This is the latest in an ongoing series examining policy patterns in New Hampshire’s current and recent legislative sessions. Prior backgrounders are available at The Quiet Cost.

Short on time? A plain language summary is available at the end of this piece. The May 14th House vote on CACR 12 — three days away — makes this backgrounder time-sensitive.

Movement One: The World That Was

(approximately 1950 — 1965)

Picture your father’s hands.

If you grew up in New Hampshire in the 1950s or early 1960s, there is a good chance you know exactly what those hands looked like at the end of a shift. The oil that never quite washed out from the creases of the knuckles. The small cuts that healed before anyone noticed them. The particular kind of tired that lived in the shoulders and forearms of a man who had spent eight or ten hours feeding material into machines that did not care how tired he was.

He punched a clock. He worked his shift — days or nights, depending on the week, depending on the rotation, depending on what the floor needed. He came home, showered off most of the oil and the fine metal dust that the machines left on everything they touched, ate the meal that was waiting, and went to bed at an hour that made sense for a man who had to be back at the gate by six.

My father’s hands fit that picture exactly. For those same reasons, in those same years.

This was not a diminished life. This was a life being built.

The house was modest — a cape or a colonial on a street of similar houses, in a town that had grown up around the mill or the factory or the machine shop the way New Hampshire towns had always grown up around the thing that employed them. Manchester around the Amoskeag. Claremont around the mill on the Sugar River. Berlin around the paper. Charlestown, Newport, towns up and down the Connecticut River valley, organized around the work that was available and the people willing to do it.

Your mother was home. Not because she lacked ability or ambition — she had both, deployed fully every day — but because the economics of the moment made it possible, and the culture of the moment made it expected, and the work of running a household and raising children was genuinely substantial enough to fill the hours. The garden behind the house was not decorative. It was functional — green beans picked with the older children in August, processed at the kitchen table, sealed into jars that would line the cellar shelves through the winter. Meal by meal. Season by season. The family fed itself from what it grew and what it bought and what it put up, and there was a satisfaction in that self-sufficiency that the generation that followed would mostly not experience.

The annual vacation was a real thing — two weeks in summer, the car packed the night before, the destination perhaps the Maine coast or the White Mountains or a lake somewhere that a relative knew about. One week at first. Eventually two. The calendar was marked months in advance. The children talked about it the way children talk about Christmas.

The black and white television arrived. Then a newer car. Then, for some, a camp on a pond. The trajectory was upward. Not dramatically, not without difficulty, not without the occasional month when the numbers were tight — but upward, measurably, year after year, in ways that your father’s father could not have predicted and your father took quiet pride in without saying much about it.

The union made some of this possible. Not all of it — your father’s hands and your mother’s labor made most of it possible. But the union was the mechanism that converted that labor into something negotiable. It was the collective voice that said: we will not accept whatever you offer. We will sit across the table from you and we will argue for our share. Holiday pay. A cost of living adjustment. A pension that would mean something when the hands finally stopped. The union did not give your father dignity — he brought that himself every morning — but it gave him leverage. And leverage, in a negotiation between a man and a corporation, is the difference between a conversation and a capitulation.

New Hampshire in 1955 was not a perfect place. It was not an equal place. There were families and communities that the upward trajectory bypassed entirely, and that story belongs in the full telling too. But for the working family with a union card and a house on a modest street and a garden in back and a jar of green beans in the cellar — for that family, the arc bent upward. The system, imperfect as it was, produced a result that felt like progress.

It would not always feel that way.

Something was coming. Not a single event. Not a crisis with a name and a date. Something slower and more consequential than a crisis — a shift in the ground itself, so gradual that by the time most people felt it, it had already been underway for years.

And the decisions that would determine how New Hampshire responded to that shift — decisions made not by the man with oil on his hands or the woman canning green beans, but by other people in other rooms for other reasons — were already beginning to be made.

Movement Two: The Ground Shifts

(1965 — 1972)

Nothing announced itself.

That is the thing worth understanding before anything else. There was no morning when your father went to work and came home knowing that something fundamental had changed. No single shift, no single season, no single year that could be pointed to later as the moment the upward arc began to bend. The change came the way most consequential changes come — gradually, then all at once, and by the time most people recognized it for what it was, the ground had already moved beneath them.

The corporations had been growing. That was, at first, entirely consistent with the upward trajectory. A growing company meant more work, more shifts, more overtime, more stability. The machine shop that had employed forty men in 1952 employed eighty by 1962. The mill that had run one shift ran two. Growth felt like security. In many ways, it was.

But growth of a certain scale produces its own logic. The company that employs eighty men in one town is answerable, in a human way, to that town — to the selectmen, to the Chamber of Commerce, to the families whose names the foreman recognizes. The corporation that employs eight thousand people across four states is answerable to something else entirely: to its board of directors, to its shareholders, to the quarterly report that summarizes everything that matters into a single number that goes up or goes down.

The board of directors did not know your father’s name. The shareholders — increasingly, as the 1960s became the 1970s — did not live in New Hampshire, had never been to Claremont or Berlin or Manchester, and had no particular interest in whether the mill on the Sugar River kept running as long as the return on their investment remained competitive. Their money was mobile in a way your father’s life was not. If the return was better elsewhere, the money would go elsewhere. The work would follow.

This was not villainy. It was arithmetic — the same arithmetic that had driven every economic transformation in American history. But arithmetic applied to human communities produces human consequences, and the consequences were beginning to accumulate.

The first thing to go was the leverage.

Not all at once. Not visibly. But the conditions that had made the union card meaningful — the relative immobility of capital, the dependence of local employers on local workers, the difficulty of moving a factory the way you could move a financial instrument — were beginning to erode. Slowly at first. Then with gathering speed.

Technology was part of it. The machines that had required skilled hands to operate were being redesigned to require less skill, or no skill, or different skills that the man who had spent twenty years mastering the old way did not have and could not easily acquire. The machinist whose expertise had been genuinely scarce — whose knowledge of tolerances and feeds and speeds represented years of accumulated judgment that could not simply be replaced — found that expertise becoming less scarce as the machines themselves became more capable. The shoe stitcher. The mattress maker. The textile worker. Trades that had represented real bargaining power because they represented real scarcity were losing that power as the scarcity disappeared.

Mobility was the other part. And this is where the story of New Hampshire’s working families intersects with something larger than any single factory or any single trade.

The economy was specializing. New kinds of work were appearing — work that required education and credentials that most of the children of the manufacturing floor did not yet have, in places that were not necessarily where those children had grown up. The young person with aptitude and ambition faced a choice that their parents had not faced in the same way: stay, in a community built around work that was slowly losing its value, or leave, for the education and the opportunity that existed somewhere else.

Many left. They had to. If the state could no longer provide the specialized education their skills required — and New Hampshire, chronically underfunding its public institutions precisely because the property tax system was already strained, increasingly could not — then the education existed somewhere else, and somewhere else was where they had to go.

This produced a fracture that would have consequences for decades. The population that remained was, on average, older, less mobile, more dependent on the wages and pensions and property values they had accumulated. The population that left took with it some of the civic energy and political engagement that might otherwise have recognized and resisted what was coming. The union membership that had once represented a broad cross-section of the working community began to represent a narrower one — still committed, still organized, but speaking for a smaller share of a changing workforce.

The boards of directors smelled it. That is not a metaphorical description. The internal documents of major corporations in this era — some of which have been studied and published by labor historians — show that management was actively tracking the erosion of union leverage and adjusting its negotiating posture accordingly. Wage freezes that would have been impossible to impose in 1958 became possible to propose in 1968. Benefit reductions that would have triggered a walkout in 1962 became negotiating positions in 1972. The balance of power at the table was shifting, and the people on one side of the table knew it and were using it.

The property tax was feeling all of this. As the economic base of manufacturing communities began to erode — slowly, inconsistently, but unmistakably — the tax base eroded with it. Towns that had relied on the assessed value of factory buildings and industrial equipment to fund their schools and their services found those values declining. The burden shifted, as it always shifts when an industrial tax base contracts, onto the residential property owner. Onto the house on the modest street. Onto the retired couple. Onto the fixed income.

This was happening everywhere. Not just in New Hampshire. Across the industrial Northeast and Midwest, working families were feeling the same pressure from the same forces for the same reasons. And across the country, state legislatures were beginning to recognize it and respond — enacting property tax limitations, expanding state aid to municipalities, looking for structural ways to protect the households that were absorbing an increasing share of the public burden.

New Hampshire had a governor who saw it clearly.

Walter Peterson was a Republican — a traditional, fiscally responsible, genuinely conservative New Hampshire Republican of a kind that the subsequent fifty years would make increasingly rare. He looked at the property tax burden on working families and retirees and he recognized it for what it was: a system producing outcomes that no fair-minded person would design on purpose, sustained by inertia and the absence of political will to address it honestly.

He proposed a solution. A 3 percent income tax, dedicated to property tax relief — structured specifically to reduce the burden on the households carrying the most disproportionate share of it. It was not a radical proposal. It was not a big-government proposal. It was a structural correction to a structural problem, proposed by a sitting Republican governor with a detailed understanding of what the numbers showed.

It was serious. It was documented. It was, by any honest accounting, exactly what the situation required.

And it was about to be destroyed — not by argument, not by evidence, not by a better proposal — but by 2,000 votes in a primary election engineered by a man who did not live in New Hampshire, did not pay taxes in New Hampshire, and whose financial interests were served, directly and measurably, by making sure that the conversation Walter Peterson was trying to have never happened.

Movement Three: 2,000 Votes

(1972)

His name was William Loeb.

He was the publisher of the Manchester Union Leader — the only statewide newspaper in New Hampshire — from 1946 until his death in 1981. In that role he had an influence on New Hampshire politics that is difficult to overstate and nearly impossible to replicate in the modern media environment. Before Fox News, before social media, before cable television, before the internet — there was William Loeb. One man. One paper. One front page, every morning, in every corner of the state.

He used it without restraint.

Governors feared him. Presidential candidates courted him. Legislators checked the front page before deciding where they stood on anything that might attract his attention. He did not merely cover New Hampshire politics. He directed them — through front page editorials written in a voice that combined absolute certainty with complete contempt for anyone who disagreed, through the sustained campaign of repetition that he understood, before the term existed, as the essential mechanism of political persuasion. If Loeb wanted something to happen, he said so every day until it happened. If he wanted someone destroyed, he said that every day too.

He had a pet issue. Taxes. Specifically: the absolute impermissibility of a broad-based income or sales tax in New Hampshire, ever, under any circumstances, regardless of what the evidence showed or what the people needed. This was not a policy position arrived at through careful analysis of New Hampshire’s fiscal situation. It was a conviction — held with the fervor of a religious belief and deployed with the tactical precision of a military campaign.

Here is what makes that conviction worth examining carefully.

William Loeb did not live in New Hampshire. He called his editorials in from his mansion in Pride’s Crossing — a wealthy enclave in Beverly, Massachusetts. He also maintained a ranch outside Reno, Nevada, which he declared as his legal residence. The reason for that declaration was straightforward and documented: Nevada had no income tax, which meant Loeb paid considerably less in taxes than he would have paid had he claimed residence in Massachusetts or New Hampshire.

The man who spent thirty-five years telling New Hampshire residents that an income tax was an unconscionable assault on their freedom was arranging his own legal affairs specifically to minimize his tax obligations — in a state he did not live in, for a paper he ran by telephone from another state entirely.

He was not wrong that taxes affect people’s finances. He was simply unconcerned with which people, and in what proportion, and whether the system producing those outcomes was fair to the families in Claremont and Berlin and Charlestown who were paying it.

In 1972, Governor Walter Peterson sought a third term. He had proposed the 3 percent income tax dedicated to property tax relief. He had the numbers. He had the argument. He had, by most accounts, the genuine support of a significant portion of New Hampshire’s working population who understood, however intuitively, that the property tax burden was becoming unsustainable.

Loeb found his candidate.

Meldrim Thomson was an Orford businessman — a publisher of law books, twice previously unsuccessful in seeking the Republican gubernatorial nomination, whose political identity was built almost entirely around two things: an absolute opposition to any broad-based tax and a willingness to say so in terms that made Loeb’s front page every morning. Thomson’s campaign slogan was “Ax the Tax.” It was not a complicated message. It was not meant to be.

Loeb put the full weight of the Manchester Union Leader behind Thomson. Day after day, front page after front page, the message was the same: Peterson wanted to take your money. Thomson would stop him. The income tax was coming and Peterson was the one bringing it.

Peterson lost the primary by 2,165 votes.

Two thousand, one hundred and sixty-five votes. Thomson received 43,396 to Peterson’s 41,231 — figures reported by the New York Times the morning after the election. In a state of roughly 750,000 people at the time, a margin so narrow that a single medium-sized town swinging the other way would have changed the outcome. A margin produced not by a superior argument or a better candidate or a more compelling vision for New Hampshire’s future — but by the sustained editorial campaign of a man who lived in Massachusetts, paid taxes in Nevada, and whose financial interests were directly served by making sure the conversation about property tax reform never reached a conclusion.

Thomson won the general election. He took the pledge — the promise to veto any broad-based income or sales tax — as a condition of his candidacy, and Loeb made clear that the pledge was not optional for anyone who wanted the Union Leader’s support. The pledge was born not as a genuine expression of New Hampshire’s values but as a political instrument, engineered by one man with a printing press and a financial interest in the outcome, imposed on a political culture that lacked the means to resist it.

Peterson’s proposal — the one that would have begun the structural correction of a property tax system already showing the strain that would become a crisis — died with his primary campaign. It has not been seriously revived in the half century since.

Think about what that means.

The upward trajectory that your father’s generation built — the house, the garden, the union card, the black and white television, the camp on the pond, the quiet pride of a life being assembled piece by piece — that trajectory was already under pressure from forces larger than any one election. The corporations were discovering shareholders. The machinist’s skill was losing value. The young people were leaving for education available elsewhere. All of that was underway regardless of what happened in the 1972 Republican primary.

What the 2,000 votes decided was not whether New Hampshire would face those pressures. Every state faced them. What the 2,000 votes decided was whether New Hampshire would have the structural tools to respond to them — or whether the political space for that conversation would be closed, permanently and deliberately, before the full weight of what was coming could be felt.

The rest of the country built those tools. New Hampshire did not.

And the consequences of that decision — made not by the man with oil on his hands or the woman canning green beans, but by a newspaper publisher calling in his editorials from a mansion in Beverly, Massachusetts — have been landing on New Hampshire households every year since 2,165 votes decided the question in September 1972. Twice a year, in fact.

In the summer. And in December.

Movement Four: The Slow Transfer

(1972 — 2025)

What followed was not dramatic.

That is the point. That is, in fact, the mechanism.

A dramatic transfer of burden — a single bill, a single session, a single governor signing a single document that moved a significant obligation from the state onto local property taxpayers — would have been visible. It would have generated opposition. It would have been reported, debated, remembered. People would have known what happened and when and who did it.

What actually happened was something considerably more sophisticated. A transfer conducted gradually, incrementally, through dozens of individual decisions spread across five decades — each one defensible in isolation, each one too small to generate the organized resistance that a larger move would have provoked, each one adding its fraction of an ounce to a burden that was growing heavier every year on the same households that had been carrying it since 1972.

The man with oil on his hands never saw the mechanism. My father. He saw the bill. Twice a year. Going up.

The revenue sharing that wasn’t.

In 1969, New Hampshire reformed how it taxed businesses — a genuine modernization that eliminated antiquated taxes rooted in an agricultural economy. Those taxes had been assessed and collected locally and had been part of the property tax base for municipalities, school districts, and counties. Removing them reduced the local tax base. To compensate, the state created revenue sharing — a mechanism by which the state would return a portion of its general revenues to cities and towns for their unrestricted use.

The attorney general at the time, Warren Rudman, addressed concerns that future legislators might not honor the commitment. “It seems quite doubtful to me,” he said, “that once this bill is passed, any legislator would go back on its pledge to return revenue to cities and towns that originally belonged to those cities and towns.”

Warren Rudman was wrong.

Revenue sharing was increased for a time, then held flat, then diverted — in 2000, the allocation to school districts was eliminated entirely, the money redirected to fund the state’s education obligations. What remained was $25 million annually for general revenue sharing with municipalities and counties. From 2010 onward, motivated initially by the Great Recession but continued long after the recession ended, revenue sharing was suspended in every state budget. Every single one.

By the time revenue sharing was formally eliminated from New Hampshire law on July 1, 2025 — quietly, in the budget trailer bill signed by Governor Ayotte — municipalities and counties had lost $400 million over fifteen years. Not a gift from the state. Their own revenue, removed from their own tax base by state law decades earlier, promised back to them by an attorney general who couldn’t imagine legislators going back on their word, and then taken away anyway.

That $400 million did not disappear. It landed somewhere. It landed on the property tax bill. Our property tax bill.

The retirement system.

The New Hampshire Retirement System requires employers — including municipalities and school districts — to contribute a percentage of payroll toward employee pensions. The state sets that percentage. The state has, over the decades since 1972, repeatedly increased the employer contribution rate that municipalities and school districts must pay while simultaneously reducing the state’s own share of the obligation.

The result is a cost that appears on the local property tax bill — absorbed by the town, the school district, the county — but was set not at town meeting, not by the school board, not by any body that local voters directly control. It was set in Concord. By the legislature. In sessions most residents never followed.

This is the hidden mandate inside the locally voted portion of the property tax bill that the Live Free backgrounder described. The school board that appears to be spending more each year may simply be absorbing a contribution rate increase that arrived from Concord without a vote and without a choice.

The education funding crisis.

In 1997, the New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled in Claremont School District v. Governor that the state’s constitution established a right to an adequate education and obligated the state to fund it. The court found the existing funding system — which relied overwhelmingly on local property taxes, meaning that property-poor communities could not adequately fund their schools regardless of how high they set their tax rate — was unconstitutional.

It was a landmark ruling. It should have produced a structural solution.

It did not.

The legislature, constrained by the pledge and unwilling to consider the revenue sources that would have funded a genuine solution, responded with a series of partial measures, creative accounting, and sustained resistance that has produced fourteen separate Claremont decisions over nearly three decades — the court repeatedly telling the legislature to fix the system, the legislature repeatedly finding ways to avoid doing so completely.

The Statewide Education Property Tax — the SWEPT — was the primary legislative response. A statewide property tax, collected locally, redistributed partially. It is a property tax masquerading as a state solution. It does not solve the regressive nature of the system. It redistributes some of the burden while preserving the fundamental structure that makes the burden unfair in the first place.

The court has continued to find the funding inadequate. As recently as July 2025, the New Hampshire Supreme Court found, in a split decision, that the state’s current level of education funding remains insufficient. The legislature was left to decide how to address it. The session continues.

Berlin. September 10, 2001.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, the world’s attention went to New York, Washington, and a field in Pennsylvania. It stayed there, appropriately and necessarily, for weeks.

The day before — September 10, 2001 — the locks were put on the doors of the Berlin and Gorham mills. Eight hundred people lost their jobs. Eight hundred families lost their health insurance. The closure became official that day, the same day American Tissue, Inc. — the company that owned the mills — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection amid allegations of corporate fraud. The mill had been the economic spine of the North Country for generations. Its closure, and the quick succession of additional mill and ancillary industry closures that followed, plunged Coos County into an economic and social crisis from which it has not fully recovered.

The timing was not a conspiracy. It was a coincidence — a brutal one that ensured the closure of a community’s economic foundation, compounded by allegations of fraud against the corporation that had employed them, received almost no sustained public attention at precisely the moment it most needed it. The North Country was left to absorb the consequences largely alone, largely unwitnessed, in the shadow of a national catastrophe that made local devastation seem small by comparison.

It was not small. It was the manufacturing floor story reaching its most painful conclusion — the machinery that had provided the wages and the union card and the leverage and the pension, finally going quiet. The chimney stacks standing. The river still running past the empty building. The workers who had given everything to that mill learning that the company they had trusted had been operating fraudulently, on the day before the day that made everything else invisible.

The accumulation.

New Hampshire manufacturing employment has fallen 33 percent since 2000. The Interest and Dividends Tax — which at least captured some revenue from investment income — was repealed in the current era, removing another source of revenue that might have reduced pressure on property taxpayers. Business taxes have been cut repeatedly over the past decade, reducing state revenue by more than a billion dollars by the legislature’s own accounting — costs that did not disappear but migrated, as costs always migrate in New Hampshire, downward onto the property tax bill.

The revenue sharing eliminated. The retirement contributions shifted. The education mandates unfunded. The business taxes cut. The Interest and Dividends Tax repealed. Each one a separate decision. Each one a separate session. Each one individually defensible to someone, somewhere, with a specific interest in that specific outcome.

Assembled together — put in the same room, as these backgrounders have been attempting to do — they describe not a series of unrelated policy choices but a consistent and sustained direction of travel. Costs and obligations moving in one direction. Away from the state. Away from corporations and investors. Onto municipalities, onto school districts, onto the property tax bill. Onto the kitchen table. Twice a year.

Your father worked for this. Your mother canned for this. The union bargained for this. The house on the modest street, the garden in back, the jar of green beans in the cellar — all of it was built on the assumption that the system surrounding it was, if imperfect, at least honestly imperfect. That the people making decisions in Concord were at least attempting to balance competing interests rather than systematically favoring one set of interests over all others.

That assumption has been tested. The record of the past fifty years is the test result.

And now — in this session, in this week — the people who have presided over that record are proposing to make it permanent.

Movement Five: CACR 12 and the Locked Door

(Now)

On April 15, 2026 — Tax Day — a parade of Republican legislators walked to the microphone in Representatives Hall at the New Hampshire State House and said, one after another, the same six words:

“No income tax. Not now. Not ever.”

Senate President Sharon Carson said it. Governor Kelly Ayotte issued a press release saying it. House Majority Leader Jason Osborne said it — and then added something that deserves to be read carefully, by anyone who has followed this series from the beginning.

Invoking General John Stark’s words — the words written by an eighty-one year old man from his farm in Manchester, in a letter to veterans he could not travel to meet, a toast that reads in full: “Live free or die: death is not the worst of evils” — Osborne said this:

“Death may not be the worst of evils, but the Democrats’ support of an income tax sure comes close.”

He used Stark’s words. The incomplete version. Without the second sentence. Without the part that explains what Stark actually meant. In service of making permanent exactly what the Live Free backgrounder documented — the system that charges the retired teacher’s aide and the remote-working professional the same property tax bill on the same assessed value, indifferent to the fact that one of them pays nine times more of her income to meet it.

The backgrounder you are reading right now was written in part because of that moment. Because using a Revolutionary War general’s words about human dignity to argue that a widow’s property tax bill should never be examined honestly is exactly the kind of thing that deserves to be named for what it is.

What CACR 12 actually does.

CACR 12 is a constitutional amendment. It passed the New Hampshire Senate in February by a party-line vote of 16 to 8. The House Ways and Means Committee advanced it on April 27, also along party lines. The full House is scheduled to vote on May 14th — three days from today as this backgrounder is published.

The amendment would require a two-thirds supermajority of the legislature to enact any new tax on personal income, earned or unearned, sales or use, capital gains, inheritance, estate, or death. A companion version pushed by House Majority Leader Osborne would go further — prohibiting the House from adopting any tax on wages, earned income, personal income, or other income of individuals entirely.

If it passes the House with the required three-fifths supermajority, it goes to voters in November 2026. If voters approve it by two-thirds, it becomes part of the New Hampshire constitution.

At that point the conversation is over. Not politically difficult. Not requiring unusual courage to pursue. Over. Constitutionally prohibited. The door examined in the Live Free backgrounder — the constitutionally dedicated income tax that would replace the downshifted portion of the property tax burden, dollar for dollar, with independent auditing and an automatic repeal trigger — would be permanently locked. Future legislators, future governors, future generations of New Hampshire residents facing a property tax system that has been loading their bills for fifty years could look at the evidence, understand the mechanism, agree on the solution, and be constitutionally prohibited from implementing it.

The lock would be in place. William Loeb’s pledge — born from a 2,165-vote margin in a September 1972 primary engineered by a man who lived in Massachusetts and paid taxes in Nevada — would be written into the founding document of the state of New Hampshire. Permanent. Irrevocable except by another constitutional amendment requiring another two-thirds supermajority of another future electorate.

They are not hiding what they are doing. House Majority Leader Osborne said explicitly: the purpose is to bind future legislatures. “The argument against banning an income tax is that you’re hamstringing future legislatures,” said Corey Lewandowski of Americans for Prosperity at a prior attempt. “Well, I’m okay with that, to be honest with you.”

They are okay with hamstringing future legislatures. Future legislators who might look at what fifty years of the pledge has done to working families and retirees and decide that honest accounting requires an honest solution. Future representatives of the households that have been absorbing the slow transfer documented in Movement Four. Future elected officials who might, given different political conditions and different public understanding, choose to honor something other than Bill Loeb’s legacy.

CACR 12 is designed to make sure those future officials cannot.

What is actually at stake on May 14th.

A constitutional amendment in New Hampshire requires a three-fifths supermajority in the House — 237 of 394 votes. The prior version failed at 194-158. The current version, with the hearing Democrats requested and the party-line committee vote that followed, is being pushed to the floor with the expectation that the math is closer this time.

It is not a foregone conclusion. Constitutional amendments in New Hampshire have failed before when they appeared certain to pass. In 2012, voters rejected a prior income tax ban amendment — it received 57 percent support, falling short of the required two-thirds. The gap between what the Republican majority can deliver and what the supermajority threshold requires is real and meaningful.

Individual voices matter in that gap. Individual constituents contacting individual representatives — not with talking points, but with the documented reality of what the property tax system has done to their households — have moved New Hampshire House votes before. The backgrounders in this series exist precisely because the pattern only becomes visible when someone assembles the pieces. The pieces are now assembled. The vote is three days away.

The question that has been building since Movement One.

The man with oil on his hands came home every evening, showered, ate, slept, went back. He did not have time to track what was happening in Concord. He trusted, reasonably, that the system surrounding the life he was building was operating in something like good faith toward the people who were doing the building.

He was wrong — not because the system was malicious in any simple sense, but because the system had been shaped, at a critical moment, by people whose interests were not his interests, using an instrument — a newspaper — that reached every corner of the state every morning with a message designed not to inform his judgment but to foreclose it.

His grandchildren are reading this backgrounder in May 2026. They have three days.

The question is not whether to support an income tax. The Live Free backgrounder laid out exactly what a constitutionally dedicated, independently audited, automatically repealing income tax replacement for downshifted property tax costs would look like — and showed that both Margaret and David, the retired teacher’s aide and the remote-working professional, would pay less in total under that system than they pay today.

The question is whether to allow that conversation to be constitutionally prohibited before it can reach a conclusion.

Walter Peterson tried to have that conversation in 1972. He lost by 2,165 votes to a candidate backed by a man who lived in Massachusetts and paid taxes in Nevada.

The conversation has been trying to happen ever since. In 1999, it passed both chambers of the legislature and was vetoed by a Democratic governor who had taken the pledge. In this session, Andru Volinsky — one of the architects of the 3-3 Tax Savings Plan, which would provide a $250,000 homestead exemption alongside a dedicated income tax and a statewide property tax rate — proposed a serious, specific, documented alternative that was dismissed before it could be fully examined.

CACR 12 is the attempt to make sure it is never examined again.

One more thing about General Stark.

Free Stater/GOP Jason Osborne used Stark’s words on the floor of the New Hampshire House to argue that an income tax is nearly as bad as death. He used the part of the toast that serves his purpose. He left out the part that explains it.

The full toast reads: “Live free or die: death is not the worst of evils.”

Stark was writing to veterans who had fought for the proposition that human dignity requires genuine freedom — not the appearance of freedom, not freedom as a slogan deployed in service of a financial interest, but freedom as something real and honest and meaningful in the daily lives of actual people.

The retired teacher’s aide sitting at her kitchen table in December with a $3,000 bill and a fixed income is not living free. She is living under a system that was shaped, at a decisive moment, by people whose interests were not hers — and is now being asked to accept that system permanently, constitutionally, without the option of ever honestly examining whether something fairer is possible.

That is not what Stark meant. The Supreme Court confirmed, in Wooley v. Maynard, that New Hampshire cannot even compel its citizens to display the motto — let alone compel them to accept one particular and highly convenient interpretation of it.

Live Free or Die belongs to her too.

The series continues. But May 14th is four days away.

This backgrounder is part of The Quiet Cost series — a series that has been assembling the pieces of a pattern that most people have not had the time or the legislative fluency to see whole. The pattern is now visible. The history is documented. The mechanism is named. The specific vote that determined fifty years of property tax loading has been identified, and the specific vote that would make its consequences permanent is four days away.

The series will continue after May 14th regardless of the outcome. There is more to document, more to assemble, more dots to connect. The work does not end with a single vote.

But a single vote can end the work of future people who might want to do something about what the documentation shows.

Contact your representative. Not with anger — with the documented reality of what has been done, by whom, over fifty years, and what is being proposed now. The NH General Court website lists every representative by district. The vote is May 14th.

The man with oil on his hands trusted the system. His grandchildren know better. Knowing better means something only if it produces action.

That is what these backgrounders have always been for.

This backgrounder is part of The Quiet Cost series, examining policy patterns in New Hampshire’s current and recent legislative sessions. Prior backgrounders are available at The Quiet Cost. If this piece reached you through a friend or a share, we are glad it did. The pattern only becomes visible when enough people are looking at it at the same time.

Now you know. And May 14th is three days away.

Didn’t have time for the full piece? Start here.

Short on time? This summary captures the essential argument. The full backgrounder is above.

Plain Language Summary — For Busy Readers

This backgrounder makes one central argument, documented from public records, legislative history, and named sources:

The property tax burden New Hampshire working families and retirees carry today was not inevitable. It was produced by a specific chain of decisions, traceable to a specific moment, made by specific people whose financial interests were not yours.

Here is what the evidence shows:

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, New Hampshire — like every industrial state — was feeling the pressure of a changing economy. Manufacturing jobs were becoming less secure. The property tax burden on working families was growing. Across the country, states were enacting structural protections for households that were absorbing an increasing share of the public burden.

New Hampshire had a governor, Walter Peterson, who proposed exactly that: a 3 percent income tax dedicated to property tax relief. It was a serious, documented, Republican proposal designed to fix a system that was already showing strain.

It was defeated in a primary election by 2,165 votes — Thomson receiving 43,396 to Peterson’s 41,231, as reported by the New York Times the morning after the September 12, 1972 election.

