nothing should be “off the table.” All facts and options need to be considered if responsible, smart, and fair tax policies are ever going to exist in NH.
DEBORA HATCHER

PETE JENNEY
My wife and I have lived in NH since 1985 and have owned several homes and put our two sons through the public school system in Hollis, and through the state university system. We bought our retirement home on Tenney Mountain in Plymouth in ’21. It was cheap as it needed a ton of renovation, and we had time and resources. It was assessed at $235K. Over the last 2.5 years, our property taxes have gone up from $6K to just shy of $14K, and the town won’t commit to stopping the increases. That new tax number also includes a new “View” line item on our tax card, adding another $112K to our assessment — something I view as trouble ahead. At the rate things are going, we’ll be spending too much of our retirement income to be worth it. Add the taxes to the nutty gas and food, and soon, utilities, etc., as the rolling costs of the wars catch up, and we’re going to need to find a new situation. I wouldn’t be so concerned about the tax situation if we actually got something for it. We have to maintain our own roads and have our own water, for example. The fire department, though apparently fully funded, does fundraising for things they want, and that just feels off. I heard that our legislature is considering lowering business taxes again, for some reason. I don’t understand the move. Sure, it might make the corporations happier, but if the tax burden just falls on their employees and they have to leave because they can’t afford to live nearby, everyone loses. I don’t think our legislature has New Hampshire’s people as their main priority. It’s sad that they seem to track with the current federal administration, which isn’t doing anyone any favors at the moment. There has to be a better way.
PETE JENNEY, Plymouth 

ERIC GREGORY
I retire later this year and am thinking of moving to NH. The friendly tax situation is a big plus. That said, I’ve been reading the local news for over a year. It appears that NH needs to do something to raise revenue in order to properly run the state. Something has to give.

The no-income-tax clarion call is shortsighted. The revenue versus expenses to run a state has to be thought of holistically and with a keen eye on future generations.

The state can’t turn a blind eye to the reality that doing nothing is going to hurt the state in the short and long terms.

All that to say this — flat tax on income and sales taxes are both regressive. Property taxes are already high. A small 1% to 2% state income tax, nothing more, is a progressive tax that seems small but will have a big impact.

If the deafening roar of no-taxes continues, it will harm the state and its fiscal status, which will affect my decision, as it will for many others, to move to NH. No one wants to move to a state that can’t pay its own bills and take care of itself and its citizens. I wouldn’t run my house or my business that way. Why would I run a state that way and expect people to be OK with it?
ERIC GREGORY

SANDRA CANNON
It should be common knowledge that property taxes are regressive and hit the working class, middle class, seniors and poor much harder. It is not a fair tax, especially when it is used to fund the majority of local public schools. There are property rich towns and property poor towns. I live in a school district with four towns, and one town’s tax rate is almost double that of another town’s (property poor versus property rich). I always support our local schools, but I feel really bad for two of the other towns with much higher tax rates. Also, because the school portion of property taxes are so high, towns try to keep their tax rate low — limiting town services, maintenance, building, etc.

We need to reinstate the interest and dividend taxes (happy to pay them), stop decreasing the business taxes (increase back to what that was a couple of years ago), and legalize marijuana so our neighboring states don’t get the taxes on that (put in the liquor stores). Get rid of vouchers that favor the rich (put the income limit back on vouchers). The 3-3 tax plan would be a 3% income tax to pay for education and a $3 true property tax (seniors would not be priced out of the houses they own). This plan makes housing in NH more affordable and spreads the cost to educate our children more equitably — concepts we should all support.

Until we start voting for different state reps and state senators, nothing will change, and we’ll continue with a very unfair tax system based on property taxes.
SANDRA CANNON, Atkinson, NH

JOHN W. RODAT
You and your colleagues are daring! Were I to have the time, I’d write an essay about tax policy. It would be partly about our role as citizens and partly about the increasingly tenuous relationship between ourselves as citizens and those who govern. Wasn’t that really the issue leading to the Boston Tea Party?

But I don’t have the time. In fact, I don’t even have time to finish what I was already working on. But here’s a start:

We’ll call the tax issue in New Hampshire, especially the property tax issue, “the squeeze.” Most folks are being squeezed by:

1. Flat income in the face of inflation (if we were all rich, we’d hardly notice);

2. For the biggest issue, school funding, we rely on local government and local government revenue. Here, I’ve made analytical progress. Please see the attached PDF that shows that NH ranks first in the U.S. in relying on local government to pay for elementary and secondary education;

3. Though I have not finished my analysis, I’m pretty confident that, of those local sources, NH property taxes will be well within the top 10 states; and,

4. In the meantime, we’ve limited, reduced, and, in noticeable cases, eliminated the property tax base. We’ve done that by putting so much land into conservation status, which is tax-exempt, and reduced the tax base of property owners of larger and more parcels, under the “current use” policies. Though I’ve not done the analysis, it would make sense that those who can afford larger parcels (typically 10 acres or more?), which they leave idle, tend to have the financial resources to buy such properties. I would exclude active farmland from any such analysis. First look here suggests that about half the land in half of the municipalities is in current use and/or conservation status.
Like I said, “the squeeze.”
JOHN W. RODAT

NINO DIZ
 I think taxes should not exist in New Hampshire. People are already too much paying a lot of taxes or taking from our taxes that we do overtime. There’s a lot of struggling going on in New Hampshire. Some states don’t see that. States like California, Texas, Nevada, they have money, they know I have issues like that, like New Hampshire does our overtime, I get cut paychecks. I get cut every time and we get less paid salary that is not enough to survive. 
NINO DIZ

LINDA MATTLAGE
I am weighing in on taxes in New Hampshire. Property taxes are unsustainable if the state keeps downshifting services to the cities and towns. There is NO “NH advantage” if no one can afford to live here. The only way to get property tax relief is to get the state to stop gutting its revenue streams and fulfill its responsibility to its citizens. Andru Volinsky’s plan is a good start.
LINDA MATTLAGE