Welcome

Whatever our differences, we all agree on doing together certain things that keep our state strong. Things that families and towns can't do on their own: things like roads and bridges, police and fire departments, schools and colleges, laws and courts, and our democracy itself, the way we reach agreements. Our state budget is the agreement we reach about what things are most important to us and how to pay for them.

Every year we make sure we're getting what we paid for. We always try to get the most bang for our buck. If something's not working anymore, it gets fixed. If something needs trimming, it gets trimmed. When it comes to where our tax dollars go, we look hard at everything every year. But our tax system--where those tax dollars come from--hasn't been looked at seriously in decades. No wonder it doesn't work anymore. The bottom line is: it cannot raise enough money to support the programs we've already decided together that we need. In this system, revenues can't grow at the same rate as the economy. It's guaranteed that our income will always fall short of our expenditures, just for the programs we already have, just for the things we've already agreed are important, never mind adding anything new.

We scrutinize our expenditures every year. It's time to take a fresh look at our revenues.

In colonial times, our system worked well. Most people were farmers and lived off the land. Property was a good measure of wealth and income, so relying on the property tax for most of the state's revenue made sense. But not anymore. Now most property is a home. It's often less a measure of what we own than of what we owe the bank. It's not a good measure of what each of us can afford to contribute to running our state, but we still rely on the property tax for over half of our revenue, more than any other state. And because we lean so heavily on the property tax, our rates are way too high, the third-highest in the nation.

Yet this still doesn't raise enough money to pay for what we agree we need to keep our state moving forward. And property taxes just keep going up. That's just to stay even, without adding any new programs. Some people insist on the so-called pledge, but let's face it, it's just a pledge to keep raising property taxes, and to ignore the ingenuity of the people of New Hampshire to look for better solutions, more modern solutions. Sticking with the old is holding us back; it's hurting our state and our families, too.

We can fix this. In the Granite State we don't back away from a challenge. We face the facts. Resourcefulness is the New Hampshire way. We can take a balanced approach to budget reform that ensures all our programs are up-to-date and efficient, that provides enough money to pay for them, and that lowers property taxes, too.

The first step is to take a fresh look at our revenue system. We can put all the options on the table. We can face the facts. We can have the debate. We can find a solution that will work for everyone. We can build a modern budget system that will keep New Hampshire moving in the twenty-first century and maintain the foundations of our prosperity for generations to come.