The margin was produced by the sustained editorial campaign of William Loeb — publisher of the Manchester Union Leader, the only statewide newspaper in New Hampshire. Loeb did not live in New Hampshire. He called his editorials in from his mansion in Beverly, Massachusetts, while declaring Nevada as his legal residence specifically to minimize his own tax obligations.

The man who told New Hampshire residents that an income tax was an assault on their freedom arranged his own affairs to pay as few taxes as possible — in a state he did not live in.

His candidate, Meldrim Thomson, won the primary, won the general election, and formalized the pledge — the promise to veto any broad-based income or sales tax — as the price of entry into New Hampshire’s political life. Democrats and Republicans alike have taken it ever since.

Here is what followed those 2,000 votes:

Revenue sharing — the mechanism by which the state returned revenue to municipalities to compensate for lost local tax base — was promised in 1970, suspended from 2010 onward, and formally eliminated on July 1, 2025. Municipalities and counties lost $400 million over fifteen years. That money landed on the property tax bill.

Retirement system contribution rates — set by the legislature, not by local voters — were repeatedly increased for municipalities and school districts while the state’s own share declined. That cost landed on the property tax bill.

Education mandates were imposed without adequate funding. The courts found the system unconstitutional in 1997 and have found the funding inadequate in fourteen subsequent decisions. The legislature’s response — the Statewide Education Property Tax — is a property tax masquerading as a state solution.

Business taxes were cut. The Interest and Dividends Tax was repealed. State revenue fell by more than a billion dollars over a decade. The costs did not disappear. They migrated, as costs always migrate in New Hampshire, downward. Onto the property tax bill.

Here is what is happening right now:

CACR 12 — a constitutional amendment that would make the pledge permanent, requiring a two-thirds supermajority to enact any broad-based tax — passed the Senate 16-8 in February, advanced through the House Ways and Means Committee 11-9 on April 27, and is scheduled for a full House vote on May 14th.

If it passes with the required three-fifths supermajority and voters approve it in November by two-thirds, the conversation is constitutionally over. Not politically difficult. Constitutionally prohibited. The solution examined in the Live Free backgrounder — a constitutionally dedicated income tax replacing the downshifted portion of the property tax burden — would be permanently unavailable to future legislators and future residents regardless of what the evidence shows or what their communities need.

On Tax Day, House Majority Leader Jason Osborne invoked General John Stark’s words in support of CACR 12 — the incomplete version, without the second sentence that explains what Stark actually meant. The full toast reads: “Live free or die: death is not the worst of evils.” Stark was writing about human dignity. His words are being used to constitutionally prohibit an honest examination of whether the system charging a retired teacher’s aide nine times more of her income than her neighbor is consistent with that dignity.

Here is what you can do before May 14th:

Contact your state representative. The NH General Court website lists every representative by district. The vote requires a three-fifths supermajority — 237 of 394 votes. Prior versions have fallen short of that threshold. Individual constituents reaching individual representatives with the documented reality of what the property tax system has done to their households have moved New Hampshire House votes before.

The man with oil on his hands trusted the system. His grandchildren know what that cost. Knowing is only the beginning.

May 14th is three days away.

The full backgrounder is above. It is detailed. It is documented. It earns every word.

But if this summary is as far as you got today — now you know.

Sources: NH General Court bill records, CACR 12 (2026); InDepthNH.org reporting on CACR 12 hearings and committee votes; NH Bulletin, Concord Monitor, Union Leader, StateImpact NH, NH Business Review, NH Public Radio reporting on the history of The Pledge; NH Municipal Association Town & City Magazine historical records on revenue sharing (RSA 31-A); Stateline.org and Governing.com analysis of NH tax pledge history; Bureau of Labor Statistics manufacturing employment data; Laconia Daily Sun analysis of NH manufacturing decline; StateImpact NH North Country mill closure reporting; New England Historical Society, Wikipedia documentation of William Loeb; Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U.S. 705 (1977); John Stark letter of July 31, 1809; Claremont School District v. Governor (1997) and subsequent decisions; NFIB NH Supreme Court analysis; Prior backgrounders in The Quiet Cost series.

About sources and drafting methods →

This is the latest in an ongoing series examining policy patterns in New Hampshire’s current and recent legislative sessions. Prior backgrounders are available at The Quiet Cost.

Short on time? A plain language summary is available at the end of this piece.

A Note Before You Begin

Somewhere in this piece, you will read the words “income tax.”

When you do, you may feel the urge to stop reading. That reaction is understandable — and it didn’t arrive by accident. For more than fifty years, considerable money and political energy have been devoted specifically to ensuring that those two words trigger exactly that response in you and me. It has been, by any measure, a remarkably successful campaign — convincing us against what might be in our best interest.

But here is the question worth sitting with for just a moment: is that feeling yours — arrived at by your own reasoning and experience — or was it carefully placed there by people whose financial interests are served by your property tax bill staying exactly as it is?

We’re not asking you to change your mind. We’re asking you to resist the temptation just long enough to consider that you and I need a fair, real solution to what our property tax bills have become — and we deserve to at least examine whether one exists before we decide it doesn’t.

If you finish this and still say no — fair enough. But finish it first, please.

Section One: The Illusion

There is something genuinely admirable about New Hampshire’s instinct.

The refusal to hand Concord another tool to reach into your pocket. The suspicion of promises made by people who will be long gone by the time the bill comes due. The conviction that a person’s earnings belong to them first, and to the government only after a real argument has been made for why any portion is needed and what it will actually accomplish.

These are not small-minded positions. They are the inheritance of people who built something real in a hard place, and who learned — not from ideology but from experience — that government expands more reliably than it delivers. The Pledge, whatever you think of it now, was born from something true.

Here is what also happens to be true.

New Hampshire has among the highest effective property tax rates in the nation. The retired couple who paid off their home thirty years ago and now live on Social Security and a modest pension pays a tax bill that has increased every single year — not because their town is spending extravagantly, not because their school board lost its mind, but because Concord has been quietly, systematically, and deliberately transferring its own obligations onto that tax bill for over a decade. The prior backgrounders in this series have documented exactly how that was done, by whom, and in whose interest.

The result is a system that calls itself free and functions as anything but — for the people who can least afford it.

New Hampshire doesn’t have a low-tax system. It has hidden taxes. Collected in the most regressive form available. Distributed with complete indifference to whether the person paying them can actually afford to do so. And protected from honest examination by a pledge made to a newspaper publisher who has been dead since 1981.

The question this backgrounder asks is not whether New Hampshire should abandon its identity. It should not. The question is whether the current system actually reflects that identity — or whether it has become a comfortable story that powerful interests tell to people it is quietly impoverishing.

That question deserves a straight answer.

Section Two: What You and I Are Actually Paying

Let’s start with something that doesn’t get said plainly often enough.

You and I pay taxes in New Hampshire. Substantial ones. The “no income tax, no sales tax” identity is real as far as it goes — but it describes only two of the many ways a government can reach into our finances. What it doesn’t describe is what fills the gap. And what fills the gap, in New Hampshire, is a property tax system that has become one of the heaviest in the nation — and one of the most unfair to people like us.

Here is how it works, and who it works against.

Our property tax bill is calculated by multiplying the assessed value of our home by a rate set annually by our municipality, our school district, our county, and the state. If our home is assessed at $300,000 and the combined rate is $20 per thousand dollars of value, the annual bill is $6,000. It does not matter whether we earned $180,000 last year or $22,000. It does not matter whether we are a working professional at the peak of our earning years or a retired neighbor on a fixed income who paid off that house thirty years ago and is now watching its assessed value climb while the Social Security check stays flat. The bill is the same. The system does not know the difference. More precisely — it does not care.

That is not an accident of design. It is the design.

Property taxes are what economists call regressive — meaning they consume a larger share of income from people who earn less. In New Hampshire, those of us in the bottom fifth of earners pay close to nine percent of our income in state and local taxes. The wealthiest one percent pay roughly two and a half percent. The people with the least are carrying the heaviest proportional load. Not because anyone stood up and voted for that outcome explicitly — but because a system was built, and sustained, and defended, that produces exactly that outcome automatically.

And it has been getting worse.

The prior backgrounders in this series documented in detail how that happened. Over the past decade, the Free State/Republican-led legislature — with the support of Governor Ayotte and her predecessor — cut business taxes, repealed the Interest and Dividends Tax, and blocked every revenue measure that might have reduced pressure on those of us paying local property taxes. When the resulting shortfalls required choices about who would pay for the obligations the state was no longer covering, the answer was consistent: us. The retired couple. The working family. The fixed-income homeowner who had no vote on any of it.

What makes this particularly difficult to see clearly is that our property tax bill arrives with our town’s name on it — not Concord’s. The school district sends the notice. The municipal office collects the payment. It looks local because the collection mechanism is local. But a significant and growing portion of what you and I are paying reflects decisions made in Concord, not at town meeting — mandates, contribution rates, and shifted obligations that our select board and our school board had no power to refuse and no ability to reduce.

We have been paying a state tax. It just doesn’t look like one.

That is the first thing worth understanding before we go any further. New Hampshire doesn’t have a low-tax system. It has a system in which the taxes that exist fall most heavily on people like us — the ones least able to pay them — and in which that fact has been obscured, deliberately and successfully, for a very long time.

The question is not whether you and I are being taxed. We are. The question is whether the way we are being taxed is fair, sustainable, or honestly presented to us.

On all three counts, the answer is the same.

A note from the author: I spent years as a New Hampshire property tax assessor. I administered this system professionally. And I want to be direct about something that experience taught me that most taxpayers never learn.

The property tax system we rely on today has its roots in colonial New Hampshire — in use in some form since before the state constitution was adopted in 1784, and formally continued as the primary mechanism of public finance ever since. It was designed for a world in which most wealth was held in land, income was largely untraceable, and the value of a piece of property was a reasonable proxy for a person’s ability to contribute to their community. That world ended a very long time ago. The system has not kept up.

More importantly: the assessed value from which your property tax bill is calculated is not a fact. It is an estimate — arrived at through what assessors call mass appraisal, a methodology that uses market and property data to approximate value without individually inspecting most properties. It is a professional estimate, and assessors work hard to make it a good one. But it is an estimate nonetheless. New Hampshire itself acknowledges this — the state applies an equalization ratio on top of local assessments specifically to compensate for the fact that different towns produce different results from the same methodology. We are correcting an approximation with an adjustment. That is what your tax bill is built on.

A properly established, single-use income tax would be calculated from something categorically different: a provable number. Your income is documented. It is reported. It is verifiable. It does not require a mass appraisal or an equalization ratio. It does not fluctuate based on a revaluation cycle or a methodology judgment call. It is, in the most literal sense, what you actually have — which is precisely what a fair tax system should be measuring.

I am not comfortable, as someone who spent a career inside this system, with the proposition that all of our tax obligations should rest on a mechanism this antiquated and this imprecise. I don’t think you should be either.

Section Three: The Same Street, Two Different Worlds

Let’s make this real.

Picture a street in any New Hampshire town. It could be Charlestown. It could be Newport. It could be Concord, Keene, or Nashua. The specific town doesn’t matter. What matters is the street — and the two houses sitting next to each other on it.

Both houses are assessed at $300,000. Both owners received the same property tax bills this year — two of them, one in the summer and one in December, each roughly $3,000. Six thousand dollars annually — a number well within the range of what New Hampshire homeowners in average-value communities actually pay.

The first house belongs to Margaret. She’s seventy-one. She and her late husband bought that house in 1987, paid it off over thirty years of careful saving, and it is now the entirety of her financial security. She lives on $22,000 a year — Social Security and a small pension from the school district where she worked as a teacher’s aide for twenty-two years. She is not poor by the state’s definition. She is, however, paying $6,000 of her $22,000 annual income in property taxes — twice a year, $3,000 at a time, each bill arriving like a deadline she cannot negotiate. That is twenty-seven cents of every dollar she earns going to a tax bill she has no meaningful ability to reduce and no real power to contest.

The second house belongs to David. He’s forty-four. He works remotely for a technology company, earns $185,000 a year, and moved to New Hampshire three years ago partly because there’s no income tax. His two property tax bills — $3,000 in the summer, $3,000 in December — represent just over three cents of every dollar he earns. He pays each one without particular difficulty and moves on with his month.

Margaret and David are neighbors. Their tax bills are identical. As a share of what they actually have to live on, Margaret is paying nine times more than David.

Read that again. Nine times more.

Not because Margaret chose a more expensive house. Not because she uses more services. Not because any elected official stood up and said: retired women on fixed incomes should carry nine times the proportional tax burden of high-earning remote workers. Nobody said that. Nobody voted for it. It is simply what the system produces — automatically, every year, without apology or acknowledgment — when you build a tax structure that charges everyone the same rate on property value while remaining entirely indifferent to income.

This is what “no income tax” actually costs. Not in the abstract. Not in economic theory. In Margaret’s checkbook, twice a year, as she sits at the kitchen table with a $3,000 bill and a fixed income and calculates what else has to give this month.

She is not alone. There are thousands of Margarets in New Hampshire. In Charlestown. In Newport. In Unity. In every town where the mill closed, where the pension was modest, where the house is paid off but the tax bill keeps climbing. Twice a year — in the summer and again in December — they sit down with a bill that represents weeks of income and figure out what else has to give. They are the people the current system hits hardest. They are the people for whom the “New Hampshire Advantage” is not an advantage at all — it is a slow and steady pressure toward a choice no one should have to make: heat the house, keep the lights on, or pay the tax bill.

And here is the piece of this that tends to go unspoken.

David doesn’t need the system to stay the way it is. He is doing fine either way. The people who need the system to stay exactly as it is — who have spent considerable money and political energy over fifty years making sure you and I never seriously examine it — are not David, and they are not Margaret. They are the people whose property holdings and investment income are large enough that any alternative to the current system would require them to contribute something closer to their actual share.

They have been very good at making sure that conversation doesn’t happen.

Until now.

Section Four: The Fear That Is Not Unreasonable

Before we go any further, we need to stop and name something.

If you have read this far — and we’re grateful that you have — there is a good chance that a specific fear has been forming in the back of your mind. It may not have announced itself yet as a fully formed objection. But it is there, and it sounds something like this:

Even if everything you’ve said about the property tax system is true — even if Margaret’s situation is exactly as unfair as you’ve described — the moment New Hampshire creates an income tax, Concord will spend every dollar of it, the property tax bill won’t go down by a single cent, and we will have handed the state a new revenue tool that will never, ever go away.

That fear is not paranoid. It is not the product of fifty years of successful conditioning, though that conditioning is real. It is a reasonable conclusion drawn from observable evidence about how governments actually behave when given new sources of revenue. It has happened elsewhere. It could happen here. Anyone who waves that concern away without addressing it directly is either not being honest with you or hasn’t thought it through.

We are not waving it away.

In fact, we want to make the case that this fear — legitimate as it is — is precisely the reason a simple legislative promise to use income tax revenue for property tax relief would never be enough. Politicians make promises. Legislatures change. Priorities shift. A promise made in one session can be unmade in the next. If the only protection between you and I and a new tax layer sitting on top of our existing property tax bill is the good intentions of the people currently in office, that protection is worth exactly as much as their word — which is to say, not enough.

So let’s talk about what would actually be enough.

The mechanism that changes this equation is not a promise. It is not a campaign pledge — and certainly not one made to a living politician any more than to a dead newspaper publisher. It is a constitutional amendment, passed directly by voters, that does three specific things that no legislature can undo without going back to those same voters for permission.

First: it dedicates income tax revenue exclusively and irrevocably to direct property tax relief — dollar for dollar, line by line, with no exceptions and no creative accounting.

Second: it requires independent annual auditing of that dedication, with results published in plain language accessible to every taxpayer in the state — not buried in a budget document that requires a law degree to interpret, but presented clearly enough that Margaret can read it at her kitchen table and know whether the promise is being kept.

Third: it includes an automatic repeal trigger — if the property tax burden on New Hampshire homeowners does not demonstrably decrease within a defined period, the income tax disappears. Not by legislative vote. Not by gubernatorial action. Automatically, by the terms of the amendment itself.

This is not a novel concept. New Hampshire already constitutionally dedicates certain revenues to specific purposes. The mechanism exists and has been used. What has been missing is not the legal architecture — it is the political will to apply that architecture to the specific problem of property tax relief, and the public understanding that such a protection is possible.

What we are describing is not a new tax layered onto an existing burden. It is a constitutionally protected exchange: a fairer way of collecting what the state was already taking from you and me — from everyone, in proportion to what we can actually afford to pay — with a legal guarantee, not a politician’s promise, that the property tax bill goes down accordingly.

The fear is legitimate. The answer to that fear is not reassurance. It is architecture.

And the architecture exists.

Section Five: What This Actually Means For Margaret. And For David. And For Us.

Let’s go back to that street.

Same two houses. Same assessed value. Same town. But now let’s apply the framework we just described — a constitutionally dedicated income tax, replacing dollar for dollar the portion of the property tax bill that represents downshifted state obligations — and see what actually happens to the two people living there.

For the purposes of this illustration, let’s work with a conservative estimate. The prior backgrounders in this series documented that a significant portion of New Hampshire’s property tax burden — conservatively, roughly a third — represents costs that were once state responsibilities and have been progressively transferred downward onto local tax bills over the past decade. That is the portion this mechanism targets. Not the locally voted municipal budget. Not the school district appropriation your neighbors approved at town meeting. Only the portion that arrived on your bill from Concord without your vote and without your consent.

On a $6,000 annual property tax bill, a third represents $2,000.

Here is what that means for Margaret.

Her property tax bill drops by $2,000 annually — $1,000 less on the summer bill, $1,000 less on the December bill. She now pays $4,000 a year in property taxes instead of $6,000. On an income of $22,000, that reduction is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a heating bill paid in full and one paid in installments. It is a car repair that doesn’t go on a credit card. It is a prescription filled on time. It is, in the plainest terms, the difference between a fixed-income retirement that is difficult and one that is genuinely precarious.

Under the constitutional dedication mechanism, Margaret pays no income tax — because the amendment, as we have described it, is designed to replace the downshifted portion of the property tax burden. For someone at her income level, the math is straightforward and entirely in her favor. She pays less. Full stop.

Here is what it means for David.

His property tax bill drops by the same $2,000 annually. He also benefits — the relief is universal, not means-tested, because the mechanism works through the property tax rate itself rather than through individual exemptions or credits. His bill goes from $6,000 to $4,000.

Under a proportional income tax dedicated to funding that relief, David contributes more than Margaret in absolute dollars — because he earns more. On $185,000 a year, a modest dedicated rate generates a meaningful contribution. But here is the number worth sitting with: David’s total tax obligation — property tax reduced plus income tax added — is lower than what he pays today. He pays less in property tax than he did before. The income tax contribution that replaced it is proportional to what he actually earns and what he can actually afford. He is not being punished for his success. He is being asked to contribute at a rate that reflects his capacity — which is what a fair tax system does.

The retired widow pays less. The working professional pays less in property tax and contributes proportionally through income. The total public obligation — the cost of running schools, maintaining roads, funding the services that make New Hampshire communities function — doesn’t change. What changes is who carries it, and in what proportion to their ability to do so.

That is not a radical idea. It is arithmetic.

And here is the piece that tends to get lost in fifty years of pledge politics and conditioned reflexes: this is not a story about taking something from David and giving it to Margaret. David is not the problem. David is also, in his own way, a beneficiary of a fairer system — because a community where Margaret can afford to stay in her home, where working families aren’t being slowly squeezed out by bills they didn’t vote for, where the people who built these towns can afford to remain in them — that is a community worth living in. For everyone on the street.

The alternative — the system we have now — produces a different outcome. It produces towns that hollow out. It produces retirees who sell the house they spent thirty years paying for because the tax bill became impossible. It produces working families who do the math and leave. It produces communities that slowly become unaffordable to the people who built them and entirely affordable to the people who didn’t need them to be cheap in the first place.

That is not the New Hampshire anyone chose. It is the New Hampshire the current system is quietly building, one tax bill at a time.

Margaret deserves better. So does David. So do you and I.

Section Six: Why This Hasn’t Happened. And Why That Might Be About To Change.

If the arithmetic is as clear as Section Five suggests — and it is — then a reasonable person sitting with this backgrounder might ask a simple question.

Why hasn’t this happened already?

It is a fair question. It deserves a straight answer. And the straight answer has two parts — one that is uncomfortable, and one that is, cautiously and honestly, something closer to hopeful.

The uncomfortable part.

The current system has not persisted for fifty years because nobody noticed it was unfair. It has persisted because the people for whom it works — the people whose property holdings, investment portfolios, and business interests are large enough that a fairer system would require them to contribute something closer to their actual share — have had both the resources and the motivation to make sure it stays exactly as it is.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a description of how money functions in democratic politics. When a policy outcome benefits a concentrated and wealthy interest, that interest will invest in protecting it. When the cost of that policy is distributed broadly across a large population of people too busy working and paying bills to organize around it, the protection tends to hold. It is not complicated. It is not hidden. It is simply the way things work when one side has resources and motivation and the other side has neither the time nor the full picture.

The full picture is what these backgrounders have been attempting to provide.

What has made The Pledge so durable is that it found a way to align the financial interests of the very wealthy with the genuine values of ordinary New Hampshire residents. The instinct behind it — distrust of government expansion, protection of individual earnings, skepticism of Concord — is real and not unreasonable, as we acknowledged at the outset. That instinct was recruited in service of an outcome that has cost the people who hold it dearly. That is a remarkable political achievement. It deserves to be named as what it is.

The Democratic party in New Hampshire has not covered itself in glory on this question either. For decades, Democratic politicians have understood the unfairness of the property tax system and declined to make a serious public case for changing it — not because they lacked the argument, but because they feared The Pledge and the political cost of challenging it. That failure of nerve has left working families and retirees without an effective advocate in either party for the better part of two generations. It is worth saying plainly, because honest accounting requires it.

The people who have paid the price for all of this are Margaret. And the retired mill worker in Berlin. And the young family in Claremont doing the math on whether they can stay. And you and me — sitting with a property tax bill that keeps climbing, for costs we never voted for, under a system that has been very carefully protected from the honest examination it deserves.

The part that is cautiously hopeful.

Something has been shifting.

It has been shifting slowly, and it is not yet visible in Concord’s voting records or the governor’s office. But it is visible in the responses to these backgrounders. It is visible in the legislators — from both parties — who have read them and said, quietly, that they recognize what they’re seeing. It is visible in the retired couple who forwarded the last piece to their select board member with a note attached. It is visible in the fact that you are still reading this.

The Pledge has survived for fifty years on a combination of money, political timidity, and the simple reality that most people haven’t had the time or the legislative fluency to see the full picture assembled in one place. Two of those three conditions are addressable. The money will always be there. The political timidity tends to follow public pressure rather than precede it. And the full picture — that is precisely what this series has been building, one backgrounder at a time.

What changes the political reality is not a single election, though elections matter. It is not a single piece of legislation, though legislation is ultimately where this has to land. What changes it is the slow, patient accumulation of people who understand what has been done, why it has been done, and in whose interest it has been maintained — and who have decided that understanding is no longer enough.

That accumulation is underway.

The Pledge is powerful only as long as the people paying for it don’t know what it’s costing them. The system is protected only as long as the full picture stays unassembled. The outcome is arranged only as long as the people it’s arranged against remain too busy, too fragmented, or too conditioned to recognize it for what it is.

You have now read through six sections of a backgrounder designed specifically to address all three of those conditions. You have met Margaret. You have seen the arithmetic. You have had the fear named and answered. You have been shown the mechanism that makes a real solution possible without requiring you to trust a politician's promise.

What you do with that is, as it should be in New Hampshire, entirely up to you.

But you know now. And knowing changes things.

Section Seven: Live Free. Actually Free.

We want to end where we began.

Not with a policy argument. Not with a constitutional mechanism. Not with Margaret’s kitchen table or David’s December check or the arithmetic that connects them. Those things matter, and they are all true, and they will still be true tomorrow morning when you set this down and go back to your day.

We want to end with the identity. Because the identity is worth keeping.

Live Free or Die.

It is the most uncompromising motto in the United States. No hedging. No qualifications. No asterisks. It does not say live free within reasonable parameters, or live free unless the political cost is too high, or live free as long as nobody wealthy objects. It says live free. Or die.

Before we go further with that, it is worth pausing on what the motto actually is — and what it is not.

General John Stark wrote those words on July 31, 1809 — not as a battle cry, but as a toast sent by letter from his farm in Manchester, where failing health at eighty-one prevented him from attending a reunion of the men he had led at the Battle of Bennington thirty-two years earlier. The full toast reads: “Live free or die: death is not the worst of evils.” That second sentence has been quietly dropped from the motto’s public life — but it is the sentence that explains what Stark actually meant. He was not being reckless with human life. He was saying that worse things than death exist. Specifically: living without genuine freedom. The veterans who received that letter understood exactly what he meant. They had fought for it.

Stark was writing about human dignity — about the proposition that a life without genuine freedom is not a life worth the name. He was not writing to a tax policy committee. He was not writing to protect investment portfolios or business interests or the financial arrangements of people who find the current system profitable. The people who have recruited his words in service of protecting a regressive property tax system that slowly dispossesses the state’s most vulnerable residents have taken considerable liberties with what he actually said — and they have been careful to use only the part of the toast that serves their purpose, while leaving behind the part that explains it.

In 1977, the United States Supreme Court ruled seven to two in Wooley v. Maynard that the state of New Hampshire could not compel its own citizens to display the motto on their license plates. George Maynard, a Jehovah’s Witness, had covered the words “or Die” on his plate on grounds of conscience — stating that by his religious belief, his highest government was one that offered everlasting life, and that it would be contrary to that belief to pledge his life to the state. The Court agreed with him. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote that the First Amendment protects not only the right to speak freely but the right to refrain from speaking at all — and that the state cannot force an individual to be an instrument for fostering public adherence to an ideological point of view he finds unacceptable.

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled, in other words, that Live Free or Die does not mean the same thing to everyone — and that New Hampshire cannot require it to.

We raise this not to diminish the motto. We raise it because there are voices in this debate who use it as though it were settled constitutional doctrine that the phrase means: no income tax, forever, regardless of what it costs the people least able to pay. It does not mean that. It has never meant that. The Supreme Court confirmed, nearly fifty years ago, that New Hampshire residents have the constitutional right to interpret their own state motto according to their own conscience and conviction — and that no political interest, however well funded or long established, has the authority to declare the interpretation closed.

Live Free or Die belongs to all of us. Including Margaret. Including the retired mill worker. Including the young family in Claremont doing the math on whether they can stay. It does not belong exclusively to the people whose financial interests are served by ensuring that the conversation about what genuine freedom actually requires never seriously happens.

We believe that. We suspect you do too.

Here is what we also believe.

There is nothing free about receiving a tax bill twice a year for costs you never voted for, transferred onto your property by people in Concord who decided their obligations were better carried by you. There is nothing free about a retired neighbor sitting at her kitchen table in December calculating whether the heating oil goes on the credit card so the tax bill can be paid on time. There is nothing free about a young family doing the math on whether New Hampshire is still a place they can afford to raise children in — and concluding, quietly and without fanfare, that it isn’t. There is nothing free about a system that has been engineered, over fifty years and with considerable money, to look like freedom while functioning as its opposite for the people who can least afford the difference.

What we have now is not the New Hampshire that John Stark was describing. It is a careful simulation of it — maintained by people who have found the motto useful and the reality profitable.

Genuine freedom — the kind worth dying for — requires honest accounting. It requires a system in which the obligations of living together in a civil society are distributed according to what people can actually bear, not according to what is most convenient for the people with the most to protect. It requires that when a government tells its citizens they are free, that freedom means something real in the lives of the people hearing it — not just in the tax returns of the people who engineered the telling.

A constitutional dedication mechanism that replaces the most regressive portion of the property tax burden with a proportional income tax is not an attack on the New Hampshire identity. It is an attempt to make that identity real — for Margaret, for the mill worker’s widow in Berlin, for the young family in Claremont, for everyone on that street who has been paying for a freedom that was always more available to their neighbor than to them.

The ghost of Bill Loeb cannot vote. He cannot campaign. He has been dead for forty-four years. The pledge he extracted from generations of New Hampshire politicians was made in service of a newspaper publisher’s convictions and a certain class of people’s financial interests — and it has been honored faithfully, at extraordinary cost, by the people who could afford it least.

It is time to honor something else instead.

It is time to honor the retired teacher’s aide who paid off her house over thirty years and deserves to stay in it. The mill worker who spent forty years contributing to this state and deserves a retirement that isn’t a monthly calculation of what goes unpaid. The young family that wants to build something here and deserves a tax system that doesn’t make that choice impossible before it begins.

It is time, in the plainest sense of the words, to Live Free.

Actually free.

Not free as a slogan. Not free as a campaign pledge. Not free as a carefully maintained illusion that serves some of us while slowly impoverishing the rest.

Free as something real. Something honest. Something that means the same thing in Margaret’s kitchen in December that it means in the statehouse in Concord.

That is the New Hampshire worth fighting for.

And it is still possible.

This backgrounder is part of The Quiet Cost series, examining policy patterns in New Hampshire’s current and recent legislative sessions. Prior backgrounders are available at The Quiet Cost. If this piece reached you through a friend or a share, we are glad it did. The pattern only becomes visible when enough people are looking at it at the same time.

Now you know.

Didn’t have time for the full piece? Start here.

Plain Language Summary — For Busy Readers

This backgrounder makes one central argument, supported by documented facts:

New Hampshire does not have a low-tax system. It has a hidden tax system — and it has been deliberately designed to look like something it isn’t.

Here is what the evidence shows:

New Hampshire has the fourth highest effective property tax rate in the nation.

The bottom fifth of earners pay nearly nine percent of their income in state and local taxes. The wealthiest one percent pay roughly two and a half percent.

A significant portion of what appears on your local property tax bill represents state obligations — retirement system contributions, education mandates, county costs — transferred downward onto local taxpayers without their vote.

The assessed value your property tax bill is calculated from is not a verified fact. It is a professional estimate, acknowledged as such by the state itself, which applies a correction ratio on top of local assessments to compensate for the imprecision.

An income tax — if constitutionally dedicated exclusively to property tax relief, with independent annual auditing and an automatic repeal trigger if property taxes don’t decrease — would not be a new burden. It would be a fairer way of collecting what is already being taken, from everyone, in proportion to what they can actually afford.

Here is what that would mean in practice:

A retired neighbor on $22,000 a year and a remote worker earning $185,000 currently pay identical property tax bills. As a share of income, the retiree pays nine times more.

Under a constitutionally dedicated income tax replacing the downshifted portion of the bill, both pay less in property tax. The retiree pays no income tax. The professional contributes proportionally — and pays less in total than he does today.

The total public obligation doesn’t change. Who carries it, and how fairly, does.

Here is what this backgrounder is not saying:

It is not saying trust the legislature to do the right thing. It is saying build a constitutional amendment that removes that requirement entirely.

It is not saying Live Free or Die means nothing. It is saying the motto has never meant one specific tax policy — the Supreme Court confirmed that in 1977 — and that genuine freedom requires honest accounting.

It is not saying the current system is anyone’s fault for supporting it. It is saying considerable money was spent over fifty years specifically to make sure most people never examined it closely enough to see what it was costing them.

The full backgrounder is above. It is long. It earns every word.

But if this summary is as far as you got today — now you know.

Sources: NH Department of Revenue Administration municipal tax rate data; Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy NH tax burden by income data; NH General Court legislative records; Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U.S. 705 (1977); John Stark letter of July 31, 1809, as reproduced in Caleb Stark, Memoir and Official Correspondence of Gen. John Stark (1860); NH Retirement System contribution rate history; NH Bulletin, Concord Monitor, InDepthNH, Valley News reporting; Senator Perkins Kwoka public statements; Prior backgrounders in The Quiet Cost series.

About sources and drafting methods →

This is the latest in an ongoing series examining policy patterns in New Hampshire's current legislative session. Prior backgrounders are available at The Quiet Cost.

Previous backgrounders in this series have documented how state and federal costs have been progressively shifted off the state budget and onto local property taxpayers — a pattern readers have recognized and, by their own account, hadn’t fully connected until seeing it assembled in one place. This backgrounder adds a second layer to that picture. While that cost-shifting has been underway, a parallel set of actions has been quietly eroding the workplace protections that the same households depend on. The two tracks, taken together, tell a story worth understanding.

Track One: The Cost-Shifting Track — A Brief Recap

New Hampshire’s “no income tax, no sales tax” identity has a price that rarely gets named plainly: some of the highest effective property tax rates in the nation, carried overwhelmingly by working families and retirees who own homes. You and me.

That burden has not grown by accident. Over the past decade, the Free State/Republican-led legislature — with the support of Governor Kelly Ayotte and her predecessor — has cut business taxes, repealed the Interest and Dividends Tax, and blocked revenue measures that would have reduced pressure on local property taxpayers. When shortfalls have required choices, the direction has been consistent and deliberate: obligations that were once a shared state responsibility have been transferred onto municipalities, school districts, and ultimately onto the property tax bills of working families and retirees — while those whose taxes were cut kept the difference.

What is less understood is that even the “locally voted” portion of the property tax bill contains costs no local board can actually vote away — most significantly, employer contributions to the New Hampshire Retirement System, set by the state legislature at rates that have increased while the state’s own share has declined. The cost lands on the local tax bill. Voters see it as a local spending decision. It is not.

Senate Democratic Minority Leader Rebecca Perkins Kwoka of Portsmouth has named this directly. She has stated that tight budget conditions result from “tax giveaways for out-of-state corporations and the ultra-wealthy” by Republican colleagues over the past decade, and has specifically identified downshifted retirement costs as a central example of how the transfer works. Her assessment is consistent with the documented record.

Track Two: The Workplace Power Track

What the prior backgrounders have not yet addressed is what is happening simultaneously in the workplace — and to whom.

The same legislative session has produced a cluster of bills moving through the House Labor, Industrial and Rehabilitative Services Committee, all with Republican sponsorship, all pointing in the same direction: away from worker protections and toward employer discretion.

They do not announce themselves as a coordinated agenda. Each bill carries its own narrow, technical title. That is precisely how this kind of strategy works. A right-to-work bill draws 1,400 people to the State House in below-freezing weather because it is a known, named fight with a forty-year history. But a bill titled “relative to employer notice of department of labor investigations” generates no headlines, no rallies, and no recognition — even though its practical effect is to give businesses a month’s advance warning before a labor law enforcement visit, allowing time to address evidence of wage theft or unsafe conditions before an inspector arrives.

Three bills from the current 2026 session illustrate the pattern.

HB 1043 — Minimum reporting pay

Current New Hampshire law, on the books since 1985, requires that any worker who reports to work at an employer’s request be paid a minimum of two hours’ wages, even if sent home immediately. The requirement exists because that worker has already committed real costs: getting ready, arranging childcare, driving in, paying for parking. HB 1043, sponsored by Representative Brian Labrie (R-Bedford) and eleven Republican co-sponsors, would eliminate that floor entirely and replace it with employer-set policies — meaning a worker could report as required and be sent home with nothing.

Representative Labrie is the Assistant Majority Leader of the New Hampshire House, a small business owner, an NFIB member, and a member of the very committee through which this bill moved. The Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy — New Hampshire’s free-market think tank whose stated mission is advancing individual freedom, limited government, and free enterprise — publicly advocated for the bill in Senate testimony, framing the 1985 protection as an outdated regulation.

The bill passed the House 189-155. In the Senate, Minority Leader Rebecca Perkins Kwoka called for a review of an “ought to pass” vote that had been called incorrectly by Republican leadership. Joined by senators who crossed the aisle, she ensured the bill was tabled. It remains alive — tabling is not defeat, and the session has not ended.

Among those casting a yes vote in the House was Representative Walter “Terry” Spilsbury (R-Charlestown), who represents Sullivan County District 3, covering Charlestown, Newport, and Unity, which happens to be my district. These are communities whose residents are predominantly working families and fixed-income retirees — not business owners or employers. Spilsbury is not a legislator without context for what he voted on: he holds a law degree, an MBA from Columbia University, and previously served as Maritime Counsel on the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. His yes vote on a bill eliminating the wage floor for hourly workers reporting to work was an informed one. Residents of Sullivan County District 3 may wish to ask their representative directly how that vote served their interests.

HB 1072 — Advance notice of labor inspections

Also sponsored by Representative Labrie, this bill requires the Labor Commissioner to give employers at least 30 days’ written notice before any inspection — including the purpose of the visit and the alleged violation — and allows employers 30 days to respond to any document request or interview demand. Shorter notice would require Attorney General approval, available only in narrow circumstances.

Read plainly: investigators would be required to announce themselves a month in advance to businesses suspected of violating labor law. It passed both chambers. It has attracted virtually no public attention. As a voice vote, individual attribution is unavailable — including whether my own District 3 representatives were among those in favor.

HB 1245 — Portable benefits for independent contractors

Co-sponsored by Representative Labrie, this bill creates a framework for employers to contribute to benefit plans for independent contractors without triggering reclassification of those workers as employees. The Josiah Bartlett Center advocated for this bill as well, framing it as a modernization.

The structural concern: making independent contractor arrangements more attractive to employers — by allowing token benefits without the legal obligations of employee status — creates an incentive to reclassify workers in ways that strip access to workers’ compensation, overtime protections, and unemployment insurance. Another voice vote, so attribution names remain unkown.

Also worth noting: in the 2025 session, right-to-work legislation was introduced and defeated for approximately the thirtieth time in four decades. It failed 200-180, with several Republicans crossing the aisle — one calling it “a pointless attack on American families.” Its reintroduction, after decades of failure, is itself part of the pattern of sustained pressure.

The Intersection: Where the Two Tracks Meet

Here is what is worth holding in view at once.

The worker who reports to a job site and can be sent home without pay under HB 1043 is, in most cases, the same person paying a property tax bill loaded with downshifted state costs they had no vote on. The worker whose employer now receives a month’s notice before a wage-and-hour inspection is the same person whose town meeting budget was constrained by retirement contribution rates set in Concord. The independent contractor stripped of employee protections loses access to the same public systems — unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation — that are themselves underfunded partly because the businesses employing them carry a reduced tax burden.

It is a two-sided squeeze. Less protected at work. More burdened at home. Both applied to the same household, in the same session, through legislation that individually sounds like routine housekeeping.

Whether this reflects coordinated intent or the cumulative effect of a consistent governing philosophy, the direction of travel is identical in both tracks: costs and risks move away from employers and institutions with capital, and toward working families and retirees who have less of it.

A Note on How This Happens

Most people do not track 400 bills a session. They have jobs, families, and limited hours. The individual pieces of this picture are all technically public — recorded in committee votes, bill texts, and floor journals on the New Hampshire General Court website. The pattern only becomes visible when someone puts them in the same room.

That is what these backgrounders attempt to do. Not to tell readers what to conclude, but to assemble what is documented so the picture can speak for itself.

There is more in this session worth watching. The backgrounders will continue.

Sources: NH Department of Revenue Administration municipal tax rate data; NH General Court bill records HB 1043, HB 1072, HB 1245, HB 238; Citizens Count NH bill summaries; Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy testimony and publications; NH Bulletin, Keene Sentinel, InDepthNH reporting; Senator Perkins Kwoka public statements; Ballotpedia legislator profiles; NFIB NH legislative updates; NH House Rules, Rule 5.

About sources and drafting methods →

Let’s set aside the political machinery for a moment. Set aside the Free State Project, the legislative capture, the judicial reshaping, the constitutional amendments, and the fifty-year history of a pledge created by a newspaper publisher who has been dead since 1981.

Set all of that aside and ask the simplest possible question: what do New Hampshire residents actually want?

The answer, documented in poll after poll, town meeting after town meeting, school board meeting after school board meeting, is not complicated. They want their property tax bills to stop rising. They want their schools to be funded. They want their children to be able to afford to live in the state they grew up in. They want the financial burden distributed fairly — not concentrated on the people least able to bear it while the wealthiest residents pay less than three cents on every dollar they earn.

That is not a radical demand. It is not a partisan demand. It is the reasonable expectation of people who have been paying more and more for less and less, year after year, while being told the problem is their school board.

And the political class of both parties — hiding behind The Pledge, honoring the ghost of Bill Loeb, performing rituals of fiscal purity for a constituency that died with the Manchester Union-Leader’s dominance — is failing them. Completely. Consistently. And at this point, inexcusably.

It is time to grow up.

Part One: What New Hampshire Residents Actually Want

The University of New Hampshire Survey Center’s Granite State Poll is the most reliable ongoing measure of what New Hampshire residents think about the issues facing their state. Its findings are consistent and revealing.

Housing, taxes, the cost of living, and education are mentioned most often by New Hampshire residents as the most important problems facing the state. Not ideology. Not culture war issues. Not abstract questions of governance. The practical, immediate, financial pressures of living in a state where property taxes — driven by Free State-GOP policy decisions — have risen nearly 48 percent since 2016 and show no sign of stopping.

The Saint Anselm College Survey Center’s March 2026 poll found that affordability has overtaken economy and inflation as the second most important concern among New Hampshire voters — up from further down the list just months earlier. Democrats are gaining ground in the state not because of ideological shifts but because economic anxiety is rising and the party in power owns it.

Ayotte’s approval has softened. The generic ballot now favors Democrats by eight points. The political environment is shifting — and it is shifting on exactly the issues The Quiet Cost series has been documenting: property taxes, school funding, cost of living, and the growing gap between what residents pay and what they receive in return.

Here is the finding that should be pinned to the wall of every campaign office in New Hampshire: when the Granite State Poll asked residents about the constitutional amendment to permanently ban an income tax — the Free State-GOP’s attempt to write The Pledge into the constitution forever — less than half of New Hampshire voters supported it.

Less than half. In a state that has been told for fifty years that the income tax is the third rail of politics. In a state where 71 percent say they oppose an income tax when asked directly. When voters were asked whether they wanted to lock that opposition into the constitution permanently — to surrender the option forever, regardless of future circumstances — they said no.

That is not a contradiction. That is a population that has not been given an honest conversation. They’ve been told The Pledge is protecting them. Nobody has shown them the bill it’s actually generating — a bill slanted heavily in favor of the wealthiest and biggest businesses, while average residents are forced to carry their water.

Part Two: The Bill Nobody Is Showing Them

Here are the facts that every New Hampshire voter deserves to know — stated plainly, without political framing, without partisan spin.

Your property tax bill doesn’t care whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican, or an Independent. It doesn’t adjust itself based on your political beliefs or your party registration. But it does adjust itself based on one thing: whether you’re wealthy or not. If you’re not — and ninety-five percent of New Hampshire residents aren’t — you have been quietly, systematically, and deliberately made to subsidize those who are. Not by accident. Not by market forces. But by decades of carefully engineered policy decisions made by the Free State-GOP majority, enabled by Democratic leaders too afraid of a dead man’s pledge to offer a genuine alternative, and signed into effect by governors who chose corporate and investor interests over the working families, retirees, and communities they were elected to serve. The bill for all of those decisions has one delivery address. It arrives in your mailbox. It is called a property tax bill. And it has been going up every year — not because your town overspent, but because the people in Concord decided you would pay what they chose not to.

Over the past decade, the Free State-GOP controlled legislature — working in alignment with Governor Ayotte’s administration — made a series of deliberate policy decisions that transferred an estimated $3 billion in state responsibilities directly onto New Hampshire’s local property taxpayers.

The documented conclusion from Cheshire County Treasurer Jack Wozmak’s December 2025 analysis, published by the New Hampshire Municipal Association, is unambiguous: without that $3 billion state downshift, the total statewide property tax levy today would be lower than it was ten years ago. Every penny of property tax growth over the past decade — every single cent — is directly attributable to state policy decisions, not local overspending.

In fact, the numbers tell an even more striking story. The total statewide property tax levy increased by $1.28 billion over the past decade. The state downshifted $3 billion. That means local schools and municipalities were actively cutting their own budgets to absorb as much of the downshift as possible — and still couldn’t absorb all of it. The downshift impact equates to 234 percent of all measured property tax growth.

The breakdown is precise. School districts absorbed $2.1 billion — 70 percent of the entire downshift — because whenever the state cuts education aid or underfunds special education, districts are legally required to make up the difference. They have no choice. Municipalities absorbed $600 million when the state stopped paying its share of the retirement system. Counties absorbed the remainder through Medicaid nursing home reimbursement shortfalls.

Meanwhile, the state budget has routinely reported surpluses. The Rainy-Day Fund has grown. Legislators have publicly congratulated themselves on fiscal discipline. That discipline exists only because local property taxpayers were forced to make up billions in missing state support — and then were handed a tax bill that made them furious at their school boards.

Simultaneously, the Free State-GOP majority cut the Business Profits Tax, the Business Enterprise Tax, and repealed the Interest and Dividends Tax entirely — reducing state revenue by tens of millions of dollars per biennium while disproportionately benefiting corporations and the wealthiest investors. The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy documents the result: the wealthiest 1 percent of New Hampshire families pay just 2.6 percent of their income in taxes. The bottom 20 percent pay nearly 9 percent. The poorest New Hampshire residents pay more than three times the effective tax rate of the wealthiest.

That is not a low-tax state. That is a state that has structured its taxes to fall most heavily on those least able to pay — and then told them it was for their own protection.

Let that sink in for a moment — because this did not happen by accident or by the invisible workings of economic forces beyond anyone’s control. These were chosen priorities. Chosen by identifiable people, in recorded votes, on specific dates. Every dollar shifted off corporate taxes and investment income was a dollar shifted onto your property tax bill. The beneficiaries were identifiable before the votes were cast. The mechanism was deliberate. And the people who would pay for it — the ninety-five percent — were never consulted, never warned, and in most cases never told it was happening at all. For too long, the role of state government in New Hampshire has been quietly redefined — from serving the public to serving the interests of those who fund campaigns, lobby in Concord, and benefit from a tax structure engineered to minimize their burden at everyone else’s expense. That is not governance. That is a protection racket with a legislative majority and a fifty-year alibi.

Part Three: The Ghost in the Room

There is a reason this has been allowed to continue, and it has a name: The Pledge.

For fifty years, New Hampshire politics has been haunted by the ghost of William Loeb — the publisher of the Manchester Union-Leader who backed Meldrim Thomson against a reasonable Republican governor in 1972 because that governor proposed a modest income tax. Loeb used his newspaper as a weapon, Thomson won, and the lesson absorbed by every politician who watched it happen was simple: touch the income tax and you die.

That lesson is fifty-three years old. The man who imposed it has been dead for forty-four years. The newspaper that enforced it has lost most of its political power. The state has changed beyond recognition. And yet every election cycle, candidates of both parties — Republican and Democrat, governor and state representative, senator and selectman — line up to take The Pledge as if it were still 1972 and Loeb were still watching.

This is not governance. This is ritual. It is the political equivalent of refusing to change a policy because a predecessor made a different choice and nobody has been brave enough to notice the world has changed.

And it is a ritual that serves a very specific constituency — one that is not you, unless you are in the top five percent of New Hampshire earners. The question worth asking is not “who does The Pledge protect from a new tax?” It is “who does The Pledge protect right now, today, from paying their fair share of the taxes that already exist?” The answer is the same people it has always protected: the corporations whose business taxes have been systematically cut, the wealthy investors whose Interest and Dividends Tax was repealed, the large landowners and second-home buyers whose investment income flows untaxed while their neighbors’ property tax bills rise to fill the gap. The ghost of Bill Loeb may haunt every politician who takes The Pledge. But it is the living, breathing, donating, lobbying beneficiaries of the current tax structure who keep his memory so carefully preserved.

The consequences of that ritual are measured in dollars and they are on your property tax bill. Every year that the political class of New Hampshire performs its loyalty to a dead man’s political legacy is another year that the downshifting continues, the burden accumulates, and the ninety-five percent of residents who depend on functional public services pay the price for the five percent who benefit most from the current arrangement.

What does exist — in place of honest governance — is a property tax system that is the most regressive in the nation, a school funding crisis that the Supreme Court found unconstitutional, a childcare system in collapse, a higher education sector ranked dead last in the country for state funding, and a legislature attempting to write its own political mythology into the state constitution to make sure nothing can ever change.

The ghost of Bill Loeb is costing New Hampshire residents billions of dollars. It is time to stop being afraid of it.

Part Four: The Childishness of It

Let’s be direct about what The Pledge actually is, stripped of its political mystique.

It is a promise made to a ghost. It is a vow of silence on the most important fiscal question facing the state, extracted by political intimidation and maintained by the fear of being the first person to stop. It is the political equivalent of a group of adults refusing to discuss a problem because somebody once got in trouble for discussing it, and nobody since has been willing to test whether that consequence still applies.

In any other context, we would recognize this immediately as a failure of adult leadership. A school principal who refused to discuss the budget because a predecessor got fired for raising it. A doctor who refused to discuss a diagnosis because a colleague once lost a patient after mentioning it. A business owner who refused to adjust their pricing because the founder set it in 1972 and changing it feels disloyal.

We would say: that is not leadership. That is hiding. That is putting your own comfort and political survival ahead of the people who depend on you to make hard decisions.

The voters of New Hampshire — the working families, the retirees on fixed incomes, the renters absorbing property tax increases through their rent, the young people deciding whether to stay or leave — did not create The Pledge. They were never consulted about it. They have been paying for it for fifty years without knowing its name.

And when they ask their elected representatives — of both parties — the perfectly reasonable question “How are you going to fix my property tax bill?” they are told, in effect: we can’t talk about that. We made a promise to a man who has been dead since Ronald Reagan’s first term, and we’re going to keep it even if it costs you your home.

That is not governance. It is abdication dressed up as principle. And it is abdication that has a direct financial beneficiary — not the working families being told The Pledge protects them from a new tax, but the corporations, wealthy investors, and large property holders who benefit every single day from a tax structure that shifts the burden off their balance sheets and onto everyone else’s property tax bill. The Pledge doesn’t just silence politicians. It silences the question that would expose who is actually being served — and who has been paying the price for that service for fifty years.

Part Five: What the Numbers Are Actually Saying

The polling on this issue is widely misread — and the misreading serves the people who benefit from the status quo.

Yes, 71 percent of New Hampshire voters say they oppose a state income tax when asked directly. That number is real and should not be dismissed. But it needs to be understood in context — and the context changes everything.

New Hampshire voters have been told, for fifty years, that an income tax is the enemy of their financial wellbeing. They have been told this by Republicans who benefit from the current tax structure. They have been told this by Democrats who are afraid of Republicans. They have been told this by a political culture that treats the question as settled when it is anything but.

What they have not been told — what the revenue gag rule has specifically prevented anyone from telling them — is this:

They are already paying high taxes. Not in spite of The Pledge, but because of it. The property tax, which falls hardest on the lowest incomes, is the direct consequence of a revenue structure that was designed to protect investment income and corporate profits from taxation. The “New Hampshire Advantage” is real — for the top five percent. For everyone else, it is the highest property tax reliance of any state in the nation.

They have not been shown that without the $3 billion in state downshifting, their property tax bill today would be lower than it was ten years ago. They have not been shown that the wealthiest one percent of their neighbors pay less than three cents on every dollar they earn in state and local taxes while they pay nine cents. They have not been shown that the Interest and Dividends Tax — repealed in 2025 — was paid primarily by the wealthiest investors, and that its elimination was paid for by every property taxpayer in the state.

When fewer than half of voters will support a permanent constitutional ban on the income tax — even though 71 percent say they oppose it today — they are telling you something important. They are saying: we’re not sure. We haven’t heard the full case. We don’t want to close a door we might need later.

That is not a constituency committed to The Pledge forever. That is a constituency that has been kept in the dark and is beginning to feel the consequences of that darkness on their property tax bills, in their children’s underfunded schools, and in the communities that are slowly being priced out of existence.

Part Six: What Grown-Up Governance Would Look Like

We are not, in this piece or in this series, advocating for any specific tax plan. The merits of a 3-3 plan, a circuit breaker, a revised revenue sharing formula, or any other specific policy approach are legitimate subjects for debate and deserve careful, evidence-based analysis. That debate should happen — and it should happen publicly, honestly, and without intimidation.

What we are saying is something prior to and more fundamental than any specific policy: grown-up governance requires being willing to have the conversation.

It requires candidates who will look property taxpayers in the eye and say: here is why your bill has gone up, here is who made the decisions that caused it, here is what I propose to do about it, and here is how I will pay for it.

It requires legislators who will ask not “will this position cost me politically?” but “is this true, is it fair, and does it serve the people I represent?”

It requires a political opposition willing to offer a genuine alternative — not just a slightly less aggressive version of the majority’s position, but a different answer to the question voters keep asking.

It requires acknowledging that the conditions that made The Pledge a defensible political calculation — if they ever were — no longer exist. That a promise made in fear of a dead man’s newspaper is not a governing philosophy. That the ninety-five percent of New Hampshire residents who are not in the top five percent deserve elected officials who are fighting for their interests, not performing loyalty to a fifty-year-old ritual that protects the five percent at their expense. The secret agenda has been hiding in plain sight for too long: state government in New Hampshire has been quietly but systematically redirected away from serving the vast majority of its residents and toward protecting the financial interests of corporations, wealthy investors, and the ideological movement that captured the legislature. Every tax cut that shifted the burden onto property taxpayers. Every education funding withdrawal that forced local schools to cut programs. Every childcare program defunded, every university budget slashed, every special education dollar withheld — each one a choice made by identifiable people in service of identifiable interests. Not the interests of the ninety-five percent. Never the interests of the ninety-five percent.

Rochester Mayor Chuck Grassie put it plainly when the 3-3 Tax Savings Plan was announced: a statewide revenue approach targeted at higher-income residents could allow his city to access state funds to pay for services, rather than increasing property taxes for all residents. That is not a radical idea. That is the basic principle of fair taxation — that those with the most capacity to contribute should contribute the most, and that the people with the least should not be asked to carry the heaviest load.

That principle does not require an income tax. It does not require a sales tax. It does not require any specific mechanism. It requires only the willingness to examine whether the current mechanism — a property tax system that is the most regressive in the nation — is actually serving the people it claims to protect.

The answer, documented in three billion dollars of downshifted costs and fifty years of rising property tax bills, is no.

Part Seven: The Moment That Is Coming

New Hampshire is approaching a political inflection point that is visible in the data even if it is not yet visible in the behavior of elected officials.

Affordability is the rising concern. Property taxes are the dominant anxiety. The political coalition that has sustained the Free State-GOP majority is not monolithic — the 22 Republicans who broke with their party to defeat the budget cap bill showed that the edges are fraying. Ayotte’s approval has softened. The generic ballot has shifted. The electorate is restless.

The Free State-GOP majority knows this. It is why they are moving urgently to write The Pledge into the constitution before the political environment shifts further. A supermajority requirement for any broad-based tax. An outright income tax ban. The constitutional trap being built in real time, as fast as the legislative calendar allows.

They are trying to lock the current system in place precisely because they can feel the pressure building against it.

The question is whether the political opposition — and more importantly, the voters who have been carrying this burden — will act before the lock clicks shut.

Every New Hampshire property taxpayer should know: without the state’s deliberate policy choices over the past decade, your tax bill today would be lower than it was ten years ago. Every school board member being blamed for rising costs should know: the decisions that caused this were made in Concord, not in your district. Every candidate running for state office in 2026 should know: voters want an answer to “how are you going to fix this?” — and “we can’t talk about that” is not an answer.

The ghost of Bill Loeb cannot vote. He cannot campaign. He cannot threaten anyone’s political career. He has been dead for forty-four years.

It is time for New Hampshire’s political class to govern as if they know that.

What You Can Do Before November 3, 2026

The New Hampshire state primary is September 8, 2026. The general election is November 3, 2026. Every one of the 400 seats in the New Hampshire House of Representatives is on the ballot. Every state Senate seat. The governorship. These are the races that determine whether the downshifting continues, whether Claremont falls, whether the constitutional trap closes permanently.

Ask every candidate you encounter — at a town meeting, at a campaign event, at your front door — the question Rep. Thomas Oppel said every voter asked him: How are you going to pay for it?

If they say “we can’t talk about that,” you now know exactly what that means and who it protects, and it is not you and me.

If they offer a genuine answer — specific, honest, and willing to address who pays and who benefits — you have found something rarer than it should be in New Hampshire politics: an adult willing to govern.

The crime is perfect only as long as the victims don’t know who committed it. The Pledge is powerful only as long as the people paying for it don’t know what it’s costing them.

Now you know.

The Quiet Cost covers the hidden economic and social costs borne by ordinary people when policy protects profit over people. This is the fifth in our New Hampshire series. The five pieces are designed to be read together and in order: the data center story shows the corporate capture of a single regulatory process; the Dillon’s Rule piece explains the legal architecture that makes capture possible; The Perfect Crime documents how the resulting costs are shifted onto property taxpayers while misdirecting their anger; The Other Half of the Perfect Crime explains why the political opposition has been unable to mount an effective response; and this piece asks the question that sits beneath all of them: when does the political class decide that the people they represent matter more than the political mythology they’ve inherited? The 2026 election is New Hampshire’s answer.

About sources and drafting methods →

In our last piece, we documented what we called The Perfect Crime: how the Free State-GOP majority in Concord has spent two decades systematically withdrawing state funding, shifting $3 billion in costs onto local property taxpayers, and engineering conditions that make residents furious at their school boards instead of their state legislators. It is a nearly flawless misdirection — the perpetrators stay invisible while the victims blame each other.

But every perfect crime has a second half. The first half is the act itself. The second half is making sure nobody can stop it.

In New Hampshire, that second half has a name. It’s called The Pledge. And for fifty years, it has operated as the most effective political silencing mechanism in the state’s history — not because Republicans imposed it on their opponents, but because Democrats accepted it, internalized it, and ultimately enforced it on themselves.

Understanding The Pledge — where it came from, how it works, who benefits from it, and why the people it hurts most keep defending it — is essential to understanding why the damage documented in our previous three pieces has gone largely unanswered by the political opposition. The trap doesn’t work if someone can spring it. The Pledge is the mechanism that keeps the trap closed.

Part One: The Ghost of Bill Loeb

To understand The Pledge, you have to understand William Loeb — and you have to understand that he has been dead since 1981 and still runs New Hampshire politics.

Loeb was the publisher of the Manchester Union-Leader, the state’s dominant statewide newspaper, from 1946 until his death. He was conservative, combative, and utterly without restraint — famous for front-page editorials that attacked politicians by name, questioned their character, and occasionally published personal information about their families. He wielded the Union-Leader as a political weapon with a reach and ferocity that no single media figure exercises in New Hampshire today.

In 1972, the Republican governor of New Hampshire, Walter Peterson, proposed a modest state income tax to reform the property tax system, with accommodations for local tax relief. It was a reasonable, evidence-based proposal from a sitting Republican governor. Loeb backed a primary challenger — an Orford businessman named Meldrim Thomson, whose slogan was “Ax the Tax” — and used the Union-Leader to pummel Peterson and his family with front-page editorials until Thomson won the primary and went on to win the general election.

The lesson was absorbed immediately and completely by every politician who watched it happen: opposing a broad-based tax was survival. Supporting one was political death.

Thomson served three terms, from 1973 to 1979. During that time, the anti-tax pledge became a political sacrament — the first question asked of every gubernatorial candidate, the litmus test above all others. Thanks to the fierce advocacy of Thomson and Loeb, the pledge became a central part of New Hampshire’s political lexicon — and today it is expected that top Republicans will take the pledge and use it as a cudgel against Democrats whenever they can.

Both men are long gone. What is amazing, as one New Hampshire journalist noted, is that “the ghost of Mel and Bill is still so present today.”

Part Two: How a Republican Pledge Became a Democratic Straitjacket

Here is the part of this story that most surprises people who haven’t followed New Hampshire politics closely: The Pledge was originally a Republican weapon. It became a Democratic prison because Democrats chose to walk in.

The ritual of taking the pledge began with Republican Governor Wesley Powell, first elected in 1958, and was elevated to a political sacrament by Thomson in the 1970s. For years it was assumed that Republicans took the pledge and Democrats didn’t — and Democratic candidates who refused it and ran on revenue reform lost. Arnie Arnesen, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in 1992, ran on an income tax and didn’t surpass 40 percent of the vote. Mark Fernald, the Democratic nominee in 2002, ran on an income tax and lost to Craig Benson in a rout.

Democrats drew the obvious lesson: don't touch the income tax. And then, one by one, candidates of both parties locked themselves into the same position. Republicans had already embraced it as gospel — John Sununu took it, Judd Gregg took it, Craig Benson took it. But the more telling development was Democrats joining them: Hugh Gallen, who refused to take the pledge in his 1982 re-election bid, lost — a lesson the party never forgot. Jeanne Shaheen took it the first two times she ran. John Lynch took it all four times he ran for governor, and he won all four times.

The result was a political landscape in which both parties were committed to the same revenue structure — one that relied overwhelmingly on property taxes and corporate taxes, with no broad-based alternative. When the Free State-GOP majority began systematically cutting corporate taxes and shifting costs onto property taxpayers, the Democratic response was hamstrung from the start. You cannot credibly argue that the property tax burden is unsustainable and simultaneously refuse to discuss any alternative to it.

When Democrats controlled the governorship and legislature for four years up until the Republican landslide in 2010, they never seriously considered new income or sales taxes, even as the state’s budget deteriorated during the recession. They had the power to change the revenue structure. They chose not to use it. The pledge had become so thoroughly internalized that even a Democratic trifecta wouldn’t touch it.

That is not a political calculation. That is a surrender — waving the white flag on behalf of the working families, fixed-income retirees, and struggling communities who never got a vote on whether to give up.

Part Three: The Mathematics of Failure

Thomas Oppel — the Canaan Democrat and state representative who co-presented the 3-3 Tax Savings Plan with Andru Volinsky in March 2026 — made the electoral argument for breaking the pledge with striking precision, and it deserves to be stated plainly here.

Since 1992, New Hampshire House Democrats have won majorities only four times out of seventeen election years — a .235 batting average. Three of those four majority years coincided with the biggest Democratic wave elections nationally. In the last twenty years, Democrats have averaged 167 seats in the 400-seat House — 34 seats short of a majority. Only once in that period were they able to hold a majority for more than two years.

In every election year in this century in which redistricting control was at stake, Republicans prevailed — drawing maps that helped entrench their advantages for the next decade.

The Democratic establishment’s explanation for this sustained minority status is that taking the pledge is electoral survival — that any hint of income or sales tax support hands Republicans a winning issue. But the evidence doesn’t support that conclusion. The Democrats who took the pledge and won did so in wave years that would have swept almost any Democrat into office. The Democrats who lost did so in environments where the pledge didn’t protect them from other Republican attacks.

What the pledge has consistently done is deprive Democrats of their most powerful counter-argument to the property tax squeeze. When a voter asks “How are you going to pay for schools, healthcare, housing, and childcare?” the pledge-taking Democrat has no answer — because every honest answer involves revenue, and revenue is forbidden. As Oppel himself said of his 2024 campaign experience: “Every voter that I talked to, I would tell them I supported public education, I supported housing, I supported better health care. And the response from every single one of them was, ‘How are you going to pay for it?’”

The revenue gag rule doesn’t protect Democrats from Republican attacks. It disarms Democrats before the fight begins — and then ensures that the Free State-GOP majority can cut, shift, and squeeze without facing a coherent alternative from the opposition. The Free State-GOP continues tightening the financial screws on the majority of New Hampshire taxpayers via escalating property taxes.

Part Four: Who The Current Tax System Actually Protects

Before examining the reaction to the 3-3 proposal, it’s worth stepping back to ask the question Oppel and Volinsky are really raising — not “should New Hampshire have an income tax?” but “who benefits from the current system, and who pays for it?”

The data is unambiguous and it has been available for years. The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy documents it clearly: the wealthiest 1 percent of New Hampshire families — those with incomes above $700,000 — pay just 2.6 percent of their income in taxes. Those with family incomes below $35,000 — the bottom 20 percent — pay more than three times as much, nearly 9 percent.

Read that again. The poorest New Hampshire residents pay nearly nine cents of every dollar they earn in state and local taxes. The wealthiest pay less than three cents. That is not a low-tax state. That is a state that has structured its taxes to fall most heavily on those least able to pay.

The Free State-GOP legislative majority has, over the past decade, cut the Business Profits Tax, the Business Enterprise Tax, and eliminated the Interest and Dividends Tax entirely — cuts that disproportionately benefited corporations and the wealthiest investors — while the resulting revenue gap was filled by higher property taxes paid by everyone else. You and me!

The “New Hampshire Advantage” — the brand built on no income tax and no sales tax — is, in practice, an advantage primarily for the people who have significant income and investments to shelter. For the working family paying property taxes on a modest home, or the retiree on a fixed income watching their tax bill rise while their income doesn’t, or the renter absorbing property tax increases through their rent, the “advantage” is largely invisible. What is visible is the bill.

As Volinsky himself has noted, New Hampshire has attracted many older and wealthier residents specifically because they can avoid paying taxes on their investment income — income that was taxed until the Interest and Dividends Tax was repealed in 2025. The state has been deliberately marketed to people who want to minimize their tax burden, and the resulting political constituency has a powerful interest in keeping the current system exactly as it is. They vote. They donate. They show up.

The people most harmed by the current system — working families, fixed-income retirees, young residents priced out of housing by property tax-inflated costs — are the ones the pledge was supposedly protecting from the burden of a new tax. In reality, they are already paying the highest effective tax rate in the state. They just don’t know it, because the mechanism is a property tax bill rather than a line on an income tax return.

Part Five: The Firestorm — and What It Revealed

On March 3, 2026, Andru Volinsky and Rep. Thomas Oppel stood on the State House steps in Concord and unveiled the 3-3 Tax Savings Plan: a 3 percent income tax combined with a $3 per $1,000 statewide property tax, designed to raise $2 billion annually for the Education Trust Fund. The plan would fund $10,000 per pupil in base adequacy payments — up from the current $4,266 — and $25,000 per pupil for special education services — up from the current $2,185. The goal, explicitly stated, was to dramatically reduce local property taxes by shifting education funding to a broader, fairer revenue base.

The reaction was immediate, unanimous, and revealing.

From Republicans: Governor Ayotte posted on X: “No income tax, no sales tax. Not now, not EVER!” Free Stater House Majority Leader Jason Osborne released a statement saying “Let me be perfectly clear: The ‘3-3 Plan’ is a billion-dollar income tax. The House Republicans’ answer to an income tax has not changed. Our answer is still HELL NO.” Let the majority of property taxpayers continue to eat moldy cake.

That was expected. What followed was not.

From Democrats: Cinde Warmington, the leading Democratic candidate for governor, said “No income tax. No sales tax. No raising taxes on working families.” House Democratic Leader Alexis Simpson said “New Hampshire House Democrats will not support an income tax. House Democrats are fighting every day for our Fair Chance Agenda, and an income tax has not and will not be considered.” Deputy House Democratic Leader Laura Telerski, asked about the Republican rejection, responded: “Rep. Osborne and I don’t agree on much, but we agree on this.” The state Senate Democratic caucus also rejected the proposal.

In other words: every Democratic leader in New Hampshire’s legislature, and the leading Democratic gubernatorial candidate, took the same position as the Free State-GOP majority on the most fundamental fiscal question facing the state. Not a modified position. Not a “let’s study it” position. The same position, delivered with the same certainty, sometimes in the same language.

The revenue gag rule was in full effect. And the ghost of Bill Loeb smiled.

Part Six: The Death Threat Nobody Talked About

What happened next deserves its own section — because it reveals something about the current state of New Hampshire politics that goes beyond fiscal policy into something more alarming.

The New Hampshire Libertarian Party posted on X — to an account with more than 100,000 followers — that under libertarian ethical theory, “it is perfectly permissible to kill” Andru Volinsky for proposing the income tax plan.

“It’s reprehensible. It’s an effort to shut me up,” Volinsky said. He noted that he couldn’t identify which of the account’s followers might act on the threat, and that the situation was especially frightening because he lives in a rural area and does not own a gun.

WBUR reached out repeatedly to Governor Ayotte’s office for comment on the death threats. The office did not respond. The political calculus behind the silence, as one Democratic congressional candidate explained, was straightforward: Ayotte and other leaders were reluctant to condemn the death threats against Volinsky because they might be accused of supporting his income tax plan. Such, WBUR noted, is the power of The Pledge.

This was not the first time the NH Libertarian Party had been investigated for violent rhetoric. The FBI looked into allegations in 2024 that the party posted that “anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero.”

The Free State connection here is not incidental — it is direct and documented. The Libertarian Party of New Hampshire’s X account that posted the death threat is controlled by Jeremy Kauffman, the Free State Project’s own former executive director. This is not an ideological overlap. It is the same organization, the same people, and the same agenda operating through a different nameplate. House Majority Leader Jason Osborne — the man who said “HELL NO” to the 3-3 plan in a formal caucus statement — is himself affiliated with the same libertarian movement. Veteran State House journalist Garry Rayno reported that at an after-conference party for the Free State’s Liberty Forum, Kauffman announced a new club — backed by a very wealthy individual — being formed to promote Free State tenets, and that Osborne was already on board.

Governor Ayotte’s silence on the Volinsky death threat was not an isolated failure of courage. It was part of a pattern. As of this writing, Ayotte has also said nothing about threatening social media posts from a Republican state representative targeting two female Democratic colleagues — one Jewish, one a naturalized citizen from the Philippines. The silence is consistent and it is telling. When a governor will condemn a tax proposal in all-caps but cannot find words to condemn a death threat made against a citizen for making that proposal, the message to every New Hampshire resident is unmistakable: the protection of The Pledge matters more than the protection of people.

When a major political party in a state legislature issues a death threat against a citizen for proposing a tax policy, and the governor of that state refuses to condemn it, the revenue gag rule has metastasized into something beyond political calculation. It has become a tool of intimidation.

That is not democracy. That is a protection racket.

Part Seven: The Constitutional Trap Being Built

The Free State-GOP majority did not stop at condemning the 3-3 plan. They moved immediately to make any future revenue discussion even more constitutionally difficult.

The New Hampshire Senate passed, 16-8, a proposed constitutional amendment — CACR 12 — that would require a two-thirds supermajority vote in each chamber of the legislature to enact any broad-based taxes. The House considered going further, proposing an outright constitutional ban on an income tax. On March 5, the House voted 194-158 in favor of an anti-income tax constitutional amendment — but the vote fell short of the three-fifths majority required to place it on the statewide ballot.

The intent is unmistakable. Having captured the legislature, reshaped the Supreme Court, and intimidated the political opposition into self-silencing on the revenue question, the Free State-GOP majority is now attempting to write The Pledge into the state constitution — permanently locking in the current tax structure regardless of who wins future elections.

If they succeed, the trap closes permanently — sealed by the same constitution that was supposed to protect the people now trapped inside it. The $3 billion downshift stays on property taxpayers forever. The education funding crisis stays on property taxpayers forever. The special education gap stays on property taxpayers forever. And any future legislature that tries to address it would need a two-thirds supermajority — a threshold designed to be unreachable.

This is the final piece of the architecture. The Dillon’s Rule structure concentrates power in Concord. The Free State-GOP majority captured Concord. The Supreme Court reshaping removed judicial oversight. The revenue gag rule silenced the political opposition. And the constitutional amendment would make the entire arrangement permanent.

It is, as we said at the outset of this series, a plan published openly in 2001. They told you exactly what they were going to do. They have been doing it ever since.

Part Eight: The Question The Gag Rule Won’t Let Anyone Ask

We want to be clear about what this piece is and is not saying.

We are not endorsing the 3-3 Tax Savings Plan, or any other specific tax proposal. The merits of any particular revenue approach — its rates, its structure, its distributional effects, its likelihood of actually reducing property taxes — are legitimate subjects of debate and deserve careful, evidence-based analysis. Reasonable people can and do disagree about the best way to fund public services.

What we are saying is something different and more fundamental: the refusal to have that debate at all — the revenue gag rule that treats any discussion of the revenue structure as politically radioactive — is itself a political choice with real consequences. And those consequences fall almost entirely on the people with the least power to absorb them.

The question that the gag rule will not allow to be asked is not “should New Hampshire have an income tax?” It is: why does the bottom 20 percent of New Hampshire earners pay three times the effective tax rate of the top 1 percent, and is that just?

That question has nothing to do with The Pledge. It has everything to do with the kind of state New Hampshire wants to be. And it is the question that the Free State-GOP majority, and the Democratic leaders who have accepted their framing, are most determined to prevent from being answered.

Because if ordinary New Hampshire residents — the working families, the fixed-income retirees, the renters, the people being slowly priced out of communities they built — fully understood not just that the system is failing them, but why, and who benefits from keeping it exactly as it is, the political landscape would look very different.

The revenue gag rule exists to prevent that understanding from taking hold. The Pledge exists to make sure that even the political opposition can’t offer an alternative.

The trap is not complete until both parties are inside it. In New Hampshire, they are.

Part Nine: The Question Nobody Will Answer

There is a deeper frustration underlying all of this that New Hampshire’s political class — of both parties — has been remarkably slow to recognize. Voters are not simply asking candidates to be against things. They are asking, with increasing urgency and decreasing patience: What exactly can you do to make my life better that isn’t already being done?

That is not an unreasonable question. It is, in fact, the only question that ultimately matters in a democracy. And it is the question that the revenue gag rule makes impossible to answer honestly.

A candidate who cannot discuss revenue cannot explain how they will fund the schools that are cutting programs. They cannot explain how they will address the property tax bills that are forcing retirees out of their homes. They cannot explain how they will rebuild the childcare infrastructure that is keeping parents out of the workforce. They can only explain what they are against — and voters, understandably, are exhausted by what candidates are against.

The Free State-GOP majority has understood this asymmetry perfectly. They offer a simple, coherent answer to “what will you do for me?” — cut taxes, reduce government, get out of the way. It is the wrong answer for the ninety-five percent of New Hampshire residents who depend on functional public services. But it is an answer. And in the absence of a credible counter-offer from the opposition — one that honestly addresses how public services get funded — the wrong answer wins by default.

Breaking the revenue gag rule is not just a matter of fiscal honesty. It is the prerequisite for offering voters the thing they are most hungry for: a candidate who will look them in the eye and say, specifically and concretely, here is what I will do, here is how I will pay for it, and here is why it will make your life better.

Until that candidate exists in sufficient numbers to matter in New Hampshire, the trap remains closed.

Part Ten: Breaking the Spell

History suggests that political silences of this kind are eventually broken — not by political calculation but by the accumulated weight of consequences becoming undeniable.

New Hampshire has come close to adopting a broad-based tax many times over the past century — in the 1930s, the 1960s, the 1970s, and the early 2000s. Each time, the moment passed. Each time, the pledge reasserted itself. Each time, the property tax carried more of the load.

But the conditions that made The Pledge sustainable are changing. When Meldrim Thomson took office in 1973, New Hampshire was a different state — smaller, more rural, with a more modest property tax burden and a less severe education funding crisis. The system was inequitable then, but its costs were manageable enough that the political fiction of “no broad-based taxes” could be maintained without too much obvious damage.

The $3 billion in downshifted costs, the 48 percent increase in property taxes since 2016, the 61 percent reliance on property taxes that exceeds every other state in the nation, the gutting of special education funding, the collapse of public higher education, the childcare crisis, the Supreme Court ordered to reverse the constitutional obligation to fund schools — these are not abstractions. They are the accumulated consequences of fifty years of refusing to ask the question that most needed asking.

Volinsky, for his part, is undeterred. “You can keep or reverse Claremont,” he said, “but the problem of overreliance on the property tax remains.” He is correct. The problem doesn’t go away because politicians refuse to discuss it. It compounds.

The question for New Hampshire voters — particularly those being slowly crushed by the system The Pledge protects — is whether they will continue to accept the terms of a debate designed by the people who benefit most from keeping it exactly where it is. Whether they will continue to tolerate a political opposition that has accepted those terms on their behalf without asking permission.

And whether, when they finally demand an answer to “How are we going to pay for this?” — the schools, the roads, the childcare, the services that make a community worth living in — they will accept “we can’t talk about that” as a satisfactory response.

The crime is perfect only as long as the victims don’t know who committed it. The revenue gag rule is the mechanism that keeps them from finding out.

The Quiet Cost covers the hidden economic and social costs borne by ordinary people when policy protects profit over people. This is the fourth in our New Hampshire series. The four pieces are designed to be read together and in order: the data center story shows the corporate capture of a single regulatory process; the Dillon’s Rule piece explains the legal architecture that makes capture possible; The Perfect Crime documents how the resulting costs are shifted onto property taxpayers while misdirecting their anger; and this piece explains why the political opposition has been unable to mount an effective response. Together, they describe a complete system — not a series of unrelated policy failures, but an architecture of power built deliberately, patiently, and openly over twenty-five years. The question now is whether enough New Hampshire residents understand what they’re living inside to begin dismantling it.

About sources and drafting methods →

Picture this scene. It plays out in towns across New Hampshire every spring, in school gymnasiums and town halls, at deliberative sessions and budget committee meetings.

A school board member stands at a microphone and explains, carefully and apologetically, why the budget has to go up again. Property taxes are already painful. People are struggling. And yet — special education costs are rising. Health insurance for staff is up. State funding is down. There’s no room left to cut without cutting teachers, programs, or services that children depend on.

And then the questions start. Why can’t you do more with less? Why does the administration keep growing? Why are we always paying more and getting less? The school board member absorbs it all. They’re a neighbor, probably a volunteer, almost certainly not getting paid enough for what they’re doing. They answer as best they can. Some of the audience is sympathetic. Others are furious. And then there are the ones who aren’t there at all — too financially exhausted to attend, working a second job just to come close to making ends meet, their absence as telling as anything said in that room.

Nobody in that room is talking about Concord.

That is not an accident. It is the plan working exactly as designed — a plan the Free State Project published openly in 2001, that the Republican-Free Stater majority in Concord has spent two decades executing, and that is now entering its most consequential phase.

Part One: The $3 Billion Confession

Let’s start with a number that should be on the front page of every newspaper in New Hampshire but has barely registered beyond municipal finance circles.

Over the past decade, the State of New Hampshire has reduced or eliminated multiple categories of state funding for local governments, effectively transferring an estimated $3 billion in costs to municipalities, school districts, and counties. That figure comes not from a progressive advocacy group or a Democratic campaign committee. It comes from a December 2025 memo by Jack Wozmak, the County Treasurer of Cheshire County, presented to the County and State Finance Commission — and published by the New Hampshire Municipal Association.

The conclusion of that analysis is even more explosive than the number itself.

Without the $3 billion state downshift, the total statewide property tax levy today would be lower than it was ten years ago. Every dollar of property tax increase over the past decade — every single one — is attributable to the state shifting its costs onto local communities. Local governments have actually been cutting their own spending to offset an even larger burden being quietly placed on them by Concord.

Read that one more time, because it matters enormously: your property taxes didn’t go up because your town overspent. They went up because the state stopped paying its share — and made sure you’d blame your town.

Part Two: The Numbers That Tell the Story

The statewide data is damning on its own. Local property taxes increased $1.52 billion — nearly 48 percent — from 2016 to 2025, rising to $4.73 billion statewide. New Hampshire now has the sixth highest effective real estate tax rate in the country. And here is the statistic that should stop every Granite Stater cold: the percentage of total local public revenue coming from property taxes in New Hampshire, at 61 percent, is higher than in any other state in the nation.

Not second highest. Highest. In the country.

New Hampshire’s reliance on property taxes to fund local services exceeds Connecticut, New Jersey, Maine, and Rhode Island — states that are routinely held up as examples of high-tax governance. The difference is that those states have income taxes and sales taxes to spread the burden. New Hampshire has neither. It has property taxes — and a state government that has spent a decade making sure those taxes carry more and more of the load.

The impact falls hardest on those least able to absorb it. Low-income families in New Hampshire pay nearly three times the share of their income toward property taxes compared with high earners — 5.9 percent versus 2 percent. Property taxes are, by their nature, regressive. In New Hampshire, where they dominate the entire revenue structure, that regressivity is amplified to a degree found nowhere else in America.

The annual tax bill for a $500,000 home ranges from as low as $1,310 in some communities to as high as $18,270 in others, depending on where you live. That spread is not random. It directly reflects which communities have been most abandoned by state funding — the property-poor towns, the rural districts, the places without a commercial tax base to cushion the blow, where residents must set dramatically higher tax rates just to fund the same basic services.

Part Three: Where the Money Went — and Where It Didn’t

Understanding the squeeze requires understanding what the state cut, what it kept, and crucially, what it chose to fund instead.

What the state cut:

The downshifting has been methodical and relentless. Cheshire County Administrator Chris Coates documented it plainly in January 2026: lawmakers have balanced the state budget by “reducing aid, altering funding formulas, or stepping away from long-standing financial commitments to local governments.” The specific line items tell the story.

The state eliminated its 35 percent revenue sharing contribution to municipal employee retirement costs — a commitment it had honored for years. It reduced highway and bridge aid below the level needed to keep pace with inflation. It cut State Aid Grants for municipal water and wastewater infrastructure so severely that, after Executive Order cuts in 2008, no payments were made for three budget cycles, leaving towns holding bond debt with no state reimbursement. It reduced its share of Medicaid nursing home costs, shifting the burden to county governments, which in turn shifted it to county property tax levies. State aid to local governments, which had already been declining, has continued its fall — leaving New Hampshire ranked 48th among all 50 states in per-person aid provided to local governments.

And in education — the single largest driver of local property taxes — the state has made its choices with particular clarity. New Hampshire currently funds the lowest share of public education costs of any state in the country. Seventy percent of all public education funding in New Hampshire comes from local property taxes. The state’s base adequacy payment — the constitutional floor for per-pupil funding — remained at roughly $4,200 per student for years, even as the Supreme Court ruled last summer that this amount was unconstitutionally low and ordered it nearly doubled.

The Free State-GOP legislature’s response? Republican-Free Stater lawmakers openly declared they would not comply. And then the Attorney General — serving under a governor who has reshaped the court with two aligned appointments — asked the Supreme Court to overturn the thirty-year-old rulings that established the constitutional obligation in the first place.

Special education funding has become its own crisis within the crisis. In 2024, local property taxes funded 83.35 percent of special education costs in New Hampshire — costs the federal government is legally required to help cover but chronically underfunds. When Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975, it promised to cover 40 percent of special education costs. Fifty years later, it delivers less than 13 percent. New Hampshire received $61.7 million in federal IDEA funding in 2024 — but was shortchanged $92.2 million from what the law intended. The state has compounded that federal failure with underfunding of its own, leaving local property taxpayers to absorb what Washington and Concord both refuse to pay. As recently as 2024, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 70 out of 176 school districts spent more than 25 percent of their entire budget on special education — up from 60 districts the year before. Given that special education costs are rising at more than three times the rate of general education expenses, that number is certainly higher today. That squeeze doesn’t just affect students with disabilities — it crowds out funding for general education, teacher salaries, building maintenance, and every enrichment activity that makes a school worth attending.

While cutting aid to municipalities and underfunding public education, the Free State-GOP legislative majority has simultaneously:

The Free State-GOP legislative majority cut the Business Profits Tax, the Business Enterprise Tax, and repealed the Interest and Dividends Tax entirely — reducing state revenue by tens of millions of dollars per biennium while disproportionately benefiting corporations and wealthy investors. As one school official told the Concord Monitor in March 2026: “We have had a lot of tax cuts in the past couple years in the state for out of state corporations and wealthy investors. The only tax that almost everybody in the state pays and that hits small businesses the most, and regular working people the most, is the property tax. And that’s the one that all the cost keeps getting shifted onto.”

The Free State-GOP majority expanded the Education Freedom Account voucher program from a modest initiative serving low-income families to a universal entitlement available to every New Hampshire family regardless of income — a founding goal of the Free State Project’s education agenda. Governor Ayotte signed the income cap removal in June 2025, making New Hampshire the 19th state with universal school vouchers. The program now enrolls 10,510 students at a cost of $51.6 million this school year — nearly double last year’s cost. Projections suggest costs could reach $102 million annually as the program continues to expand automatically under its own built-in growth provisions.

Here is the detail that deserves its own paragraph: 96.7 percent of EFA recipients were already in private or home school programs before they enrolled. The voucher program is not, in practice, rescuing children from failing schools. It is subsidizing choices that families had already made, with property taxpayer money, while the public schools those families left behind struggle with reduced enrollment, reduced state funding, and rising costs.

Every dollar that flows to the voucher program is a dollar that does not flow into the Education Trust Fund that supports public schools. The Senate explicitly acknowledged this trade-off in 2025, when it rolled back a proposed $30 million increase in special education funding — an amount that would have helped 31,469 students with disabilities — by approximately the same amount it approved for voucher expansion. The choice was made. The priorities were stated in the numbers.

And in the most recent state budget: every state department faced cuts. Except school vouchers.

Part Four: The Misdirection — And Why It Works

Now we return to that school gymnasium. The board member at the microphone. The frustrated taxpayers asking why costs keep rising.

Here is what most of those taxpayers don’t know — and what the architects of this system are counting on them not to know:

The school board didn’t cause this. The teachers didn’t cause this. The administrators, the librarians, the special education coordinators, the town selectmen, the budget committee members — they are managing a crisis that was created for them, in Concord, over the course of two decades, by people whose names most of their constituents couldn’t tell you.

The mechanism of misdirection is elegantly simple. When the state cuts funding, it doesn’t announce “we are cutting funding to your town’s schools.” It adjusts a formula. It changes a reimbursement rate. It allows a program to expire. It doesn’t restore revenue sharing when revenues recover. The cuts are technical, buried in budget documents, reported on by a handful of Statehouse journalists whose work reaches a fraction of the residents most affected.

But when the local property tax bill arrives — and it does arrive, in every mailbox, with the full dollar amount clearly stated — the anger is immediate and local. The school board held a meeting last Tuesday. The selectmen approved a budget last month. Those are the faces voters know. Those are the people they see at the grocery store. Those are the targets.

Rep. Ken Weyler, chairman of the House Finance Committee and one of the most powerful fiscal voices in the Free State-aligned Republican majority, described the strategy with remarkable candor in February 2026, while urging fellow Republicans to pursue school district consolidation even if the bill didn’t pass immediately. “Change is difficult,” he said. “I’ve watched it happen in this legislature for 36 years. At first they say ‘Ah, you’re crazy!’ Finally, after about five attempts, ‘yeah I voted for that before,’ and it passes.”

Five attempts. Thirty-six years. Patience built into the strategy from the beginning.

The Free State Project’s founders understood this perfectly. Their 2001 plan did not call for storming town halls and eliminating school budgets by force. It called for capturing the legislature, cutting state funding, and letting the resulting pressure at the local level do the rest. That plan is now being executed by the Free State-GOP majority that controls Concord. When residents, squeezed beyond endurance, finally vote to cut their own school budgets — as voters in Jaffrey-Rindge did in 2025, cutting $3 million from the district budget in a display of frustration with property taxes that local officials called “devastating” — the Free State-GOP legislators in Concord can point to it as proof that taxpayers want less government.

They don’t want less government. They want government they can afford. And the reason they can’t afford it is that the state stopped paying its share.

Part Five: The Compounding Crises

The downshifting doesn’t operate in isolation. It compounds with other forces that the state has either created or failed to address:

The voucher drain removes money from the Education Trust Fund continuously, while public schools — which serve nearly 90 percent of New Hampshire students — absorb rising costs with a shrinking revenue base. The phase-out grants that briefly helped public schools when students left for vouchers ended in 2026. The stabilization funding is gone. The money leaves. The costs don’t. Your property tax bill does not go lower.

The higher education collapse ranks New Hampshire last in the nation for public university funding — dead last, at $4,629 per full-time student versus a national average of $11,683. The newly approved state budget cut funding for Keene State, Plymouth State, and UNH by 17.6 percent. The result is predictable: tuition rises, access falls, young people leave the state or take on debt that follows them for decades. The workforce the economy needs doesn’t materialize. The towns that depended on those institutions to anchor their regional economies feel the absence.

The childcare crisis adds another layer. New Hampshire’s licensed childcare capacity dropped almost 13 percent between 2017 and 2023, with an average annual shortage of roughly 9,107 slots. The state loses between $9 million and $14.1 million in potential tax revenue each year because parents can’t find childcare and can’t work. On May 6, 2026, Republican Executive Councilor David Wheeler tabled $1.2 million in professional development funding for the Granite Steps for Quality program — an extension of an existing contract with the Pyramid Model Consortium that has served 9,500 childcare professionals across 719 licensed programs statewide since its establishment in 2017, originally funded through the Endowment for Health and subsequently supported through state and federal childcare block grant funds. Wheeler’s stated reason: the Pyramid Model Consortium lists diversity, equity, and inclusion among its strategic priorities. The state’s own HHS Associate Commissioner explained that the “inclusion language” in question referred specifically to equal access to childcare for children with disabilities — in her words, “equal access to childcare for all children.” Wheeler tabled it anyway. This context matters: Governor Ayotte’s own anti-DEI law, signed in June 2025, was subsequently blocked by a federal court which found it so broadly written that it violated federal disability law — specifically because IDEA requires the very inclusion practices the law sought to ban. The Executive Council had that ruling in hand. The state’s own Department of Health and Human Services warned the decision would result in “lower quality care for children and families.” None of it changed the outcome.

The federal withdrawal adds a third squeeze to the pincer. Federal funding for education, childcare, healthcare, and infrastructure — programs that New Hampshire communities have built their budgets around — is under unprecedented pressure from Washington. Local governments in New Hampshire receive about a quarter of their revenue from the state. The state, in turn, receives significant federal transfers. When federal dollars shrink, the pressure flows downward: to the state, to the counties, to the towns, and finally to the property tax bill.

Part Six: The Caps — Completing the Trap

Here is where the strategy reaches its most complete expression — and where its true purpose becomes impossible to misread.

Having created the conditions for rising property taxes by systematically withdrawing state funding, the Republican-Free Stater legislative majority then proposed to cap what local governments could spend in response.

The mandatory school district budget cap bill — one of the Free State-GOP leadership’s top legislative priorities for 2026 — would have limited school district spending increases to the five-year rolling average of the Consumer Price Index, regardless of actual cost increases in special education, health insurance, or any other line item. Analysis by Reaching Higher NH found the cap “would actually reduce funding for most school districts, even before accounting for inflation, over the next five years.”

In seven school districts where voters were given the chance to voluntarily adopt spending caps in 2025 — the mechanism the Free State-GOP majority had created for exactly this purpose — every single measure failed. Voters, given the actual choice, said no.

The Free State-GOP legislative majority responded to this democratic verdict by attempting to impose the caps by state law anyway. The bill ultimately collapsed in a chaotic House floor session in January 2026, when 22 Republicans broke with their party and joined Democrats to defeat it — but only after a new version requiring cities and towns to vote every two years on whether to impose a tax cap had already been introduced to replace it.

The pattern is clear and it is relentless. The Free State-GOP majority withdraws state funding. Property taxes rise. Residents grow angry — at their school boards, their selectmen, their local officials. The same majority then proposes caps that would force local cuts. When residents reject the caps voluntarily, the majority tries to impose them by law. The goal — the original Free State Project goal, articulated in 2001, now carried forward by its legislative allies — is to slash government. Not by asking people to vote for slashing government. By engineering conditions that make slashing government feel like the only option left.

Part Seven: The Real Targets

The people absorbing the greatest damage from this engineered squeeze are not abstractions. They are your neighbors.

Older residents on fixed incomes who own their homes outright face property tax bills that rise regardless of their ability to pay. In New Hampshire, where property tax is the dominant revenue instrument and there is no circuit breaker program strong enough to protect the most vulnerable, rising taxes can force people out of homes they have owned for decades.

Working families face a double burden: rising property taxes on homes they’re still paying mortgages on, and rising costs for the services — schools, childcare, roads — that make it possible to work and raise children.

Renters bear the costs invisibly. Landlords pass property tax increases through to rent. The renter who has never owned property, who doesn't receive a tax bill, who may never connect their rising rent to a property tax levy set at town meeting, still pays — in every rent check, in every lease renewal, with no tax deduction and no direct line of sight to the budget decisions driving the cost.

Students with disabilities and their families navigate a system where the legal guarantee of a free and appropriate education runs directly into a funding structure that covers barely 16 percent of what those services actually cost. The remaining 84 percent falls on local property taxes — or falls through the cracks entirely.

Young people inherit a state where public higher education is the most underfunded in the nation, where housing costs have been driven up in part by property tax burdens, where the economic infrastructure — childcare, schools, public services — has been gradually hollowed out. Many of them leave. The demographic data shows it.

And here is the final, bitter irony: the communities that suffer most from this system are the ones that "Live Free or Die" — a motto we now know is little more than a hollow slogan — was supposedly designed to protect. Rural towns. Working communities. Places without a commercial tax base to cushion the blow. The property-rich towns — the ones with lakefront estates and second-home wealth and commercial corridors — can absorb the state's withdrawal. Their tax rates are low enough that even after downshifting, the bills remain manageable.

It is the towns without that cushion that are being slowly broken. And the people being driven out first are the elderly, the fixed-income, the working families — the people whose presence defines the character of a New Hampshire community.

What You Can Do About It — Right Now

The first step is the simplest and the most powerful: name the source of the problem correctly.

When your property tax bill goes up, the question to ask is not “why is the school board spending so much?” The question is: “What did the state cut, and who voted for it?”

When the school board proposes a budget that raises taxes, the question to ask is not “why can’t they do more with less?” The question is: “How much of this increase is state-mandated cost that the state no longer helps pay for?”

When a politician tells you property taxes are out of control, the question to ask is: “What did you vote for in the state budget that contributed to this? Did you vote to cut the Business Profits Tax while cutting education aid? Did you vote to expand the voucher program while blocking special education funding?”

Those questions have answers. Public records exist. Voting records are available. The NH Fiscal Policy Institute, the NH School Funding Fairness Project, Reaching Higher NH, and the NH Municipal Association have documented the downshifting in detail. The receipts are there for anyone who looks.

The second step is to show up where the decisions are actually made. Town meeting matters. School district deliberative sessions matter. But the state budget — the document that determines how much aid flows to your town, your school, your county — is written in Concord, by people you elected, in sessions that receive a fraction of the public attention their consequences deserve.

Your state representative votes on that budget. Every biennium. Your state senator votes on it. Their votes determine whether the state pays its share or shifts the cost to your property tax bill. Those votes are the most consequential fiscal decisions affecting your daily life that you probably never pay attention to.

The third step is to share this information with the people around you who are absorbing the costs without understanding their source — the retiree furious about their tax bill, the parent angry at the school board, the renter who doesn’t know why their rent keeps rising. They’re not wrong to be angry. They’re just pointing at the wrong people.

The crime is perfect only as long as the victims don’t know who committed it.

READER RESOURCE: How to Check Your Legislator’s Free State-GOP Alignment

New Hampshire residents have access to two publicly available tools that show exactly how aligned your state representative or senator is with the Free State-GOP agenda described in this piece.

The Gold Standard is a vote recommendation newsletter published by the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance (NHLA) — an organization the Free State Project helped create. It is distributed to every state house and senate member before votes on legislation, telling them how to vote on each bill. It is, in plain terms, a legislative instruction sheet handed to your elected representatives as they walk into session.

The Liberty Rating is the NHLA’s annual report card, scoring every legislator based on how closely their actual votes followed those recommendations. Scores are expressed as a percentage and letter grade — from A+ (voted with the NHLA 97 percent of the time or more) to F (consistent opposition) to the most pointed designation of all: “Constitutional Threat.”

The 2025 Liberty Rating — the most recent available — scored all 400 House members and all 24 senators. Eighteen House representatives earned A+ ratings. Thirty-seven were designated a Constitutional Threat.

You can look up your own representative’s score here: 🔗 nhliberty.org/liberty-ratings

If your representative scores an A or above, you now know exactly whose agenda they are serving — and it was published openly, in 2001, before many of them ever set foot in New Hampshire.

The Quiet Cost covers the hidden economic and social costs borne by ordinary people when policy protects profit over people. This is the third in our New Hampshire series. Read our first piece on the gutting of data center protections under Senate Bill 439, and our second piece on Dillon’s Rule, the Free State Project, and the capture of New Hampshire’s legislature, governor, and Supreme Court. The three pieces are designed to be read together: the data center story is one symptom, Dillon’s Rule is the diagnosis, and this piece is the prognosis — what happens to ordinary people when the system runs its course.

About sources and drafting methods →

Here’s a civics question most New Hampshire residents couldn’t answer: How much actual, legal authority does your town have to govern itself?

The answer, for most of the state’s history, has been: exactly as much as the legislature in Concord decides to allow. Not one inch more.

New Hampshire has built an entire political identity — a brand, really — on the romance of local independence. Town meetings. Rugged self-determination. “Live Free or Die.” The idea that government works best when it’s closest to the people, and that Granite Staters don’t need Concord, let alone Washington, telling them what to do.

It’s a beautiful story. It’s also, legally speaking, largely a fiction.

And over the past two decades, a small, organized, and remarkably candid political movement has been systematically exploiting that fiction — at the direct expense of the average New Hampshire resident who never noticed it happening.

But it’s no longer just the legislature. As of 2026, the triangle of power is complete: the legislature, the governor, and now the Supreme Court itself are aligned. The last backstop — the one institution that could say “no” to Concord even when Concord controls everything else — has been methodically reshaped. And the consequences are already landing on New Hampshire’s property taxpayers, its schoolchildren, and its communities.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It was a published plan. And they told you exactly what they were going to do.

Part One: The Legal Fine Print Nobody Reads

In 1868, an Iowa judge named John Dillon issued a ruling that established a principle still governing most American states: municipalities — your city, your town, your village — are “creatures of the state.” They exist because the state legislature created them, and they have only the powers the state explicitly grants. If the legislature is silent on something, the town cannot act. If the legislature takes a power away, it’s gone. The state is supreme.

This is called Dillon’s Rule, and New Hampshire is one of its firmest adherents.

The alternative — used in Massachusetts and many other states — is called Home Rule. Under Home Rule, towns and cities have broad, inherent authority to govern themselves on local matters, and the state must explicitly prohibit something before towns lose the right to act. The presumption runs in favor of local power, not against it.

New Hampshire has never been a Home Rule state. As the New Hampshire Municipal Association puts it plainly: “Cities and towns have only the powers the legislature has expressly given them. All municipal authority must find its basis in some state law.” And when local ordinances conflict with state law? The state law wins — the local ordinance is preempted and unenforceable.

Former Concord Mayor Martin Gross, who served as legal counsel to the NHMA, summarized the reality without diplomatic softening: “Here, by and large, home rule is a political slogan rather than a legal reality. ‘The state does what it pleases’ is still the legal rule in New Hampshire.”

Read that again. The man whose job was to represent New Hampshire’s cities and towns called local control in this state a slogan, not a legal reality. That was his considered professional opinion. It remains accurate today.

The practical consequence is significant. Under Dillon’s Rule, local officials in New Hampshire must spend considerable time lobbying the state legislature to approve bills granting local authority — and fighting bills that impose new restrictions on them. Every power a town exercises exists because Concord chose to allow it. Every protection a community has can be taken away by a single legislative session. Towns cannot establish their own taxes. They cannot adopt their own criminal codes. They cannot regulate industries the legislature has decided to protect from local oversight.

And in a state where the legislature has been systematically captured by an ideologically aligned majority, that legal structure becomes a weapon.

Part Two: New Hampshire Has Tried to Fix This. Three Times. It Failed.

This isn’t a secret. Civic and legal organizations in New Hampshire have understood the Dillon’s Rule problem for decades and have repeatedly tried to fix it.

Three times in the past 40-plus years, New Hampshire voters have been asked to vote on a proposed amendment to the state Constitution to grant expanded home rule authority to municipalities. The attempts came in 1974, the late 1980s, and most recently in 2000. The proposed 2000 amendment was relatively modest — it would have let towns exercise any power regarding their own affairs that wasn’t explicitly prohibited by state law, while still preserving the state’s right of preemption over municipal powers.

It failed to get the required two-thirds vote.

The bar is deliberately high: constitutional amendments in New Hampshire require a 60% supermajority in the legislature to get on the ballot, and then a two-thirds vote from the public to pass. Which means the people who benefit most from keeping towns weak — the legislature itself — are the same people who control whether meaningful change is even possible.

That structure is not an accident. And it’s about to matter enormously.

Part Three: The Plan That Was Never a Secret

In July 2001, a 24-year-old Yale doctoral student named Jason Sorens published an essay in an online journal called The Libertarian Enterprise. It was blunt, strategic, and breathtakingly transparent about its intentions.

“Libertarian activists need to face a somber reality,” he wrote. “Nothing’s working.”

His solution was as audacious as it was simple. He proposed that “freedom-minded people of all stripes” become residents of a small state, take over the state government, then cut taxes, shrink budgets, scrap regulations, and expand personal freedom. He calculated that 20,000 libertarians, concentrated in a small enough state, could seize effective political control. He called it the Free State Project.

More than 200 readers responded within days. Within months there was a website, a logo, and a Statement of Intent. By 2003, the 5,000 who had enrolled chose New Hampshire from among 10 states. The selection was enthusiastically endorsed by then-Governor Craig Benson, who signed up as a “Friend of FSP.” New Hampshire had been chosen for its small population, its existing libertarian-leaning political culture, and — critically — its Dillon’s Rule legal structure, which meant that capturing the legislature meant capturing everything.

The FSP spelled out what “taking over” would look like in practice. Once they controlled state government, the plan promised: “We can slash state and local budgets, which make up a sizeable proportion of the tax and regulatory burden we face every day. Furthermore, we can eliminate substantial federal interference by refusing to take highway funds and the strings attached to them. Once we’ve accomplished these things, we can bargain with the national government over reducing the role of the national government in our state.”

The original essay even floated the threat of secession as leverage against the federal government — a position Sorens later backed away from after it attracted interest from Confederate loyalists and white supremacists. But the core mission — move in, take over, dismantle — never changed.

This was not a fringe document buried in an obscure archive. It was a published plan, openly distributed, openly celebrated by its authors. They were telling you exactly what they were going to do.

Part Four: The Migration, The Milestones, and the Method

The plan proceeded methodically.

On February 3, 2016, the Free State Project announced that 20,000 people had signed the Statement of Intent, triggering the formal “move.” As of May 2022, approximately 6,232 participants had moved to New Hampshire for the Free State Project. Estimates from more recent reporting place the number between 7,000 and 9,000 movers as of 2025.

But raw numbers never told the whole story. The Free State Project’s strategic genius was targeting the right level of government. “If we had 2,000 solid, committed people that made it their business to get involved,” one FSP leader noted, “we might be at least as powerful as either party, quite possibly both.”

That insight led directly to the New Hampshire House of Representatives — the third largest English-speaking legislative body in the world, with 400 seats spread across 203 districts. Many of those districts are small, low-turnout, and essentially uncontested. Running for a New Hampshire House seat costs almost nothing, requires almost no name recognition, and attracts almost no outside scrutiny. For an organized, motivated minority with a clear ideological agenda and a willingness to move across the country to execute it, it was a perfect target.

In 2014, 17 Free Staters were elected to the NH House. In 2016, 15 of 32 Free Stater candidates won their races. By 2021, the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance — which scores legislators based on their alignment with libertarian principles — rated 150 representatives as “A-minus” or above. That’s more than a third of the entire chamber voting in ideological lock-step.

And the numbers have grown. In 2024, Republicans expanded their House majority to at least 222 seats — a 44-seat margin — while achieving a 16-8 supermajority in the Senate. New Hampshire’s Republican trifecta — governor, House, and Senate all under unified Republican control — has now existed for 15 of the past 34 years, compared to just four years of Democratic trifecta control in the same period.

Veteran State House journalist Garry Rayno of InDepthNH, who has covered New Hampshire politics for three decades, has watched this transformation in real time. “The Free Staters and mega libertarians have taken over the Republican Party in New Hampshire,” he wrote in 2025, “leaving little room for those who were once the party’s stalwarts. Their agenda is leaving a legislative wasteland for the vast majority of people in the state.”

Part Five: The Alliance That Changed Everything

Here is where the story takes its sharpest turn — and where ordinary New Hampshire residents most need to pay attention.

The Free State Project began as a libertarian movement. Its founding philosophy was, in theory, about less government power across the board: fewer taxes, fewer regulations, more individual freedom. It wasn’t explicitly pro-corporate. Early libertarian philosophy was often skeptical of large corporations and their cozy relationships with government.

That purity did not survive contact with money.

As the Free State Project’s influence grew in Concord, it found itself in a strategic alliance with the national Republican Party machinery and its corporate-funded organizational infrastructure. The movement is now fueled by organizations like Young Americans for Liberty, Americans for Prosperity, and ALEC — the American Legislative Exchange Council — whose model legislation is driven by the Heritage Foundation, the same organization that wrote the Project 2025 blueprint being executed simultaneously at the federal level.

ALEC, for those unfamiliar, is a nonprofit that brings together state legislators and corporate representatives to draft model legislation — essentially pre-written bills that member legislators can introduce in their own states. Corporate members include representatives from ExxonMobil, Pfizer, AT&T, Koch Industries, and State Farm Insurance. According to its own reporting, approximately 200 ALEC model bills become law each year across the country.

The bills now passing through the New Hampshire legislature frequently mirror ALEC templates. The House recently passed legislation blocking local governments from preventing their police departments from working with ICE and from establishing sanctuary city policies — both based on ALEC model legislation. The data center bill we covered in our previous piece — stripped of consumer protections, granted “by right” status in commercial and industrial zones, preventing towns from imposing their own safeguards — follows the same playbook.

What began as “Leave us alone, government” has become “Let corporations do whatever they want, and use Dillon’s Rule to prevent local communities from stopping them.” The libertarian promise of individual freedom has been converted, in practice, into corporate freedom — and the people paying the price are the ordinary residents those corporations move into, drain, and leave behind.

Free State Project members running for or holding political office often hide or deny their FSP affiliation from voters and downplay their extreme beliefs when asked. Granite State Progress, which has tracked FSP legislative influence since 2008, consistently documents this pattern. Many FSP-aligned legislators run as plain Republicans in local races, relying on the fact that most voters don’t know — and won’t research — what their state representative actually believes or who funds their campaigns.

Part Six: The Third Branch — And Why It Matters More Than Ever

In a Dillon’s Rule state, the legislature is the dominant branch. But it is not — or was not — the only check that mattered. New Hampshire’s Supreme Court has, over the decades, served as an independent backstop. When the legislature overreached, when towns believed their rights had been illegally stripped, when communities needed a forum for redress, the courts were where that fight happened.

An independent judiciary is the mechanism by which residents can say “you went too far” — even when the legislature controls everything else.

That mechanism is now in serious jeopardy.

Governor Kelly Ayotte, who took office in January 2025, has appointed two justices to the New Hampshire Supreme Court in just over a year — and in doing so has ensured that all five seats on the court are now held by Republican gubernatorial appointees. Her first appointment, Bryan Gould, replaced Justice James Bassett, who retired in August 2025. Her second appointment, Daniel Will, was confirmed by the Executive Council in February 2026 and sworn in on March 4, 2026, replacing Justice Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi, who reached the mandatory retirement age of 70.

The result is stark: as of this writing, all five justices on the New Hampshire Supreme Court are Republican gubernatorial appointees. There is not a single justice on the state’s highest court who was not placed there by a Republican governor.

But the appointments themselves tell only part of the story. The specific replacements matter enormously.

Justice Bassett — whom Gould replaced — had been the author and deciding vote in a landmark 3-2 ruling just last summer ordering the legislature to nearly double the state’s per-pupil education funding to meet its constitutional obligations. That ruling directly threatened the Free State-GOP agenda of slashing state budgets and eliminating court oversight of legislative decisions. Bassett reached mandatory retirement age and stepped down. Ayotte nominated Gould — a private attorney who had previously served as Special Counsel to Governor Craig Benson, the same governor who endorsed the Free State Project in 2003 — to fill the seat.

Gould’s confirmation drew a 4-1 Executive Council vote. The lone dissenting voice, Democratic Councilor Karen Liot Hill, raised concerns about whether his conservative background meant he might rule against school funding precedents.

She was not wrong to ask.

Part Seven: The Claremont Cases — Thirty Years of Precedent, Now Under Attack

To understand what’s at stake with a reshaped Supreme Court, you need to understand the Claremont cases — and why they matter to every property taxpayer in New Hampshire.

In the 1990s, the NH Supreme Court issued two landmark rulings — Claremont I and Claremont II — establishing that the New Hampshire legislature has a constitutional obligation to fund an adequate public education for every child in the state. The court derived this duty from Part II, Article 83 of the New Hampshire Constitution, which states that legislators shall “cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries and public schools.”

For thirty years, those rulings have been the foundation of New Hampshire’s school funding system. They have been litigated, defended, and upheld through dozens of subsequent court cases. More than half a million New Hampshire children have gone through public schools relying on the constitutional framework those decisions created.

New Hampshire currently contributes the lowest share of state money for public education in the country, according to the National Education Association. That chronic underfunding means local property taxes fill the gap — a burden that falls disproportionately on working families and retirees living in communities with lower property values.

Last summer, the Supreme Court — by a 3-2 margin — found that the state’s base adequacy payment was unconstitutionally low and called on the legislature to nearly double it, from roughly $4,200 to at least $7,200 per pupil. Republican lawmakers balked. Some openly declared they would not comply. Legislative leaders characterized the ruling as judicial overreach.

Then Governor Ayotte placed her two new justices on the court — including Gould, who replaced the author of that 3-2 ruling, and Will, who as the state’s former solicitor general had represented the state in education funding cases.

And then, in February 2026 — with the newly shaped court in place — New Hampshire’s Attorney General filed to ask the Supreme Court to overturn the Claremont decisions entirely. Not to modify them. Not to reinterpret them narrowly. To erase thirty years of constitutional precedent that has protected New Hampshire schoolchildren and their communities from the full burden of an underfunded state government.

The filing argues that the amount the state funds its public schools is a “political question” — meaning it belongs exclusively to the legislature, with no role for the courts at all. If the court accepts that argument, the Claremont protections are gone. The legislature could underfund public education to whatever level it chose, and no court could say a word about it.

Zack Sheehan, executive director of the NH School Funding Fairness Project, described the effort plainly: “This is a coordinated and well-thought-out strategy across multiple branches of government. We are taking it very seriously because it’s not happening in a vacuum.”

It is not happening in a vacuum. It is the triangle closing.

The legislature guts regulations and strips local authority. The governor reshapes the court with appointees chosen to align with the legislative agenda. The court — now staffed entirely by Republican appointees — is asked to remove the last constitutional protection ordinary residents had against a legislature that has decided their interests come second.

Former NH Chief Justice Robert Lynn, now a Republican state representative who supports overturning Claremont, offered perhaps the most candid summary of the stakes: the Claremont cases, he said, are “New Hampshire’s version of Roe v. Wade.” He meant it as a road map.

Part Eight: Who Isn’t Noticing — And Why That Was the Plan

There is a particular cruelty to how all of this has unfolded that deserves naming directly.

The residents most harmed by the erosion of local control are the least likely to have tracked what’s been happening. Older residents. Retired residents. People who’ve lived in New Hampshire for decades and built their lives around its character — its lakes, its town meetings, its sense that your community’s decisions actually belong to your community.

These residents remember a New Hampshire where local control felt real, even when it wasn’t legally guaranteed. They remember school boards that reflected their values, zoning decisions made at town meeting, and planning boards that actually had authority to say no to development that didn’t fit. They remember when there was at least a functional pretense of partnership between state and local government.

That New Hampshire hasn’t disappeared entirely. But it is being systematically dismantled, one bill at a time, by a legislature that has been deliberately and patiently reshaped over more than two decades — by people who published their intentions in 2001 and have been executing on them ever since.

The struggle for an informed electorate is real and it is intentional. In the NH House, 400 candidates run in races that get almost no media coverage, attract almost no campaign spending, and are decided by small numbers of voters who often know little about the candidates beyond a name on a yard sign. The entire architecture of the legislature was designed for exactly this kind of low-visibility capture.

Free Stater-aligned legislators frequently run as plain Republicans in local races, relying on the fact that most voters won’t research what their state representative actually believes, who funds their campaigns, or whether they signed a pledge to a political migration organization before they ever moved to New Hampshire. By the time residents notice the effects, the votes have been cast and the damage is done.

Part Nine: The Data Center Bill Is Just the Latest Example

We covered Senate Bill 439 in our previous piece. It bears revisiting briefly here, because it is Dillon’s Rule in action — a living, current demonstration of everything this backgrounder describes.

The bill began as a Democratic proposal with real teeth: noise limits, grid capacity requirements, setback rules, and the preserved right of towns to add their own local safeguards on top of state minimums. The Republican-Free Stater majority gutted it. In its amended form, data centers are permitted “by right” in any commercially or industrially zoned area, and towns are explicitly barred from regulating them more strictly than other businesses.

It doesn’t matter if your town’s aquifer is already stressed. It doesn’t matter if your grid can’t handle the load. It doesn’t matter what the voters of your community decided at town meeting.

Concord has spoken. Under Dillon’s Rule, that ends the conversation.

If a community believes the bill goes too far — if they believe that stripping their authority to protect their own water, grid, and quality of life is unconstitutional — their recourse is the courts. The same courts now staffed entirely by Republican gubernatorial appointees. The same courts being asked simultaneously to eliminate thirty years of constitutional precedent protecting public education. The same courts that will soon decide how much authority, if any, New Hampshire communities retain to govern themselves.

The triangle is not theoretical. It is operational.

Part Ten: What You Can Actually Do About It

Here is the most important sentence in this piece:

New Hampshire House races are decided by dozens of votes. Sometimes fewer.

In 2024, 20 House seats were lost by 200 votes or less. Winning those 20 seats, plus three more, would have created a new majority in the chamber. Four seats were won by fewer than 326 votes. The Free State Project understood this arithmetic in 2001 and has been acting on it for twenty-five years. Most New Hampshire residents have not.

Your state representative is not a minor office. In a Dillon’s Rule state, your state representative is the person who decides how much authority your town actually has. They decide whether local communities can protect their water, their air, their noise levels, their character. They decide whether the next twenty years looks like the last twenty — or whether the demolition continues.

Your governor is not just an administrative figure. In a state without merit-based judicial selection, your governor appoints every Supreme Court justice — the people who will decide whether the legislature’s actions are constitutional, whether your school funding is adequate, and whether communities have any legal recourse when Concord overreaches.

Knowing who your state representative is, what they believe, who funds them, and whether they have Free State Project ties is not a hobby for political junkies. In New Hampshire, it is basic civic self-defense.

Knowing your governor’s judicial philosophy — and understanding that a single two-year term can reshape the state’s highest court for a generation — is equally essential.

The Free State Project told you exactly what they were going to do. They published it in 2001. They chose New Hampshire in 2003. They hit 20,000 signatures in 2016. They’ve been winning House seats, and now Supreme Court seats, ever since.

The question is whether the people who’ve lived here their whole lives — who built this state’s character, who treasure its lakes and its town meetings and its genuine independence — are going to start paying the same attention to state legislative and gubernatorial races that a group of organized outsiders has been paying for a quarter of a century.

Because in a Dillon’s Rule state with a captured legislature, a cooperative governor, and a reshaped Supreme Court, whoever runs Concord runs everything.

Live Free or Die means nothing if you don’t know who’s holding the key.

The Quiet Cost covers the hidden economic and social costs borne by ordinary people when policy protects profit over people. Our previous piece covered Senate Bill 439 and the gutting of data center protections in New Hampshire. These two pieces are designed to be read together — the data center story is the symptom; this is the diagnosis. If this backgrounder was useful, share it widely — and make sure your neighbors know who their state representative and governor actually are, and what they actually believe, before the next election.

About sources and drafting methods →

The Bill with Two Faces

On its surface, House Bill 1300 — branded by its sponsors as the “Property Tax Protection Act” — sounds reasonable enough. Who could be against letting voters weigh in on their property taxes? But beneath the appealing name lies a carefully constructed political maneuver, driven by a specific ideological movement, built on a misleading narrative, and designed to solve a problem the state itself created — without the state having to do anything about it.

To understand HB 1300, you have to understand where it came from, who is pushing it, and what it deliberately leaves out.

The Procedural Sleight of Hand

HB 1300 did not begin life as a property tax bill. It was originally introduced as redistricting legislation — a Republican attempt to redraw New Hampshire’s congressional districts in ways that could help the GOP flip the state’s two U.S. House seats, both currently held by Democrats. That effort went nowhere fast. Governor Kelly Ayotte made clear she would veto any such redistricting attempt.

So Rep. Ross Berry (R-Weare), chairman of the House Election Law Committee, did something telling. He took the dead redistricting bill, gutted it entirely, and replaced it with a new property tax cap mechanism — turning a bill that was going nowhere into a vehicle for a policy that had already been rejected once in more direct form.

Berry was explicit that the procedural maneuver was intentional. “I felt it was very important that we take something that clearly wasn’t politically going to happen, which was redistricting,” he said, “and we turn it into something that the voters care about.”

That phrase deserves a second look. Not “something that will help voters” — “something that voters care about.” It is the language of a political operative repackaging a product, not a legislator solving a problem. Berry’s background is in party infrastructure, not school finance or municipal budgeting. He served as executive director of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee and as a GOP data director. He knows how to build a vehicle. What he has built here is the third iteration of the same policy the legislature has already rejected twice — this time wrapped in the one thing guaranteed to get attention at a kitchen table: a property tax bill.

The informed voters Berry might hope to win over with this framing are, in practice, the same constituency that has driven all three attempts: Free State Project adherents and their allies, for whom constraining public institutions is the point, not the regrettable side effect. For everyone else — the working families, seniors, and local officials Berry claims to be helping — the bill offers the appearance of relief while delivering none of it.

What the bill actually proposes: the Secretary of State’s office would be required to place a question on every November general election ballot in even-numbered years asking voters in each city, town, school district, and county whether to cap local property tax increases to inflation plus new property growth for the following two fiscal years. A two-thirds supermajority would be needed to enact the cap.

The Backstory: A Policy That Keeps Getting Rejected

HB 1300 is not a new idea. It is the third attempt in the current legislative session alone to impose fiscal constraints on local school budgets — each one arising after its predecessor was defeated.

It started with HB 675, a bill that would have directly capped school district budget increases to inflation. That bill was killed on January 8, 2026, in a dramatic floor vote that saw 22 House Republicans break with their own caucus and join nearly all Democrats to gut and defeat it — a final tally of 346-9. It was a stunning rebuke of the House Republican leadership’s top priority for the session.

HB 1300 is the leadership’s answer to that defeat. Rather than impose a cap directly, it creates a mandatory ballot question that — if approved by a two-thirds supermajority — would produce the same result. Berry acknowledged it openly: his bill is an attempt to respond and adapt to the rejection of HB 675.

The New Hampshire Municipal Association wasn’t fooled. Calling the bill “rife with technical issues,” the association warned it could cause “serious chaos and confusion” if implemented, and noted that “divorcing this ballot question from local elections and town meetings makes it easier to confuse voters as to what they are actually voting for.”

Who Is Really Driving This

Rep. Ross Berry (R-Weare)

Berry is the bill’s prime sponsor and, as chair of the House Election Law Committee, its chief architect. His background is in Republican Party infrastructure — he served as executive director of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee and as Virginia data director for the GOP before entering the legislature. He is not publicly identified as a Free State Project member, but is a reliable operator within that ideological ecosystem, consistently advancing its agenda through slick procedural creativity.

House Majority Leader Jason Osborne (R-Auburn): The Free State Connection

The more significant figure behind HB 1300 is House Majority Leader Jason Osborne, who has been among its loudest champions. Osborne is not merely adjacent to the Free State Project — he is its most powerful elected official in New Hampshire.

Osborne moved to New Hampshire from Ohio in 2010 explicitly as part of the Free State Project, a libertarian migration effort founded in 2001 with the goal of concentrating enough like-minded people in New Hampshire to reshape its government. At the New Hampshire Liberty Forum in March 2026 — a gathering that serves as a quasi-political convention for the movement — Osborne delivered a keynote that captured exactly where things stand.

“It’s not a smear anymore,” Osborne told the crowd, referring to the Free State label. “It’s a description of where the center of New Hampshire political thought is today. Take the win.”

His framing of HB 1300 was equally revealing. “For years,” he said in a statement, “big-spending school administrators have hidden behind a rigged process, packing deliberative sessions, running out the clock, and bulldozing taxpayers who dare to push back.”

This is the Free State Project’s core narrative about public education in microcosm: local school boards as adversaries, public school budgets as the problem, and state-imposed constraints as the solution. It is an ideology, not an analysis.

The Broader Free State Agenda

The Free State Project’s influence on New Hampshire’s legislative direction is no longer a fringe concern — it is the operating reality of the Republican House caucus. The policies championed in Concord in recent years — school vouchers (Education Freedom Accounts), spending caps, gun deregulation, cryptocurrency legislation, attacks on environmental protections — all bear its imprint.

Osborne’s wife chairs a nonprofit homeschool cooperative that benefits directly when the voucher program expands, giving his family a personal financial stake in the defunding of public schools. The Education Freedom Account program is now diverting nearly $60 million annually from public school funding — money that flows out of the education trust fund and directly increases pressure on local property taxes to compensate.

Outside money has lubricated the project’s political machine. The NH Liberty Alliance PAC, backed in part by Americans for Prosperity — a super PAC funded by major corporate interests — has distributed funds to over 150 members of the 400-seat House of Representatives, systematically building a caucus aligned with the FSP agenda.

The Cracked Foundation: What the Bill Gets Wrong

The Claremont Obligations the State Is Ignoring

The central narrative behind HB 1300 — that rising property taxes are caused by out-of-control local school spending — is not just incomplete. It inverts the actual chain of causation.

New Hampshire is the most property-tax-dependent state in the nation for funding public education. That is not an accident of local generosity. It is the direct consequence of three decades of the state legislature failing to meet its own constitutional obligations.

In 1993 and 1997, the New Hampshire Supreme Court issued the landmark Claremont decisions, establishing unambiguously that it is the state’s constitutional duty to provide an adequate education to every child in New Hampshire’s public schools — and to guarantee the funding to do so. The court further held that any property tax assessed to fulfill that obligation is, in fact, a state tax — and must therefore be uniform and proportional across all communities statewide.

The legislature has never complied. For more than 30 years, it has underfunded its adequacy formula, shifted costs onto local districts through unfunded mandates, and allowed wealthier towns to retain excess Statewide Education Property Tax revenue rather than redistributing it to poorer communities. The result is a system where the state’s failure becomes visible on every local property tax bill — and then gets blamed on local school boards.

The most recent court to examine the system said so directly. Rockingham County Superior Court Judge David Ruoff found that the state’s chronically low funding levels “effectively converts” local property taxes into an unconstitutionally disproportionate state tax. The state is not a passive bystander to high property taxes. It is their primary architect — a festering furuncle on the finances of every average New Hampshire property taxpayer.

The Coordinated Strategy to Erase the Standard Rather Than Meet It

What has unfolded in 2026 is not a series of independent policy debates. It is a coordinated, sequential dismantling of the legal framework that holds the state accountable for its constitutional education obligations — pursued simultaneously on three fronts while property tax anxiety provides the political cover.

The timeline tells the story:

January 2026 — The legislature kills HB 675 (the direct spending cap), but three revenue-side bills that could have actually reduced property taxes — HB 491, HB 1636, and HB 1708 — are quietly allowed to die without serious consideration.

February 2026 — HB 1815 and its Senate companion SB 659 are introduced. Framed as technical adjustments to adequacy statutes, they are in fact a statutory gutting of the Claremont framework: redefining public education as a “shared responsibility” between state and local government, removing the longstanding guarantee of an adequate education from statute, and explicitly declaring that funding decisions are “political policy matters” reserved to the legislature — beyond the reach of the courts. Simultaneously, the state’s attorneys formally ask the New Hampshire Supreme Court to overturn the Claremont decisions entirely.

March 2026 — Despite more than four hours of public testimony at the State House — overwhelmingly in opposition, with over 1,500 people signing in against the bills online — the Senate passes HB 1815 16-8 and tables SB 659, since one version is sufficient.

March 27, 2026 — Governor Ayotte quietly signs HB 1815 into law. It takes effect May 26, 2026 — soon after the publication of this backgrounder. Don’t pay the bill, toss it in the wastebasket, and pretend it never existed — and let the property taxpayers make up the difference.

April 28, 2026 — The Senate hears HB 1300, the property tax cap ballot question bill, which would prevent local communities from compensating for the funding gap the state has just legally redefined as no longer its problem.

Each move reinforces the others. The court challenge attempts to erase the constitutional standard. HB 1815 rewrites the statute the courts have relied upon. HB 1300 caps local communities’ ability to respond to the costs the state has offloaded. Together, they form a pincer movement against public education funding — with property taxpayers caught in the middle, being told the problem is their local school board.

Zack Sheehan, executive director of the NH School Funding Fairness Project, was unsparing: “For years, some lawmakers and state leaders have said they were not trying to overturn Claremont. In this filing, the State is formally asking the Supreme Court to do exactly that. Overturning Claremont does not reduce property taxes. It does not increase support for students. It does not address the inequities that school districts across New Hampshire face every day.”

The Bills That Could Have Actually Helped

In the same session that produced all of the above, the legislature had multiple opportunities to address the actual drivers of high property taxes. All of them were allowed to die:

• HB 491 would have studied ways for the state to increase its contribution to education with the explicit goal of reducing local property taxes.

• HB 1636 would have directed the Department of Revenue Administration to identify options to restructure the state’s tax system to reduce burdens on low- and moderate-income households.

• HB 1708 proposed a modest increase in business profits taxes that would have directly offset property taxes.

None moved forward. The asymmetry is not subtle: bills that would have required the state to take responsibility died quietly, while bills that shift responsibility further onto local communities advanced aggressively. That asymmetry is the story.

The Republican Crack in the Wall

The House Republican caucus is not monolithic on this issue, and the dissent within it is telling.

Rep. Kristine Perez (R-Londonderry) is the most prominent and credible Republican opponent. She comes from a conservative community and was herself an advocate for a local tax cap — until her own community’s study of the issue convinced her it was the wrong tool. Her evolution on the issue is instructive.

“We all agree that property taxes are rising too fast and school budgets are the largest driver,” Perez said during the HB 675 fight. “The real question before us now is how do we apply restraint without harming classrooms or stripping away local control.”

On HB 1300 specifically, she was more direct: “Putting a cap on the school portion of property taxes is just another way of saying ‘cutting school budgets.’”

It’s worth pausing on Perez’s framing, because even her reasonable-sounding opposition contains an embedded assumption that deserves scrutiny. When she says school budgets are “the largest driver” of rising property taxes, she is describing a symptom while obscuring the cause. School budgets appear large on local property tax bills precisely because the state has spent three decades offloading its constitutional funding obligation onto local communities — through underfunded adequacy payments, unfunded mandates, and a voucher program draining tens of millions annually from the education trust fund. The local budget isn’t the problem. It is the receptacle for the state’s failure.

Perez was among the 22 House Republicans who broke with their caucus to kill HB 675. That same coalition of pragmatic, locally grounded Republicans represents the most significant obstacle to HB 1300 as well. They are not ideological opponents of fiscal restraint — they are legislators who actually have to answer to constituents who depend on functioning schools, fire departments, and road maintenance. When costs exceed capped revenues, those are the services that disappear.

Governor Ayotte: Neither Champion Nor Obstacle — But Hardly Neutral

Governor Kelly Ayotte has maintained a studied ambiguity about HB 1300 specifically. She has declined to publicly back it, and Senate Republicans have not signaled it is a priority for them — leaving its path to becoming law uncertain.

But Ayotte’s neutrality on HB 1300 should not be mistaken for independence from the agenda behind it. The coordinated timeline above tells a different story. While declining to publicly champion the property tax cap bill, she signed HB 1815 into law, her administration is pursuing the Claremont overturn in court, and she has presided over the expansion of the voucher program that drains education trust funds. She has declined to advance any of the revenue-side solutions that could actually reduce property tax burdens. If you’re not wealthy or a big business, look elsewhere for help.

Her earlier comment on the predecessor spending cap bill captures her posture precisely: “I haven’t studied the specifics of that. I certainly believe in local control, but I also think it is important that local officials protect taxpayers at the local level.” A governor genuinely committed to property tax relief would not need to study whether the state should meet its 30-year-old constitutional obligation to fund education. That obligation is not a matter of policy preference. It is settled constitutional law — or was, until her administration began systematically dismantling it.

What Happens If It Passes

The NH School Funding Fairness Project has laid out the practical consequences clearly. When costs keep rising but budgets are capped, something has to give. In school districts, those tradeoffs land on what is not legally required: course offerings, extracurricular programs, arts, athletics, and enrichment activities. They land on teachers not replaced when they retire, on deferred building maintenance, on reduced support staff.

The NH Municipal Association has warned that the bill also “hamstrings municipalities from authorizing labor agreements due to the threat of a future cap” — meaning the damage begins before any cap is ever voted on, as communities become unable to make multi-year financial commitments.

None of this reduces the actual cost of providing an education. It simply means those costs go unmet — in the classroom, in the community, and ultimately in the life outcomes of New Hampshire’s children.

Three Times and Counting: A Pattern, Not Bad Luck

There is an old saying that a fish rots from the head down. In New Hampshire’s 2026 legislative session, the same fish has been served three times — each time with new garnish, each time rotting in the same way, and each time pushed back across the table by enough legislators who recognized the smell.

Understanding all three attempts together is essential to understanding what HB 1300 actually is.

The First Attempt: HB 675 — The Direct Cap

The opening move was the most brazen. HB 675 would have directly capped school district budget increases to the rate of inflation — a hard, statewide, state-imposed ceiling on what local communities could spend on their children’s education. House Majority Leader Osborne and Deputy Majority Leader Joe Sweeney made it their flagship priority for the session.

It died on January 8, 2026 — the first week of the session — in one of the most lopsided votes in recent New Hampshire legislative history. Twenty-two Republicans broke with their caucus, joined nearly all Democrats, and gutted the bill on the floor before voting it down 346-9. It was a repudiation so thorough that a parliamentary move was immediately made to prevent the bill from returning to the House floor at all in 2026.

For a House Republican leadership that had spent months building toward this moment, it was a catastrophic defeat. For the Free State Project’s legislative allies, it was also a signal: the direct approach was politically untenable. Time for a new vehicle. Time to snooker the public. They’re too busy working to even notice. (No, we’re not).

The Second Attempt: HB 1300, Version One — The Redistricting Hijack

The second attempt was more procedurally creative. Someone noticed that HB 1300 — the redistricting bill that was going nowhere because Governor Ayotte had already promised a veto — was still technically alive as a legislative vessel. On January 13, just five days after HB 675’s defeat, Berry and two co-sponsors filed a replace-all amendment that gutted the redistricting language entirely and substituted the property tax cap ballot question mechanism.

The move was architecturally clever but substantively transparent. Using a dead redistricting bill as a shell for a policy the House had just rejected in another form was, as the NH Municipal Association put it, a bill “rife with technical issues” that had been “hastily drafted.” It also attracted immediate constitutional questions: could the state actually mandate that communities vote on any particular measure? Critics from both parties said the answer was far from clear.

The bill advanced out of the House Election Law Committee — which Berry chairs, giving him direct control over its fate at that stage — and passed the full House along near party lines in March. But the Senate remained cool to it, and the April 28 hearing before the Senate Election Law and Municipal Affairs Committee generated the same broad opposition that had dogged its predecessors.

The Third Mask: “The Property Tax Protection Act”

By the time HB 1300 reached its Senate hearing, it had acquired a new name: the Property Tax Protection Act. This rebranding is itself instructive. A bill that began as a redistricting measure, was converted into a spending restraint mechanism, and has now been dressed in the language of taxpayer protection has traveled a long way from its origins — without changing its fundamental purpose at any point.

The name is designed to make opposition politically costly. Who wants to vote against “property tax protection”? The same rhetorical strategy produced the “Education Freedom” branding for the voucher program that is currently draining $60 million annually from public school funding. In the Free State playbook, the name of the policy and the effect of the policy are often inversely related.

What the Pattern Tells Us

A policy that fails three times in a single session and keeps coming back is not the product of legislators genuinely trying to solve a problem and searching for the right approach. If that were the case, the repeated defeats would prompt reflection — perhaps some engagement with the Claremont obligations, perhaps some examination of what the revenue-side bills that died quietly might have accomplished.

Instead, each defeat produces a faster, more procedurally aggressive response. HB 675 died on January 8. The replacement amendment was filed January 13. The new branding was in place by March. The Senate hearing was scheduled for April 28.

This is not legislating. It is campaigning — using the machinery of the legislature to generate a political narrative about property taxes and local spending that can be deployed in November’s elections, regardless of whether the underlying bill ever becomes law. If it passes, the Free State Project’s allies claim a victory for “taxpayers.” If it fails, they have a villain — the Senate, the governor, the teachers’ unions, the school boards — to run against.

The fish, in other words, was never really meant to be eaten. It was meant to be smelled. A rotten fish is not worth smelling.

The Bottom Line

HB 1300 is not a property tax relief bill. It is a pressure transfer mechanism — a device for moving the political consequences of the state’s funding failures downward onto local communities, while insulating Concord from accountability for creating those failures in the first place.

The Free State Project’s fingerprints are all over it: in its sponsor’s background as a party operative rather than a policy expert; in the Majority Leader who moved to New Hampshire specifically to reshape its government and now leads that government’s most powerful chamber; in the decades-long ideological project to defund public institutions and rebrand that defunding as taxpayer liberation. The FSP used to be a fringe the mainstream GOP tolerated. In New Hampshire in 2026, as Osborne himself declared, it is the center. The mainstream GOP has not merely climbed into bed with the Free State Project — in the House, it has largely become it.

The cracks in the official narrative are visible everywhere, for anyone willing to look past the branding:

Twenty-two Republicans keep breaking with their leadership because they represent real towns with real fire departments, real school buildings, and real constituents who will notice when the roads stop getting plowed.

Courts have ruled repeatedly — most recently finding that the state’s chronic underfunding “effectively converts” local property taxes into an unconstitutional state tax — that New Hampshire is failing its own constitution. The state’s response is not to fix the funding. It is to ask the Supreme Court to delete the constitutional standard, rewrite the underlying statute, and call it a day.

Three revenue-side bills that could have actually addressed property tax burdens — through studying increased state contributions, restructuring the tax system, or modest adjustments to business profits taxes — died quietly in the same session that produced HB 1300. They were not defeated dramatically. They were simply not pursued. That asymmetry is the story.

Sixty million dollars annually flows out of public school funding into an Education Freedom Account voucher program with minimal oversight, directly increasing pressure on local property taxes — championed by a Majority Leader whose own family benefits financially from its expansion.

HB 1815 — which strips the statutory guarantee of an adequate education, redefines the state’s obligation as merely “shared,” and explicitly tells courts that school funding is none of their business — was signed into law by Governor Ayotte on March 27 and takes effect this month, even as HB 1300 works its way through the Senate. The dismantling of the Claremont framework is not a future threat. It is already underway.

And a policy that has failed three times in a single session keeps returning faster and more aggressively each time, not because its architects believe they are close to solving the property tax problem, but because the political value of the narrative — local school boards as villains, Concord as helpless bystander — is the actual product being manufactured.

Property taxes in New Hampshire are genuinely too high. The people feeling that pressure are not wrong, and their frustration is legitimate. But those taxes are high because the state built a system that depends on them, has refused for thirty years to meet its constitutional obligation to reduce that dependence, has now signed legislation stripping that obligation from statute, is asking the Supreme Court to erase it from constitutional law, and is simultaneously advancing a bill that would prevent local communities from even responding to the pressure Concord generates.

HB 1300 doesn’t protect property taxpayers. It protects the people responsible for their tax bills from having to answer for them.

The fish has been served three times. Granite Staters would be wise not to take a bite.

Sources: NH House Republican Caucus press releases; New Hampshire Bulletin; NH Public Radio (NHPR); The Boston Globe; Keene Sentinel; Manchester Union Leader; InDepthNH.org; Concord Monitor; NH School Funding Fairness Project; Ballotpedia; Wikipedia; NH Supreme Court (Claremont I, 1993; Claremont II, 1997); Rockingham County Superior Court (Rand v. State, 2024); LegiScan; NEA-New Hampshire; NH Municipal Association; Citizens Count NH.

About sources and drafting methods →

A note before we begin. It is not my intention in this piece to assign blame, suggest anyone should face legal consequence, or imply there is a secret coordinated effort to disadvantage any group of New Hampshire residents. What I am asking is something more precise — and something the documented record makes possible with unusual clarity. The pattern described in this piece has been operating in plain sight for more than fifty years. Its instruments are public. Its outcomes are documented. Its burden falls on identifiable Granite Staters in identifiable ways. As with every piece in this series: follow the numbers, trace the outcomes, notice who each decision benefits and who carries the additional burden. The conclusions the documented record points toward are ones I will let you reach for yourself.

There is a particular skill that appraisal work develops over time — especially the forensic kind. The assignments where the numbers don’t add up and your job is to find out why. You learn, fairly quickly, to look past what things are called and examine what they actually do.

That discipline came from a long time working with the instruments directly — assignments across dozens of New Hampshire and Vermont towns as a certified general appraiser in both states, forensic appraisals for federal government entities during the savings and loan crisis, field discovery of assessment failures in the statistical appraisals underlying property taxation across both states, and ultimately service as a certified property tax assessor inside the system this series has been documenting.

One type of forensic assignment I encountered more than once involved businesses suspected of hiding cashflows. A restaurant purchasing bulk liquor from a variety of sources, off the normal books, to understate its actual receipts. The income wasn’t missing. It was obscured — because the label on the reported receipts was what drove the deal being negotiated. A reduction in the mortgage balance. A better settlement with the lender. The label was doing work the underlying numbers wouldn’t support if examined directly.

New Hampshire’s tax system requires the same discipline. Not because anyone is acting in bad faith — that is not the argument this publication makes. But because the labels and the instruments have been pointing in different directions for a long time, and most Granite Staters have only ever been shown the labels.

This piece is about what the instruments actually say.

The July Moment

The bill arrives in June. Most New Hampshire towns mail the estimated property tax bill in late May or early June. It is due July 1st — or July 2nd in many municipalities for the 2026 cycle. A second, final bill follows in the fall, due in December or January depending on where you live.

You open the June envelope. You look at the number. You do the rough math on what you earn and what the bill demands. You live in the state with no income tax, no sales tax — the Live Free or Die identity, built over fifty years of political campaigns and front-page editorials and gubernatorial pledges. The number on the page does not feel like a low-tax state.

That feeling is not a misunderstanding. It is not innumeracy. It is not failure to appreciate what you have.

It is the gap between the label and the instrument. And it has been there the whole time.

What follows are the tales. The ones New Hampshire has been telling itself for more than fifty years. And alongside each one — what the documented record actually shows.

Tale One: “New Hampshire Has No Broad-Based Tax.”

The Pledge was born in the 1972 gubernatorial campaign — cemented by Meldrim Thomson and Union-Leader publisher William Loeb, administered ever since by the Coalition of New Hampshire Taxpayers. Its promise was simple and durable: New Hampshire protects Granite Staters from broad-based taxation. No income tax. No sales tax. The property tax, in this framing, is a local tax — your town’s business, your community’s choice, not a statewide instrument bearing on your daily life the way an income or sales tax would.

The framing held for fifty years. It still holds, in many rooms, today.

The documented record tells a different story.

New Hampshire raises 63% of all state and local government revenue from property taxes — the highest dependence of any state in the country, by a margin that is not close. The next most property-tax-dependent state, Texas, is at roughly 40 to 41 percent. The national average is 27 percent. New Hampshire residents pay the second-highest property taxes per person in the nation: $3,388 per person against a national average of $1,943. The lowest-paying state averages $697. Granite Staters pay nearly five times that — per person.

The property tax funds schools, roads, fire departments, police, county services, and a statewide education levy the courts have twice found unconstitutional in its current form. It is paid by owners through their bills and by renters through their rent. It falls on every resident in the state.

That is not a local tax. That is the tax. Everything else is marginal by comparison.

Two other instruments deserve naming here.

The Meals and Rooms Tax has been collected since 1967, at a current rate of 8.5% on every restaurant meal, hotel stay, and car rental in the state. It is assessed at the point of transaction, calculated as a percentage of the purchase price, collected by the seller, and remitted to the state on a regular schedule. That is the functional definition of a sales tax. Its current rate is higher than Massachusetts’s general sales tax — the tax New Hampshire residents cross the border to avoid.

The Interest and Dividends Tax was collected from 1923 until 2025: a percentage levy on investment income, reported on a return, remitted annually for 102 years while The Pledge was being sworn against income taxes. It was not repealed because it had become a runaway train. It was repealed in a single act that produced no measurable relief for the bottom 80% of earners, and benefited exclusively the top 5%.

The Pledge protected Granite Staters from three labels. The instruments operated freely underneath them for a combined 150-plus years.

From the discipline of appraisal work: an instrument is defined by what it does, not what it is called. The label on the outside of the box has never changed what was inside it.

You were not wrong to trust what you were told. The Pledge was administered with confidence, by people with real platforms, for a long time. But the documented record shows that New Hampshire has always had a broad-based tax. The question was never whether one existed. It was whether the one being used was the fairest way to fund public life — and that question was successfully prevented from being asked.

Tale Two: “Your Property Tax Bill Reflects Local Decisions.”

High property taxes, in this telling, are a local problem. Your school board is spending too much. Your town isn’t being careful enough with the budget. Vote differently at town meeting. Local control means local accountability — and local accountability means the solution, if there is one, lives at the local level too.

The property tax bill does arrive locally. That part is accurate.

What it contains is not exclusively local.

Your bill blends two fundamentally different things into a single number: what your town chose, and what the state required but did not fund.

The New Hampshire Supreme Court established in 1993 that the state bears the exclusive constitutional obligation to fund an adequate education for every child. That obligation has never been fully met. In 2025, the court set the constitutional minimum at $7,356 per pupil per year. The state pays $4,266. The annual gap between what the state owes and what it pays exceeds $500 million — and that gap lands on local property tax bills, most heavily in the communities least able to carry it.

Special education offers the sharpest illustration. The state contributes $2,100 per student annually. The average actual cost of serving those students is $49,812. Local property taxes absorb 83% of special education costs statewide. The state’s contribution, in many towns, does not cover the cost of the initial evaluation required before a single service is delivered.

Meanwhile, business tax cuts since 2015 have produced between $800 million and $1.17 billion in forgone state revenue, according to NH Fiscal Policy Institute analysis. That cost did not disappear. It shifted — downward, to the property tax. In fiscal year 2026, 109 New Hampshire communities received less state adequacy aid than in fiscal year 2025. Those cuts are scheduled to grow every two years through 2034.

When you vote at town meeting, you are voting on the local bucket. The constitutional shortfall, the unfunded mandates, the forgone revenue from state-level tax cuts — those were decided in Concord. The bill arrives locally. The decision didn’t happen there.

Blaming your school board for a property tax increase driven by state-level choices is like blaming your mailbox for what’s inside it.

Tale Three: “The Property Tax Is Fair — Same Rate for Everyone.”

Whatever its size, the property tax is at least neutral. Same rate applied to every property in town. No sliding scales, no favoritism, no judgment about who you are or what you earn.

This tale contains a kernel of truth — the rate is uniform within a given town — and obscures something important about how that rate gets applied and who ends up carrying it.

Start with the variation across towns. The same $500,000 home carries a tax bill ranging from $1,310 to $18,270 depending solely on which side of a town line it sits — a ratio of nearly 14-to-1 between the lowest and highest rates in the state. A home in Lee: $13,805. The same home across the town line in Nottingham: $6,600. In Charlestown: $18,270. Same constitutional obligation. Same state. Different accident of geography.

Now go deeper — to something the rate discussion never reaches.

The property tax is not assessed on a known number. It is assessed on an estimated value. Every assessed value on every property tax bill in New Hampshire is a professional opinion — the product of a mass appraisal methodology applied to imperfect data across thousands of properties simultaneously. The New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration runs an annual equalization process specifically because assessed and market values do not align perfectly across municipalities. If they did, that process would not be necessary.

I know this from the inside. Working across dozens of towns in New Hampshire and Vermont as a certified general appraiser in both states, I found a consistent pattern in assessment records. For standard residential properties, assessors had transaction data to work from, however imperfectly. For complex commercial and industrial properties — the ones requiring specialized training and market knowledge — local assessors were typically dependent on whatever the mass appraisal companies and software packages generated. Many did not have the education or experience to independently evaluate those outputs. The software was calibrated primarily on residential sales data. It handled complex income-producing properties poorly. Because the assessors could not independently check the results, the outputs were accepted.

The errors that process produces are not random. Complex commercial and industrial properties — owned predominantly by businesses and investors — tend to be undervalued. Modest residential properties — owned by working families — tend to be overvalued relative to market. Research published in the Harvard Journal on Legislation in 2025 documented this pattern at the national level: in virtually all jurisdictions, expensive homes are undervalued by assessors and under-taxed, while modest homes are overvalued and over-taxed. Nearly universal. Directional. Not random error — systematic error running consistently against those least able to challenge it.

Challenging a property tax assessment in New Hampshire requires filing within a limited annual window, often obtaining an independent appraisal, and potentially presenting that case before the Board of Tax and Land Appeals or Superior Court — a process taking months to over a year, costing hundreds to thousands of dollars. Businesses and wealthy property owners have professional appraisers available. Working families typically do not. The errors stay where they land.

Unlike a sales or income tax — where an error is corrected between the taxpayer and the agency — a property tax error gets redistributed across every other taxpayer in the municipality. The system does not absorb the mistake. It spreads it.

The rate is uniform within a town. The system it runs through is not. And it has never been.

Tale Four: “An Income Tax Would Cost Working Granite Staters.”

This is the central tale. The one that has kept the architecture intact for fifty years. The one worth spending the most time with — because it is the one doing the most work, and because the documented record dismantles it more completely than any of the others.

An income tax, in this telling, would be a new burden on working families — added on top of what they already pay, with no ceiling and no guarantee against expansion. New Hampshire voters have already decided. The Pledge exists because people understood what was at stake. An income tax is not what New Hampshire is.

Let’s examine that claim against the record.

The framing problem.

Every time New Hampshire voters were asked about an income tax, they were asked about adding something — not replacing something. A fairly framed question would have included the trade-off: what changes in return?

“Do you support an income tax?” produces a different answer than: “Would you support reducing your property tax bill by shifting a portion of education funding to a different tax structure?” One asks about adding a cost. The other asks about changing the balance. New Hampshire voters have never been asked the second question in any systematic way. The debate was confined, deliberately, to the first.

The current burden on working Granite Staters.

The working Granite Stater is not currently protected from broad-based taxation. According to modeling by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, cited by the NH Fiscal Policy Institute, the effective state and local tax rate for the bottom 20% of earners — households making under roughly $35,000 per year — is 8.9% of income. The top 1% of earners pay 2.8%. The ratio is more than three to one.

Right now. Under the system The Pledge built.

Renters pay property tax through their rent, with no exemptions, no elderly credits, no relief programs available to them. The maximum homeowner relief program benefit is $1,100. The average actual relief per applicant is $201.66. The treadmill runs whether you own or rent. It just does not look the same on the bill.

Here is where the forensic discipline applies directly. A restaurant hiding its cashflows to negotiate a better deal on its mortgage is not hiding the income because the income does not exist. It is obscuring the real number because the label — the reported receipts — is what drives the negotiation. New Hampshire’s tax debate has operated the same way for fifty years. The real number — what working families already pay, as a percentage of income, under the current system — was never put on the table. The negotiation was conducted entirely on the labeled number: no income tax, no sales tax. The instrument underneath — the one extracting 8.9% from the bottom fifth of earners — was never part of the discussion.

What the 3-3 Tax Savings Plan actually proposes.

In March 2026, along with others, attorney Andru Volinsky — who argued the original Claremont cases before the New Hampshire Supreme Court establishing the state’s constitutional obligation to fund public education, and who has argued before the United States Supreme Court — unveiled the 3-3 Tax Savings Plan on the granite steps of the State House alongside a coalition of Granite Staters from across the state.

The plan’s structure is worth understanding precisely, because the income tax fear tends to dissolve when the actual numbers are examined:

A 3% New Hampshire Education Income Tax with substantial deductions. A uniform $3 statewide property tax, replacing the current 14-to-1 local rate variation. A $250,000 homestead exemption. A $750 renter credit per rental unit. Revenue dedicated exclusively to education funding. Projected to raise approximately $2 billion, applied directly to reducing local property taxes.

The deduction structure is where the fear meets the math — and where they diverge most sharply.

A couple filing jointly pays nothing on the first $70,000 of income before a single dollar of income tax applies. A family of four pays nothing on the first $100,000. That threshold is not arbitrary: according to Federal Reserve data, $99,000 is the exact middle of the household income range in New Hampshire. Roughly half of all NH households would pay little to nothing under the income tax component of this plan.

Even Michael Graham of the NH Journal — a skeptic — accurately described the purpose: not a tax increase. A tax shift. Moving approximately $1 billion from the state’s property tax burden to an income tax.

The online calculator at NHTaxSavingsCalculator.com compares what you actually paid in school property taxes in 2024 with what you would have paid under the 3-3 Tax Savings Plan, using real 2024 data. The documented result: 80% of New Hampshire taxpayers would reduce their school property taxes under the plan. The math is not a projection. It is a comparison. Anyone can run their own numbers.

The runaway train concern — and why it is answerable.

The fear that an income tax, once created, becomes an expanding burden is not irrational. It deserves a direct answer rather than dismissal.

Guardrails can be written directly into law: constitutional dedication limiting use strictly to education funding; a statutory lock-box preventing diversion to other purposes; a supermajority legislative vote requirement to raise rates; automatic property tax offset mechanisms written into statute; sunset provisions requiring periodic review. The 3-3 Tax Savings Plan incorporates several of these by design.

New Hampshire also has 102 years of documented experience collecting a tax on income. The Interest and Dividends Tax ran from 1923 to 2025 without becoming a runaway train. It was repealed not because it had expanded beyond its purpose but because it was the one instrument in the system that asked more of those with more investment income. It was eliminated for the people it cost. The people it did not cost are still opening the same property tax bills.

You were not wrong to be cautious. Caution about government’s appetite for revenue is reasonable and earned by experience. But the caution was applied to the label, not the instrument. The instrument doing the work right now is already extracting more from working Granite Staters, as a share of income, than a well-designed, guardrailed, education-dedicated replacement would. The question is not whether to be taxed. That question was answered a long time ago, in the mailbox, every July. The question is whether the system doing the taxing asks of each Granite Stater what they can actually afford to give — or what their property happens to be estimated to be worth.

The calculator is at NHTaxSavingsCalculator.com. The math is available to anyone willing to look at it.

Tale Five: “The EFA Program Serves Families Who Need It.”

The Education Freedom Account program was created, in its original telling, to help disadvantaged families access educational alternatives when the public system was not serving their children. A targeted program. A helping hand for families without the resources wealthier families had always had.

The documented record shows what happened next.

In the program’s first year, with an income cap in place, 54% of participants came from the lowest income bracket. Today, with no income cap, that figure is 19%. The program sold as serving disadvantaged families is now predominantly serving families who were already choosing and affording private and home education. 96.7% of current recipients never attended the public school system.

Cost: $51.6 million this school year. Up 119% per biennium. Drawn from the Education Trust Fund — the same fund the courts have twice found constitutionally underfunded for public schools. The fund is being drained from the top by EFA expansion while constitutionally underfunded at the bottom for the 160,000 students in the public system.

The legislative oversight committee established to monitor the program’s performance has not met publicly in more than a year and has not produced its required annual report. A program drawing $51.6 million annually from the public education fund operates with less external scrutiny than the institution it was designed to supplement.

Arizona ran this sequence first. The result: a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, no measurable improvement in outcomes for voucher recipients, and 75% of recipients who had never attended a public school. New Hampshire’s 96.7% non-public-school recipient rate has already exceeded Arizona’s ratio — before completing Arizona’s funding collapse.

Supporting educational options for families who genuinely need them is a defensible value. The documented record shows that the program currently funded under that premise is predominantly serving families who were never in the public system — at a cost drawn from the fund simultaneously failing its constitutional obligation to the students who have no other option. The stated purpose and the documented outcome are not the same thing.

Tale Six: “We’re Protecting Future Generations from Big Government.”

CACR 12 — introduced in 2026 by fourteen Republican state senators, with no Democratic sponsors — would require a two-thirds supermajority to enact any broad-based tax: income tax, sales tax, capital gains tax, estate tax.

There is no income tax proposal currently moving through the New Hampshire legislature. CACR 12 does not respond to a tax being enacted. It responds to a possibility — the possibility that a future legislature, faced with the documented consequences of the current system, might want to consider alternatives. The amendment’s purpose is to answer that future debate before it begins, by making one category of solutions constitutionally out of reach.

A two-thirds threshold is not a high bar for deliberation. It is a near-permanent bar in a closely divided state. Its effect is not to require careful consideration of tax changes. It is to make structural reform functionally impossible regardless of what the documented record shows or what a democratic majority might prefer.

The top 1% of New Hampshire earners pay 2.8% of income in state and local taxes. Working families in the bottom 20% pay 8.9%. CACR 12 protects the first number from change. The second number stays where it is.

One additional observation belongs here. When the 3-3 Tax Savings Plan was presented — a documented, modeled, calculable alternative to the current system — Democratic legislative leadership was as silent as Republican leadership. No alternative offered. No engagement with the record. Town committees across the state have engaged. Institutional leadership in both parties has not. The ground is moving. The institutions are not.

Protecting New Hampshire’s independence is a genuine and legitimate value — one that crosses party lines authentically. But the independence being protected by CACR 12 is not the independence of working Granite Staters from an overreaching government. It is the independence of the current tax architecture from democratic review by the people paying 8.9% of their income into it. Those are not the same thing. They have never been the same thing. The brand has just been successful enough, for long enough, that they have felt like they were.

The Permission, Plainly Stated

Return, for a moment, to the bill.

It arrived in June. It was due in July. The number on it did not feel like a low-tax state — because it wasn’t one. Not for you. Not for most Granite Staters. Not for the working families and retirees and renters and first-time buyers who have been carrying the architecture of this system on their property tax bills while being told, reliably and confidently and for fifty years, that they were protected from exactly this kind of burden.

You weren’t imagining it. The frustration is documented. The bottom 20% of earners pay effective state and local tax rates more than three times those paid by the wealthiest residents — in the state that built its political identity around protecting them from broad-based taxation. The protection was always applied to the labels. The instruments collected what they collected, under other names, from the first bill to the last.

The tales were told by people with real platforms, real conviction, and real political and financial interests in maintaining the framing. Believing them was not foolish. The cost of questioning them was real — ask any candidate who refused The Pledge, or any editorial that challenged Loeb’s front page. The social and political pressure to keep cheering was not imaginary, and it has not fully dissipated.

What has changed is the documented record. The NHFPI analysis is public. The ITEP burden data is public. The court decisions are public. The EFA enrollment figures are public. The CACR 12 sponsor list is public. The 3-3 Tax Savings Plan calculator exists at NHTaxSavingsCalculator.com and anyone can run their own numbers against actual 2024 data, in the time it takes to open a browser.

None of this requires changing a political identity. It requires something simpler — what Andru Volinsky described when he stood on the granite steps of the State House and proposed a different way forward: looking up.

Looking up at the architecture above the bill in the mailbox. Looking up at who built it, who benefits from it, and who has been carrying it. Looking up at what a different set of choices — documented, modeled, calculable — would actually cost the working families who have been told, for fifty years, that they were already free.

The tales have been told long enough. The math has always been available. It just needed to be put in one place.

Now it is.

Sources

The following backgrounders in this series provide the full sourcing and documentation for the figures and findings referenced in this piece. Readers are encouraged to consult them directly.

For Tale One: “The Invisible Income Tax: What ‘No Income Tax, No Sales Tax’ Actually Costs in New Hampshire” — thequietcost.substack.com “What Do You Mean By ‘Broad-Based’?” — thequietcost.substack.com

For Tale Two: “The Quiet Cost in Your Property Tax Bill Isn’t What You Think” — thequietcost.substack.com “When the State Pays Less, Towns Pay More” — thequietcost.substack.com “Starve, Blame, Replace” — thequietcost.substack.com

For Tale Three: “Estimated Values, Exact Dollars” — thequietcost.substack.com “The Invisible Income Tax” — thequietcost.substack.com

For Tale Four: “What Would a Fairly Framed Tax Question Actually Look Like in New Hampshire?” — thequietcost.substack.com “A Simpler, Fairer Way to Pay in New Hampshire” — thequietcost.substack.com “The Quiet Cost of ‘Just Tax ___’” — thequietcost.substack.com “A Structural Plan Granite Staters Have Been Waiting For” — thequietcost.substack.com “What Do You Mean By ‘Broad-Based’?” — thequietcost.substack.com Andru Volinsky, “The 3-3 Tax Savings Plan” — andruvolinsky.substack.com/p/the-3-3-tax-savings-plan-5d5 NHTaxSavingsCalculator.com

For Tale Five: “Starve, Blame, Replace” — thequietcost.substack.com

For Tale Six: “The Invisible Income Tax” — thequietcost.substack.com “What Do You Mean By ‘Broad-Based’?” — thequietcost.substack.com

This piece reflects the author’s independent analysis and synthesis of the documented record assembled across this publication’s backgrounder series. It is not legal or financial advice. The professional observations regarding assessment practices reflect the author’s direct experience as a certified general appraiser in New Hampshire and Vermont and as a certified property tax assessor in New Hampshire.

About sources and drafting methods →

NOTICE: FOR ADULTS WHO HAVE ALREADY HAD THE TALK

This material discusses the true origins of “state education funding” and may permanently alter your understanding of where money comes from. Side effects include: skepticism toward political slogans, closer reading of property tax bills, and the inability to hear the phrase “school choice” without asking — choice for whom, exactly?

Reader discretion is advised. Santa is not responsible for the contents.

A factual backgrounder, with a touch of the North Pole

The Setup: “Choice” Was Already on the Menu

Before the first elf ever picked up a legislative pen, New Hampshire parents already had school choice. They always have. Granite State families have always been free to send their children to private schools, religious schools, or to homeschool them — no permission slip required. The question was never whether parents could choose. The question was always: who pays for it?

Enter the Education Freedom Account — or EFA — which proponents prefer to call a school “choice” program, presumably because “publicly funded private school subsidy” doesn’t fit as neatly on a bumper sticker.

The Gift List: What’s Actually Under the Tree

New Hampshire created its EFA program in 2021, administered by the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH — a New York-based nonprofit that received a sole-source contract to run the program. Think of it as outsourcing Santa’s workshop to a contractor in another state.

The program works like this: the state deposits the per-pupil “adequate education” grant into a private account, which families can spend on approved educational expenses — private school tuition, tutoring, homeschooling materials, technology, transportation, and, yes, reportedly even ski mountain fees.

For the 2025–2026 school year, the base EFA grant is $4,265.64 per student, with additional funds available for students on free or reduced lunch, those with special education needs, or English language learners. Last year’s average payout ran $5,204 per student.

Sounds promising. Now let’s check whether the sleigh actually makes it down the chimney.

The Problem with Santa’s Math

Here is where parents are encouraged to sit their children down and have The Talk.

The average private school tuition in New Hampshire runs considerably higher than $4,265. Exeter, Kimball Union, St. Paul’s — the schools whose names tend to come up in school choice brochures — charge annual tuitions well north of $50,000 as boarding schools, with day rates still far exceeding what any EFA covers. Even more modest private day schools often run $10,000 to $20,000 per year.

The EFA doesn’t bridge that gap. It’s a voucher, not a scholarship to Hogwarts.

And here’s the part the brochure leaves out: private schools are not required to accept your child. As one legal analysis of SB 295 noted plainly, private schools retain full discretion over admissions — they can decline students with disabilities, reject those needing language support, or simply charge more than the EFA covers. The public school across town cannot do that. It must take every child, every time, no questions asked.

So: the voucher won’t cover the tuition, and the school may not take your child anyway. But other than that, the choice is entirely yours.

Who’s Actually Using the Elves’ Workshop

Program data punctures another holiday myth: that EFAs are primarily helping disadvantaged families escape struggling schools.

Since the program launched, over 65% of EFA recipients were not enrolled in public schools in the year before receiving their voucher. They were already in private schools or homeschooling. In the most recent data, that figure climbed to 96.7% — meaning fewer than one in twenty EFA recipients actually switched from a public school to take the account. The rest were families who had already made a different choice, and are now receiving public money to help pay for it.

That is not “school choice.” That is a publicly funded rebate for decisions families had already made on their own — many of them affluent enough to make those decisions without state assistance.

In June 2025, Governor Kelly Ayotte signed SB 295, removing the income cap entirely and making New Hampshire the 19th state with a universal voucher system. The program, which cost roughly $27 million in its earlier income-capped form, is now projected to cost the state approximately $50 million in 2025–2026, with estimates that full universal participation could reach $102 million annually. State cost projections from 2021 did not come close to anticipating these figures.

Enrollment hit 10,510 students this year — nearly double the prior year — and the program reached its 10,000-student cap within weeks of the expansion signing, leaving applicants on a waiting list. Freedom has its own velvet rope, apparently.

The Property Tax Chimney

New Hampshire’s public schools are funded through a mix of local property taxes and state adequacy grants — but that distinction is far less clean than it sounds, because the “state” money is largely property tax money in a different coat.

Here’s how the sleight of hand works. State law requires every New Hampshire municipality to levy what’s called the Statewide Education Property Tax, or SWEPT. Towns are required to raise approximately $363 million per year through SWEPT. That locally collected money is then counted by the state as its contribution toward each town’s adequate education grant — meaning the state’s obligation is reduced dollar-for-dollar by what local property taxpayers already paid. The money never travels to Concord and back. Insiders sometimes call it a “phantom tax” — it’s local property tax revenue dressed up in a state budget line.

SWEPT covers roughly 34% of the total adequacy grant statewide. The remaining 66% flows from the broader Education Trust Fund — fed by the Business Profits Tax, the Business Enterprise Tax, the Real Estate Transfer Tax, the Utility Property Tax, tobacco taxes, and Lottery revenue. Those sources are not entirely disconnected from property owners and local economic activity either.

The bottom line: when an EFA voucher is issued and state adequacy dollars follow a child to a private school or homeschool program, the property taxpayers of New Hampshire are, in substantial part, funding that voucher — without any corresponding reduction in their property tax bill. The chimney the money travels through may say “State of New Hampshire” on the label, but much of what’s inside was put there by the same local taxpayers who have been paying their property tax bills all along.

Santa didn’t make that gift. The neighbors did.

When the state redirects those adequacy dollars through an EFA, it draws from the same Education Trust Fund that finances public schools. Every dollar that travels to a private account is a dollar that does not go toward public school programs — special education services, career and technical education, school safety grants, building aid.

New Hampshire already holds the distinction of spending the least state money on public K–12 education, as a percentage of total education revenue, of any state in the country. The property taxpayers of every town and city in the state carry the heaviest local share. The EFA expansion does not reduce those property tax bills — it simply redirects a portion of what the state was contributing, with the local levy remaining firmly in place.

Proponents argue that students who leave public schools reduce local costs. The Department of Education estimated cumulative local savings of $30.6 million from public school switchers since the program began. What that math does not fully account for: school buildings, staff contracts, and fixed costs don’t shrink proportionally when 15 students leave a district of 1,200.

The Accountability Gap (Or: No One’s Checking the Nice List)

Public schools in New Hampshire are subject to rigorous oversight — state standards, local school boards, annual reporting, and accountability to the voters who fund them. EFAs operate under a different set of rules.

The NH Department of Education contracted out the entire program to the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, and then — in a maneuver that would impress even the most creative elf accountant — asserted that all program data belongs to the contractor, not the state. When the Legislature passed a bill requiring a performance audit, state auditors reported they could not obtain the information they needed because the department claimed it wasn’t in their possession.

A compliance review of 50 voucher accounts found that 25% were missing required information, including unverified residency and inaccurate income reporting. Legislative efforts to increase transparency have been defeated along party lines every year since 2021.

So parents are encouraged to trust the process — even if the process cannot be audited.

The Bottom Line

New Hampshire families have always had the right to choose their children’s school. What they have not always had is a publicly funded account to help pay for that choice. That is the actual policy question — and it’s a legitimate one, worth genuine debate.

What is not worth accepting at face value is the suggestion that a $4,265 grant unlocks the gates of elite private education for families who couldn’t otherwise afford it. The numbers don’t support it. The admissions offices of selective private schools don’t support it. And three years of program data don’t support it.

Like the realization that the handwriting on the gift tags looks a lot like Mom’s, the arithmetic eventually becomes clear: school choice, as currently structured in New Hampshire, is primarily a subsidy for families who had already made their choice — funded by the same public dollars that were designed, and are still needed, to educate every child the private schools decline to take.

The elves are busy. The sleigh is expensive. And some children aren’t on the list.

Sources: NH Department of Education; Reaching Higher New Hampshire; NH Bulletin; NH Public Radio; Dartmouth student editorial analysis; Citizens Count NH; Ballotpedia.

About sources and drafting methods →

A note before we begin. This piece does not argue that standardized testing is inherently wrong, or that any school, administrator, or teacher has acted improperly. What it examines is something more specific: what happens when the same test is administered on the same day to students in two towns that share a school district, a superintendent, and a state testing window — but whose educational circumstances are separated by a distance that test scores alone cannot explain. The data cited here is drawn from publicly available sources: the New Hampshire Department of Education, the NH School Funding Fairness Project, the NH Fiscal Policy Institute, and national school performance aggregators drawing on NCES data. The pattern that emerges is documented. The conclusions are ones the reader can reach independently.

Every spring, students across New Hampshire sit down for the NH Statewide Assessment System — the NH SAS. The tests are the same statewide. The standards are the same. The testing windows are the same. And when the results come back, they are treated as a measure of how well students are learning and, by extension, how well their schools are performing.

In most public discussions of those results, that is where the analysis stops.

This backgrounder asks what happens when you do not stop there. When you take two communities — same district, same tests, same dates — and look carefully at what surrounds those scores. What the towns earn. What they spend. What their tax bills look like. What share of their students carry additional learning needs. And what each school does in the weeks before the testing window opens.

What you find is not a story about good schools and struggling ones. It is a story about what standardized test scores are actually measuring — and how much of that measurement has nothing to do with what happens in a classroom.

Two Towns, One District

Charlestown and Walpole are both members of Fall Mountain Regional School Administrative Unit 60 in southwestern New Hampshire. Their students share a superintendent. They will eventually share a building at Fall Mountain Regional High School in Langdon. They take the same state assessments, on the same days, under the same state requirements.

The similarities end approximately there.

Charlestown carries the highest property tax rate in New Hampshire: $36.54 per $1,000 of assessed value. A home valued at $500,000 in Charlestown generates an annual tax bill of $18,270. That rate is not the product of extravagant local spending. It is the product of a relatively modest property tax base — lower overall property values generating insufficient revenue at any reasonable rate — combined with the full weight of school funding, municipal services, and county obligations that New Hampshire places almost entirely on local property taxpayers. Readers of this publication’s earlier piece on New Hampshire’s property tax system will recognize the structure immediately: it is the same architecture that produces $2.62 rates in wealthy resort communities and $36.54 rates in working towns, for the same constitutional obligation.

Walpole sits just across the county line in Cheshire County, bordering Charlestown’s Sullivan County to the south — yet both towns are served by the same SAU. Its property tax rate is substantially lower. Its residential profile is considerably more affluent. And its students, taking the same tests on the same days, score dramatically differently.

The numbers are not ambiguous.

Charlestown Primary School, serving grades PreK through 4, ranks in the bottom half of all New Hampshire elementary schools for combined test performance. Math proficiency runs 35 to 39 percent — against a state average of 42 percent. Reading proficiency runs 40 to 44 percent — against a state average of 51 percent. North Charlestown Community School — formerly the Farwell School — served the village of North Charlestown and recorded math proficiency between 20 and 29 percent and reading proficiency between 11 and 19 percent in its final years of operation, placing it 425th out of 457 ranked New Hampshire schools. On March 12, 2024, Charlestown voters approved its permanent closure by a margin of 276 to 269 — seven votes. By that point, declining enrollment had reduced the school’s use to pre-K only, and the property has since reverted to the Farwell Trust. Its remaining students were consolidated into Charlestown’s schools. That seven-vote margin deserves a moment’s pause. It was not a community eager to shed an institution. It was a community that had run out of options — and the children who attended that school absorbed the disruption of its closure on top of everything else the data already shows surrounding them.

Walpole’s schools tell a different story. North Walpole School on Cray Road, serving grades 2 through 4, achieves 57 percent math proficiency and 62 percent reading proficiency — both well above state averages, ranking it 38th out of 234 New Hampshire elementary schools and earning a U.S. News Best Elementary Schools designation. Walpole Elementary School on Bemis Lane, serving grades 5 through 8, achieves 45 to 49 percent in math and 60 to 64 percent in reading, ranking in the top 30 percent of all New Hampshire schools and earning a U.S. News Best Middle Schools designation.

Same district. Same tests. Same dates. The gap between those numbers is not small. It is the kind of gap that, in a public accountability system, marks one set of schools as succeeding and another as struggling.

What it does not mark — not directly, not automatically, not without further examination — is the reason.

What the Scores Are Sitting On

Before a single student in either town opens a test booklet, the circumstances surrounding that test are already dramatically unequal.

Economic need. Charlestown Primary School enrolls 47 to 52 percent of its students in the free or reduced-price lunch program — the standard federal proxy for economic disadvantage in school populations, and the figure most consistently correlated with academic performance in the research literature. Walpole Elementary enrolls 27 percent. Within the same school district, on the same test, the student population presenting for assessment in Charlestown carries nearly twice the rate of economic disadvantage as the one in Walpole.

This is not a minor variable. It is, in the academic literature, one of the strongest and most consistently documented predictors of standardized test performance — stronger, across most studies, than school quality, teacher experience, or instructional approach considered in isolation. A Harvard-based research team studying SAT and ACT performance found that children of the wealthiest one percent of Americans were thirteen times more likely than children of low-income families to score at the highest levels. Stanford researcher Sean Reardon has documented that economic gaps in academic achievement appear before kindergarten and compound throughout schooling. The connection between economic disadvantage and test scores is not a hypothesis. It is one of the most replicated findings in education research.

Special education concentration. School staff with direct knowledge of both programs report that Charlestown’s schools serve an above-average concentration of students with Individualized Education Programs — a figure verifiable through the NH Department of Education’s public iReport database for any reader who wishes to confirm it. Students with IEPs face a compounding challenge with standardized testing: they are assessed against the same grade-level standards as their peers, on instruments that the test designers themselves caution are not designed for accountability determinations, in a format that may not reflect their actual knowledge and capability.

In New Hampshire, educating one student with an IEP costs an average of $31,093 more per year than educating a student without one. The state and federal governments together cover 16.65 percent of that cost. The remaining 83.35 percent falls to local property taxes. In Charlestown — already carrying the highest property tax rate in the state — every additional IEP student represents a budget pressure that a town like Walpole, with a stronger tax base and lower overall rate, can absorb more readily.

The squeeze is real, documented, and directional. It runs against the towns with the greatest need.

The Preparation Gap

The test scores between Charlestown and Walpole reflect not only what students know, but what they have been given the opportunity to practice before they demonstrate it.

In the weeks before the annual state testing window — a period confirmed by school personnel with direct knowledge of both programs — Walpole’s students receive structured preparation covering the testing format itself: what the screens look like, how questions are presented, how answers are entered, what to expect from the testing environment. This is not unusual in resource-advantaged schools. Two-week pre-test preparation sessions covering test format and procedure are a widely documented practice in schools serving more affluent populations nationally.

Charlestown’s students receive the same test. The preparation for that test is not equivalent.

This distinction matters more than it might initially appear. Standardized tests measure a compound variable: knowledge and content mastery on one hand, and test-taking fluency — familiarity with format, timing, question conventions, and navigation — on the other. For a student encountering a particular testing interface for the first time, a meaningful portion of cognitive load during the assessment goes toward figuring out how the test works rather than demonstrating what they know. For a student who has spent two weeks practicing in a simulated environment, that cognitive load is already resolved before the testing window opens.

The test does not know the difference. The score does not record it. The accountability framework treats the results as equivalent measures of equivalent preparation.

They are not.

What the Scores Are Not Measuring

A 2022 analysis in The Century Foundation put the core issue directly: schools that narrow their curricula to focus on test preparation do not generally improve students’ test performance. The best way to help students perform well on standardized reading and math assessments may be to spend less time on decontextualized test preparation and more time on rigorous, meaningful content engagement.

The research on standardized testing validity raises a related concern that the accountability framework rarely surfaces. The tests measure a defined and relatively narrow set of skills — primarily mathematics computation and procedural knowledge, and reading comprehension of specific passage types. They do not measure critical thinking capacity, collaborative problem-solving, creative reasoning, scientific curiosity, or the social and emotional foundations that developmental researchers consistently identify as predictive of long-term learning success. What the tests capture is real. What they omit is also real, and the omission is not evenly distributed: the skills that standardized tests measure most reliably tend to be the skills most amenable to direct instruction and rehearsal, which means they are disproportionately accessible to students whose schools have the time, resources, and institutional priority to prepare for them.

There is a deeper validity concern embedded in the test design itself. The correlation between socioeconomic status and standardized test scores is among the most consistently documented relationships in education research. A large multi-dataset study found that while socioeconomic status correlates with test scores at r = .42, controlling statistically for socioeconomic status barely changes the test-to-performance correlation — suggesting the tests capture something real about academic preparation. What that finding does not resolve is whether the academic preparation gap it captures reflects differences in school quality, or differences in everything that surrounds school: stability, nutrition, housing, healthcare access, parental availability, summer learning loss, and the accumulated advantages and disadvantages that compound across a childhood.

When the accountability system presents Walpole’s scores and Charlestown’s scores as a report on school quality, it is presenting the output of that entire system — and attributing it entirely to the schools.

The Funding Architecture Behind the Scores

This publication has examined New Hampshire’s education funding structure in two earlier backgrounders: the adequacy fraud piece, which documented the state’s thirty-three-year pattern of withholding constitutionally owed education funding from public schools, and the property tax piece, which documented that New Hampshire relies on property taxes for 63 percent of all state and local government revenue — the highest proportion of any state in the country, by a margin that is not close.

Those two findings meet in Charlestown in a specific and documentable way.

When the state withholds adequate education funding — a pattern the courts have repeatedly found unconstitutional and which continues regardless — the shortfall lands on local property taxes. It lands hardest on communities with the least capacity to absorb it: towns with lower property values, higher needs, and rates already stretched toward their practical limits. Charlestown, at $36.54 per $1,000, has nowhere left to go. The margin that a wealthier community might use to fund additional staffing, enrichment, or targeted intervention simply does not exist.

The result is a feedback loop with a clear direction. The state underfunds education. The underfunding lands on local property taxes. The local tax burden in property-poor communities is already the highest in the state. The resources available for instruction, support, and preparation are constrained accordingly. The test scores reflect those constrained resources alongside the demographic factors that surround them. The accountability framework then presents the scores as a measure of school quality — and the cycle of disadvantage is confirmed by data that was generated by the disadvantage itself.

Who Designs the Tests — and Who Profits

New Hampshire’s standardized testing landscape operates on two tracks that are worth understanding separately.

The NH SAS — the state-required summative assessment given each spring — is administered through a portal operated by Cambium Assessment, a subsidiary of Cognia. Cognia is the entity formed when Dover, New Hampshire-based Measured Progress merged with the Georgia-based accreditation firm AdvancED. There is a certain irony in the geography: the primary instrument used to assess New Hampshire public school students was designed by a company that was, until recently, a New Hampshire company. It has since been absorbed into a much larger national nonprofit enterprise, but the local roots are worth noting. A New Hampshire institution, built on New Hampshire tax dollars, now operates at national scale and answers to a national board.

The interim assessments — the MAP Growth tests used by many New Hampshire districts two to three times per year to track student progress between state testing windows — tell a more complicated story.

MAP Growth was developed by NWEA, the Northwest Evaluation Association, which operated for four decades as a nonprofit research organization with a genuine mission orientation. In January 2023, NWEA was acquired by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. HMH had itself been taken private the previous year by Veritas Capital, a New York private equity firm, for $2.8 billion. When the HMH acquisition of NWEA closed, NWEA relinquished its 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. A separate foundation was established to receive the sale proceeds. The nonprofit identity that had defined NWEA for forty years was set aside to complete the transaction.

Veritas Capital’s investment philosophy is publicly articulated by its CEO: the firm targets technology companies operating in sectors dominated by the federal government — defense, healthcare, education — which it describes as captive markets paid for by tax dollars. The observation is accurate as a description of the standardized testing market. Federal law requires testing. That requirement does not create an optional marketplace. It creates an obligated customer base — school districts that must comply, funded by taxpayers who have no choice about whether testing occurs.

The entity that emerged from these acquisitions now occupies a structural position that warrants examination. HMH is one of the country’s largest curriculum — textbooks, lesson plans, and classroom materials — publishers. NWEA produces the assessments many of those same districts use to measure student progress. When the same company sells both the curriculum and the test, the incentive to align them is financial as well as pedagogical. A district using HMH instructional materials and NWEA assessments is measuring its students on an instrument produced by the company whose textbooks it also purchased. One education market analyst noted the implication directly: districts relying on MAP Growth should expect to be encouraged to purchase HMH curriculum so it can be aligned to the test. The model is not hypothetical — it already existed at smaller scale with Curriculum Associates, which produces both the i-Ready assessment and the curriculum it measures. The HMH/NWEA merger extended that model to a market position of considerably greater reach.

The consolidation extends further still. Renaissance Learning has partnered with curriculum providers Great Minds and Savvas. McGraw-Hill has integrated Pearson’s assessment tool into its instructional materials. The pattern across the industry is consistent: the companies that sell schools what to teach are acquiring or partnering with the companies that measure whether students learned it. Critics of this trend — including the executive director of the Center for Assessment, who consults states on testing — have raised a concern that is structural rather than conspiratorial: when assessment RFPs used to attract five, six, or ten competing bidders and now attract two or three, expertise declines, costs rise, and the leverage that public institutions once held in procurement negotiations shifts to the vendors. Fewer options means less accountability for the companies doing the measuring.

NWEA’s own published guidance for families includes a disclosure worth noting: the organization states explicitly that it does not recommend using MAP Growth for grade-level advancement or accountability purposes. That disclaimer is part of the documentation available to parents. It is considerably less visible in the public accountability frameworks that treat MAP Growth scores as meaningful measures of school performance and district quality.

New Hampshire taxpayers are financing this system — through property taxes, state education funding, and federal pass-through dollars. The communities bearing the heaviest per-capita burden of that financing are, as this piece has documented, the same communities whose students score lowest on the instruments the system produces. The companies that profit from the accountability framework those scores support are not located in Charlestown.

This is not an accusation of fraud or conspiracy. It is a description of a market structure — one that merits the same scrutiny this publication has applied to New Hampshire’s property tax architecture, its education funding adequacy obligations, and its constitutional amendment proposals. Public money flowing to private equity in exchange for mandatory compliance products is a pattern worth understanding, wherever it appears.

What the Scores Are Actually Measuring

The NH SAS tests themselves were built against the New Hampshire College and Career Ready Standards, aligned broadly to the Common Core framework adopted by most states in the early 2010s. The assessments are designed by professionals using established psychometric methods. The scores are not arbitrary. Within their defined scope, they measure something real.

The question this backgrounder has examined is not whether the tests work. It is what they are measuring when they produce the results they produce in communities like Charlestown — and whether a public accountability system that presents those results as a school quality report card is telling an accurate story, or a partial one.

The scores reflect student preparation. That preparation reflects instructional quality — but it also reflects family stability, economic security, housing, health, summer learning access, test familiarity, and the accumulated weight of living in a community where the property tax rate is the highest in the state and resources are stretched past their limit. A test that cannot distinguish between those variables is not measuring what the accountability framework claims it measures.

That is not an argument for abandoning assessment. It is an argument for reading the results honestly — for understanding that when two schools in the same district produce scores thirty percentage points apart on the same test on the same day, the distance between those numbers is not a measure of one school’s success and another’s failure.

It is a measure of everything that surrounds both schools.

And in New Hampshire, most of that is a funding story.

The Quiet Cost of a Score

There is a version of this story that is comforting in its simplicity. Some schools do well. Some schools struggle. The data shows us which is which. The accountability system ensures that struggling schools improve or face consequences.

That version requires believing that standardized test scores in a system like New Hampshire’s are measuring school quality — and only school quality. It requires setting aside what we know about the relationship between economic disadvantage and test performance. It requires ignoring what school personnel with direct knowledge describe about the preparation gap between Walpole and Charlestown. It requires not asking who designed the tests, who profits from them, and whether the instrument was built to answer the question the accountability system is asking it.

It requires, in short, looking at the number and not asking what the number is sitting on.

Charlestown’s students are not failing. Charlestown’s teachers are not failing. What is failing is a funding architecture that extracts the highest property tax rate in the state from one of its least wealthy communities, returns inadequate state support, concentrates students with the greatest learning needs in schools with the most constrained resources, and then measures the result with an instrument that cannot see any of that — and calls the output a school report card.

The test is the same in Walpole and Charlestown. The test is measuring the same thing in both towns.

That is precisely the problem.

Sources

The following sources informed this piece. Readers are encouraged to consult them directly.

1. NH Department of Education, Office of Assessment, NH SAS overview and testing requirements. education.nh.gov

2. PublicSchoolReview.com, Charlestown Primary School profile, 2024–2026. publicschoolreview.com

3. PublicSchoolReview.com, N. Charlestown Community School profile, 2024. publicschoolreview.com

4. PublicSchoolReview.com, Walpole Elementary School profile, 2025–2026. publicschoolreview.com

5. SchoolDigger.com, North Walpole School profile and NH ranking, 2024. schooldigger.com

6. SchoolDigger.com, Walpole Elementary School profile and NH ranking, 2023–2024. schooldigger.com

7. U.S. News & World Report, North Walpole School ranking, New Hampshire Elementary Schools. usnews.com

8. U.S. News & World Report, Walpole Elementary School ranking, New Hampshire Middle Schools. usnews.com

9. NH Fiscal Policy Institute / NH School Funding Fairness Project, “School Funding and Special Education Update with Latest 2023–2024 School Year Data,” February 2025. fairfundingnh.org

10. NH School Funding Fairness Project, “School Funding and Special Education: It’s Getting Worse,” March 2024. fairfundingnh.org

11. NH Fiscal Policy Institute and Valley News, “Property Tax Rates Vary Widely Across New Hampshire,” April 2026. vnews.com

12. Business NH Magazine, “New Analysis Details NH’s Massive Variation in Property Taxes,” April 2026. businessnhmagazine.com

13. Valley News, “Charlestown Town Meeting Results,” March 14, 2024. vnews.com

14. Valley News, “Charlestown Considers Shuttering School,” March 5, 2024. vnews.com

15. NWEA Wikipedia entry, acquisition history and MAP Growth description. en.wikipedia.org

16. EdWeek Market Brief, “Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Acquires Assessment Provider NWEA, in Education Mega-Deal,” January 2023. marketbrief.edweek.org

17. EdWeek Market Brief, “HMH and NWEA: An Inside Look at What’s Happened Since the Deal,” November 2024. marketbrief.edweek.org

18. EdWeek Market Brief, “Vendors Are Pairing Assessment and Curriculum. Is That What K-12 Officials Want?” March 2026. marketbrief.edweek.org

19. NWEA, Common Questions — Families (MAP Growth guidance including non-recommended uses). nwea.org

20. Steven Singer / Gadfly on the Wall Blog, “A Private Equity Firm, The Makers of the MAP Test, and an Ed Tech Publisher Join Forces,” January 2023. gadflyonthewallblog.com

21. K-12 Dive, “HMH Finalizes Acquisition of Assessment Provider NWEA,” May 2023. k12dive.com

22. NH Business Review, “Cognia’s the New Name of Former Measured Progress,” August 2019. nhbr.com

23. The Century Foundation, “This School Didn’t Teach to the Test — And Scored Better,” March 2022. tcf.org

24. Harvard Gazette, “Wide Gap in SAT/ACT Test Scores Between Wealthy, Lower-Income Kids,” November 2023. news.harvard.edu

25. Opportunity Insights / Harvard, Chetty, Friedman, and Deming, research on SAT/ACT performance by income. opportunityinsights.org

26. Fiveable / EBSCO Research Starters, “Standardized Testing and IQ Testing Controversies.” ebsco.com

27. Citizens Count NH, “Standardized Testing in Schools,” NH Issue Brief. citizenscount.org

28. Steven, “The Invisible Income Tax: What ‘No Income Tax, No Sales Tax’ Actually Costs in New Hampshire,” The Quiet Cost, April 30, 2026. thequietcost.substack.com

29. Steven, “The Adequacy Fraud: Thirty-Three Years of a Promise New Hampshire Has Never Kept,” The Quiet Cost, April 2026. thequietcost.substack.com

30. Fall Mountain Regional High School, Wikipedia entry, district history and composition. en.wikipedia.org

This piece reflects independent analysis of publicly available data, reports, and published journalism from the sources cited above. Where specific figures or findings originate in reporting by named organizations or researchers, attribution is made in the text. The NH DOE’s public iReport database contains school-level IEP enrollment data verifiable by any reader.

School personnel with direct knowledge of practices in both Charlestown and Walpole schools informed the description of pre-assessment preparation. Their identities are not disclosed.

About sources and drafting methods →

A note before we begin. It is not my intention in this piece to assign blame, suggest anyone should face legal consequence, or imply there is a secret coordinated effort to disadvantage any group of New Hampshire residents. What I am asking is something more precise — and something the documented record makes possible with unusual clarity. The strategy described in this piece has been named by its own architects. Its stages have been documented in states that preceded New Hampshire down this path. And the evidence that New Hampshire is now moving through those stages is not inference. It is a matter of public record. As with every piece in this series: follow the numbers, trace the outcomes, notice who each decision benefits and who carries the additional burden. The conclusions the documented record points toward are ones I will let you reach for yourself.

There is a playbook.

It is not hidden. It has been described by its own architects in lectures, published papers, and public statements. It has been executed, with varying degrees of completion, in Arizona, Florida, Indiana, and Wisconsin. It has a name in policy literature — sometimes called the starve and blame strategy, sometimes the privatization playbook — and it operates in three documented stages.

Stage One: Systematically defund the public institution over a period of years, ensuring it cannot perform at the level it was designed to perform.

Stage Two: Redirect the funding mechanism that was supposed to correct the underfunding toward an alternative that benefits a different constituency — positioning that alternative as a superior option before the public institution’s decline becomes visible.

Stage Three: When the predictable consequences of stages one and two materialize — declining performance metrics, workforce attrition, program cuts, community strain — point to those consequences as evidence that the institution itself is broken and beyond repair. Present the pre-positioned alternative as the solution. Do not mention the defunding that produced the failure.

This piece is about where New Hampshire currently sits in that sequence — and about the specific, documented evidence that Stage Three has begun.

Section One: The Playbook Has a Name — and Its Architects Described It Openly

The starve and blame strategy was not invented for education. Its origins are in the Reagan-era fiscal philosophy known as “starve the beast” — the deliberate use of tax cuts to reduce government revenue, forcing subsequent spending reductions on the programs that revenue supported. David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director, named the strategy explicitly in his 1986 book. Milton Friedman, in 2003, described the mechanism plainly: cutting a government’s allowance was the only reliable way to reduce its size.

The application of this strategy to public education specifically — with the additional stage of positioning a private alternative — came later, and its architects have been equally transparent.

Christopher Rufo, one of the leading figures in the school privatization movement, described the strategy at a lecture at Hillsdale College with a precision that bears quoting exactly:

“To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”

That sentence is not a description of responding to public school failure. It is a description of manufacturing the premise that produces the political conditions for replacing public schools. The distrust comes first. The failure narrative is built to justify it. The alternative is pre-positioned before the failure is declared.

The Arizona model — the most complete execution of this playbook in American K-12 education — documents how the sequence operates in practice. Arizona lawmakers, supported by organizations funded by the Koch network and the DeVos family, spent decades systematically reducing public school funding through draconian tax cuts beginning in the 1990s. By 2008, Arizona had fallen from 35th worst in public education funding nationally to 47th worst. By late 2016, state funding per pupil was down 36.6 percent compared to before the Great Recession. When the predictable consequences materialized — declining outcomes, teacher shortages, program cuts — the narrative was ready: public schools were failing. The alternative had been positioned. In 2022, Arizona became the first state to pass a universal school voucher program.

The outcome in Arizona is now documented and serves as a warning for every state watching New Hampshire’s trajectory.

Arizona’s voucher program’s cost skyrocketed from an original estimate of just under $65 million to roughly $332 million in a single fiscal year. The state faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of it attributable to voucher spending. And 75 percent of voucher recipients had never attended a public school — meaning the state was spending hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing private education for families who had never used the public system it was supposedly improving.

New Hampshire’s EFA program, as this series documented in its first backgrounder, has 96.7 percent of recipients who never attended the public school system. New Hampshire has exceeded Arizona’s ratio before completing Arizona’s funding collapse.

Section Two: Stage One in New Hampshire — The Defunding Record

The previous backgrounders in this series have documented Stage One in New Hampshire in quantifiable detail. The record does not require repetition here — it requires assembly.

The New Hampshire Supreme Court established in 1993 that the state bears the exclusive constitutional obligation to fund an adequate education for every child. That obligation has never been fully met. In July 2025, the court ruled in ConVal that the constitutional minimum is at least $7,356.01 per pupil per year. The state pays $4,266.

The annual gap — more than $500 million — lands on local property tax bills, most heavily in the communities least able to carry it.

Special education students receive $2,100 in additional state aid annually. The average actual cost of serving them is $49,812. Local property taxes absorb 83 percent of special education revenues statewide. The state’s contribution, in many cases, does not cover the cost of the initial evaluation required before a single service is delivered.

In fiscal year 2026, 109 New Hampshire communities received less state adequacy aid than in fiscal year 2025, losing an average of $137,115.96 in school funding. Those cuts are scheduled to grow every two years through 2034 as the Hold Harmless Grant phases out.

The legislature’s response to two consecutive court rulings finding the system unconstitutional was not to increase funding. It was to pass HB 1815, redefining adequacy downward, and to ask the Supreme Court to overturn the 1993 and 1997 Claremont decisions that created the obligation entirely.

This is Stage One. It is documented in court records, legislative history, and the property tax bills of every working family in Claremont, Berlin, my hometown of Charlestown, and Pittsfield. The defunding is not incidental. It is the constitutional shortfall the courts have named, the legislature has refused to correct, and the property tax system has been absorbing for three decades.

Section Three: Stage Two in New Hampshire — The Redirection

While the constitutional shortfall accumulated, the alternative was being positioned.

New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Account (EFA) program was created in 2021 with an income cap of 300 percent of the federal poverty level — presented as a targeted program serving disadvantaged families who needed alternatives. In its first year, 54 percent of participants came from families in the lowest income bracket.

Each subsequent year, the income cap was raised. In June 2025, Governor Ayotte signed SB 295, removing the income cap entirely and making New Hampshire the 19th state to establish a universal school voucher program. The program currently has 10,510 students — nearly double the prior year’s enrollment — at a cost of $51.6 million for the 2025-2026 school year alone. The state budget appropriated $87.1 million for the current biennium — 119 percent more than the prior biennium.

As income limits were removed, the demographics shifted precisely as Arizona’s had.

In the program’s first year, with the income cap in place, 54 percent of EFA recipients came from families making less than 185 percent of the federal poverty level. This school year, with no income cap, that figure is 19 percent.

The program sold as serving disadvantaged families is now predominantly serving families who were already choosing and affording private and home education, many never having attended public education.

The Education Trust Fund — established specifically to fulfill the state’s constitutional obligation to fund public education — is the fund from which EFA grants are drawn. The same fund the courts have twice found to be constitutionally underfunded for public schools is now being drawn upon to subsidize private, religious, and homeschool families who made no claim on the public system. A projected deficit of approximately $60 million will require replacement from general funds.

Meanwhile, the legislative oversight committee established to monitor the EFA program’s performance has not met publicly in more than a year and has failed to produce its required annual report. No accountability. No transparency. The alternative being positioned to replace the public institution operates with less external scrutiny than the public institution it is designed to replace.

The redirection is not subtle. The Education Trust Fund is being drained from the bottom — public school adequacy underfunded by court-confirmed constitutional violations — and from the top, by a voucher program whose costs are growing at 119 percent per biennium while the population it was designed to serve has been diluted to the point where low-income recipients are now a minority of participants.

Stage Two is underway. The alternative is positioned. The funding mechanism is redirected. The question is what comes next.

Section Four: Stage Three Begins — The Narrative Is Being Built

Stage Three does not announce itself. It arrives as data.

The Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy — the same organization that celebrated the Interest and Dividends Tax repeal by claiming New Hampshire had “no individual income or sales taxes at either the state or local level” while the Meals and Rooms Tax collected 8.5 percent on every restaurant meal in the state — published a study in November 2025 with a carefully constructed framing.

The study documented a 45 percent increase in inflation-adjusted spending on New Hampshire public schools from 2001 to 2024, alongside an enrollment decline of 26 percent and a fall of 21 points in NAEP reading and math scores. The Bartlett Center’s conclusion, published under the headline “NH Public Schools Post Nation’s Largest Enrollment Decline and 4th Highest Per-Pupil Spending Growth,” was stated directly: “The inescapable conclusion is that New Hampshire’s K-12 public school students have more resources devoted to their educations than ever before.”

The implication — which the headline and framing make unmistakable — is that declining outcomes despite rising spending constitute evidence of institutional failure. More money. Worse results. The system is broken.

This framing requires three specific omissions to function.

The first omission: The spending increase is overwhelmingly local, driven by property taxpayers absorbing the state’s constitutional shortfall. The 45 percent spending increase over two decades is not evidence of a generously funded system. It is evidence of a community-level response to a state-level funding abdication documented in two Supreme Court rulings. Communities are spending more because the state is spending less than it constitutionally owes. Attributing the spending increase to the system’s dysfunction rather than to its underfunding inverts the causal relationship entirely.

The second omission: Enrollment decline is demographic, not market-driven. The New Hampshire Department of Education’s own data attributes declining enrollment to lower birth rates — the annual birth cohort fell from approximately 14,000 in the early 2000s to roughly 11,000 to 12,000 today. There are fewer school-age children in New Hampshire. Presenting enrollment decline as evidence that families are rejecting public schools requires ignoring the department’s own explanation for why it is occurring.

The third omission: NAEP score declines are national in scope. Scores fell 7 points nationally over the same period New Hampshire fell 21 points. New Hampshire’s decline is real and deserves examination. But attributing it solely to public school dysfunction, without examining the documented relationship between chronic underfunding, teacher attrition, and educational outcomes, is not analysis. It is framing.

The narrative infrastructure of Stage Three — more money, worse outcomes, the system is broken — is being built now, in New Hampshire, by the same organizations that have consistently supported the policies producing the outcomes being blamed on the institution.

Section Five: The Legislators Speaking Stage Three Out Loud

Stage Three does not remain at the level of think tank publications. It enters the legislative record.

Representative Sullivan, arguing for full removal of the EFA enrollment cap, stated her case plainly:

“We’ve increased public school spending significantly, and the outcomes haven’t changed. So I think people are looking for more of a return on their dollar, which is why they’re supporting the EFAs.”

Read that sentence against the documented record of this series.

The spending increase she cites is the property tax increase produced by the state’s failure to meet its constitutional obligation. The outcomes that haven’t changed are the product of thirty years of underfunding, a teacher workforce losing nearly 7 percent of its members in a single year — ranking last in the nation — and a special education system whose state contribution covers less than 5 percent of actual costs. The “return on their dollar” she is describing is being paid to a program whose oversight committee hasn’t met in over a year, whose low-income participation has dropped from 54 percent to 19 percent as it became universal, and whose recipient population is 96.7 percent families who never used the public system.

The cause of the problem is being presented as the solution to the problem.

That is Stage Three. It is no longer approaching. It is here.

Section Six: What the Alternative Actually Offers — and Who It Leaves Behind

The honest accounting of the EFA program’s record requires examining not only what it offers its participants but what it delivers — and what it cannot deliver — for the students who will remain in the public system regardless of what the voucher program does.

The students most dependent on public schools are precisely the students least served by market-based alternatives. Rural communities across New Hampshire have no viable private school options within reasonable distance. Students with significant disabilities are, as the Arizona record documents extensively, routinely denied admission by private schools even when they hold vouchers. Families navigating poverty, housing instability, or the complexity of special education systems do not have the bandwidth the EFA program requires to navigate its application process, select a vendor, and manage their child’s alternative education.

In Arizona — the model New Hampshire is following — the documented outcomes after three years of universal vouchers include a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, no measurable improvement in educational outcomes for voucher recipients, and a public school system stripped of the funding it needs to serve the 70 percent of students whose families have no viable alternative. The state that New Hampshire’s voucher advocates celebrated as the model is now managing the consequences of the experiment they championed.

New Hampshire’s public schools serve approximately 160,000 students. Its EFA program serves 10,510 — and is growing. The students who will remain in public schools as that program grows are disproportionately the students with the greatest needs and the fewest alternatives. The funding mechanism supporting those students is being simultaneously underfunded by the state’s constitutional shortfall and drained by the EFA program’s expanding cost. And reiterating what I stated above, the oversight committee monitoring the program’s performance has not met in over a year.

The question the documented record raises is not whether New Hampshire values public education. Communities across the state have demonstrated, through decades of property tax increases absorbed to cover the state’s shortfall, that they value it considerably. The question is whether the people making decisions about its future are building something better — or executing a playbook whose outcome in every state that preceded New Hampshire has been a system that works well for families with resources and leaves everyone else behind. Serving the wealthy via subsidies paid by everyone else.

Section Seven: What Honest Attribution Requires

This series has documented the defunding. It has documented the redirection. It has documented the construction of the failure narrative. None of this is inference. The defunding is in court decisions. The redirection is in budget appropriations. The narrative is in published studies and legislative testimony.

Honest attribution requires naming the relationship between the cause and the effect. New Hampshire’s public schools are under strain. That is documented and real. The sources of that strain are also documented and real: a thirty-year constitutional underfunding confirmed by two Supreme Court rulings in 2025, a teacher workforce that has lost nearly 7 percent of its members in a single year while compensation falls further behind neighboring states, a special education system whose state contribution covers less than 5 percent of actual costs, and a funding mechanism — the property tax — that has increased 48 percent over a decade because it is absorbing obligations the state constitutionally owes but refuses to pay.

The question honest attribution requires asking is this: when an institution is systemically underfunded, its workforce driven out by noncompetitive compensation, its constitutional obligations deflected onto local property taxpayers, its funding mechanism simultaneously drained by a parallel program serving families who never used it — and when the people who made those decisions then present the institution’s predictable decline as evidence that it cannot be saved — is that a diagnosis or a conclusion that was decided before the examination began?

The playbook does not require bad actors. It requires each stage to be executed without the public understanding how the stages connect.

Stage One looks like fiscal responsibility. Stage Two looks like parental choice. Stage Three looks like accountability for outcomes.

They are connected. The documented record shows how.

What comes next in New Hampshire depends, in part, on whether enough Granite Staters examine that record before Stage Three is complete.

The previous backgrounders in this series documented the instruments. This piece has named the strategy. The next question — whether the conversation the series has been building toward can happen before the architecture it describes becomes permanent — is the one The Quiet Cost will continue to examine.

Sources

The following sources informed this piece. Prior backgrounders in this series contain their own full source lists, which are not duplicated here.

1. Save Our Schools Arizona, “The Privatization Playbook,” sosaznetwork.org, October 2024.

2. Christopher Rufo, lecture at Hillsdale College, cited in Save Our Schools Arizona, “The Privatization Playbook,” 2024.

3. ProPublica, “Arizona School Voucher Program Causes Budget Meltdown,” September 24, 2024. propublica.org

4. AZ Mirror, “Universal Vouchers Dramatically Defund and Divide,” September 7, 2022. azmirror.com

5. Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, “NH Public Schools Post Nation’s Largest Enrollment Decline and 4th Highest Per-Pupil Spending Growth,” November 28, 2025. jbartlett.org

6. New Hampshire Bulletin, “As New Hampshire Education Freedom Accounts Double, Percentage of Low-Income Recipients Drops,” December 3, 2025. newhampshirebulletin.com

7. New Hampshire Bulletin, “New Hampshire Clearly Values Education, But the System Is Under Growing Strain,” April 28, 2026. newhampshirebulletin.com

8. NHPR, “As New Hampshire’s School Voucher Program Expands, Oversight Committee Hasn’t Met in a Year,” December 8, 2025. nhpr.org

9. Reaching Higher NH, “School Vouchers: What Can We Expect From Expansion?” August 8, 2025. reachinghighernh.org

10. InDepthNH.org, “Education Freedom Account Program Hits Its Enrollment Cap,” August 5, 2025. indepthnh.org

11. Garry Rayno, “New Education Freedom Account Data Tells a Different Story,” InDepthNH.org, December 6, 2025. indepthnh.org

12. NH Fiscal Policy Institute, “The State Budget for Fiscal Years 2026 and 2027,” August 2025. nhfpi.org

13. NH Department of Education, “New Hampshire Adapts to Changing Student Population,” November 14, 2025. education.nh.gov

14. New Hampshire Bulletin, “Report: New Hampshire’s Public School State Spending Levels Lowest in U.S.,” April 29, 2025. newhampshirebulletin.com

15. Valley News, “NH Public School Funding Last in Nation, Teachers Suffer,” April 29, 2026. vnews.com

16. Ballotpedia, “Starve-the-beast.” ballotpedia.org

17. Wikipedia, “Starve the Beast.” en.wikipedia.org

18. Economic Policy Institute, “State and Local Experience Proves School Vouchers Are a Failed Policy,” April 20, 2023. epi.org

19. Shanker Institute, “How Do Vouchers Defund Public Schools? Four Warnings and One Big Takeaway,” May 15, 2024. shankerinstitute.org

20. Steven, “Your Tax Dollars at Work: How New Hampshire Funds Private Education for Students Who Never Attended Public School,” The Quiet Cost. thequietcost.substack.com

21. Steven, “The Adequacy Fraud: Thirty-Three Years of a Promise New Hampshire Has Never Kept,” The Quiet Cost. thequietcost.substack.com

22. Steven, “Not Separate Problems. One System: What Five Backgrounders Add Up To — and What the Pattern Points Toward Next,” The Quiet Cost. thequietcost.substack.com

This piece reflects the author’s independent analysis of publicly available data, court decisions, legislative records, and journalism by the sources cited above. It is not legal or financial advice. Where specific figures or findings originate in reporting by named journalists or organizations, that attribution is made in the text.

About sources and drafting methods →

A note before we begin. It is not my intention in this piece — or in any piece in this series — to assign blame, suggest anyone should face legal consequence, or imply there is a secret coordinated effort to disadvantage any group of New Hampshire residents. My background is in property appraisal and tax assessment. The professional discipline that work requires is simple: read the actual instrument in front of you rather than the label on the outside of the box. Follow the numbers. Trace the outcomes. Notice — carefully and without prejudgment — who each policy decision benefits, and who is left carrying the additional burden. This piece assembles what the previous five backgrounders in The Quiet Cost’s series on New Hampshire’s tax and education funding structure established — and points toward what comes next. Readers who have followed the series will recognize the components. Readers arriving here for the first time will find enough to understand what is at stake — and, this publication hopes, enough to go back and read what came before. As with every piece in this series: the pattern that emerges from the documented record is presented here. The conclusions it points toward are ones I will let you reach for yourself.

Five backgrounders. Five instruments. Five separate examinations of decisions that each have a defensible standalone rationale — protecting local control, expanding parental choice, rewarding business investment, reducing tax burden, providing constitutional certainty.

This piece is about what they add up to when examined together.

Section One: The Inventory

The Property Tax as the Invisible Income Tax. New Hampshire raises 63 percent of all state and local government revenue from a single source — the property tax — the highest dependence on any single tax instrument of any state in the country, by a margin that is not close. That instrument extracts an effective rate of 8.9 percent of income from the bottom 20 percent of earners and 2.8 percent from the top 1 percent. It falls on renters as well as owners. It varies from $2.62 to $36.54 per $1,000 of assessed value across the state — producing a $17,000 annual difference for the same-valued home depending on which side of a town line it sits. It is compounded at the assessment level, where modest homes are systematically overvalued and expensive ones undervalued before the rate is applied. It is, by every neutral definition of the term, a broad-based tax. It has never been called one.

The Adequacy Fraud. The New Hampshire Supreme Court established in 1993 that the state bears the exclusive constitutional obligation to define and fund an adequate education for every child. In July 2025, the court ruled in ConVal that the constitutional minimum is at least $7,356.01 per pupil per year. The state currently pays $4,266. The gap — roughly $3,100 per student, across approximately 168,000 public school students — represents more than $500 million annually in constitutionally owed funding that the state withholds. That money does not disappear. It lands on local property tax bills, most heavily in the communities least able to carry it. The legislature’s response to the ConVal ruling was not to increase funding. It was to pass HB 1815 — redefining adequacy downward — and to ask the Supreme Court to overturn the 1993 and 1997 Claremont decisions entirely.

The EFA Diversion. The Education Trust Fund — established specifically to fulfill the state’s constitutional education obligation — is the same fund from which Education Freedom Account grants are drawn. The legislature that tells public school districts there is no money to meet adequacy payments found $113.5 million over the current biennium for the EFA program. As documented in this publication’s first backgrounder, 96.7 percent of EFA recipients in the most recent reporting period had never been enrolled in the public school system the fund was created to support. The combined effect will drain the Education Trust Fund and produce a projected deficit of approximately $60 million requiring replacement from general funds — while 145 municipalities received less state adequacy aid in fiscal year 2026 than in 2025.

There is a pattern in policy literature for what happens when a public institution is systematically underfunded while its resources are redirected elsewhere — and for how the predictable consequences of that underfunding are subsequently used. That pattern, and its specific application to New Hampshire’s public education system, will be the subject of this publication’s next backgrounder.

The Interest and Dividends Tax Repeal. New Hampshire collected an income tax from 1923 until 2025. It was called the Interest and Dividends Tax. It ran for 102 years while The Pledge against income taxation was being sworn. Its repeal, completed effective January 1, 2025, produced no measurable reduction in effective tax rate for the bottom 80 percent of earners. More than half of the revenue it had collected came from the 2.5 percent of filers reporting more than $200,000 in taxable investment income. The state did not eliminate its only income tax. It eliminated the one it had spent a century pretending was not one — and in doing so, removed the one instrument in its tax system that asked more of those with more investment income, while the property tax that falls most heavily on those with the least remained fully intact.

The Constitutional Lock. CACR 12 — introduced by fourteen Republican state senators with no Democratic sponsors — would require a two-thirds supermajority vote of the legislature to enact any broad-based tax, including an income tax, a sales tax, a capital gains tax, or an estate tax. It responds to no tax currently being proposed. It responds to a possibility — the possibility that a future legislature, faced with the documented consequences of the current system, might want to consider alternatives. Its purpose is to answer that future debate before it occurs, by making one category of solutions constitutionally out of reach. The sponsors are uniformly from the party whose donors and constituencies pay the lowest effective rates under the current system and would pay more under any restructured alternative.

Taken individually, each of these is a policy decision. Taken together, they describe something more specific: a fiscal architecture with a consistent direction. This piece is about that direction — and about the documented mechanism that has kept most Granite Staters from examining it.

Section Two: The Mechanism Nobody Named

There is a reason this architecture has operated largely unexamined for fifty years. It is not primarily because residents lack the information — though the information has been systematically kept from the debate. It is because the architecture includes, as one of its instruments, a mechanism that prevents the examination from occurring.

Political economists who study regressive fiscal systems have documented what happens when a single instrument — one that extracts a disproportionate share of income from those with the least — becomes the primary mechanism of government finance. Three phenomena operate in sequence.

The first is the treadmill effect. As property taxes rise, working families must work more hours, take additional jobs, defer retirement, or sacrifice other needs simply to remain in homes they already own. They run harder to stay in place. The tax does not rise because their circumstances improved. It rises because the state transferred its constitutional obligations downward, cut taxes at the top, and called the result a low-tax environment. Between 2016 and 2025, aggregate local property taxes in New Hampshire increased $1.52 billion — nearly 48 percent — after inflation adjustments. The treadmill does not announce itself. It simply gets faster.

The second is fiscal exhaustion. The burden imposed by the system consumes precisely the time, energy, and civic capacity that would otherwise be available to understand, question, and challenge it. A family working two jobs to cover a property tax bill consuming 8.9 percent of their income does not have bandwidth to attend legislative hearings, track budget debates, or organize politically around a funding mechanism most people have never had explained to them plainly. The people with the most at stake in reforming the system are the ones the system has most effectively stripped of the capacity to demand reform. Civic participation declines. Political pressure for structural change weakens. The burden grows further.

The third is political fatigue by design. The Pledge does not merely protect the current distribution of tax burden. It exhausts the debate itself. Every election cycle in which “no income tax, no sales tax” functions as a litmus test rather than a policy position is a cycle in which the actual burden on working families is not the subject under examination. The 8.9 percent effective rate disappears behind the brand. The $17,000 gap between neighboring towns disappears behind the brand. The $500 million annual constitutional shortfall disappears behind the brand. The debate stays confined to labels, and the people who most need it to change are too exhausted by the treadmill to redirect it.

There is a fourth instrument that does not appear in any of the previous backgrounders because it does not appear on any tax bill and generates almost no political debate: fees. Licensing fees, court fees, municipal fees, recreational fees, inspection fees. As traditional state revenue mechanisms are reduced or eliminated — business tax cuts, the I&D repeal, reduced state aid to municipalities — the gap is increasingly filled not only by property taxes but by fees assessed at every level of government. Fees are functionally a flat charge. They fall on everyone equally regardless of income. They are more regressive than the property tax. They accumulate quietly in household budgets, most visibly in the budgets of those with the least margin to absorb them. They are invisible to the political debate precisely because they are invisible to the tax bill.

Three terms. One documented cycle. Fifty years of uninterrupted operation. One additional instrument operating below the threshold of public visibility.

Section Three: The Attorney, the Cases, and Thirty-Three Years

In 1988, a group of school districts, property taxpayers, and parents in some of New Hampshire’s poorest communities filed suit against the state. They argued that the system by which New Hampshire funded public education violated the state constitution’s guarantee of an adequate education and its requirement that state taxes be proportional and reasonable.

The lead attorney for the plaintiffs was Andru Volinsky — a George Washington University Law School graduate who had come to New Hampshire after teaching criminal law at the University of Tennessee College of Law and defending death penalty cases as a faculty member. He had argued before the United States Supreme Court at age thirty. He was, by any measure, a serious lawyer taking a serious case.

In 1993, the New Hampshire Supreme Court decided Claremont I. The state bore the exclusive constitutional obligation to define and fund an adequate education for every child. In 1997, Claremont II established that the property taxes used to fund education were state taxes — required to be equal in valuation and uniform in rate statewide.

Volinsky won both cases. The constitutional right was established. It has never been fully implemented.

In 2016, Volinsky represented the Dover School District and won the return of more than $1.5 million in unconstitutionally withheld school aid. In 2017, he was elected to the New Hampshire Executive Council, where he served two terms. In 2020, he narrowly lost the Democratic gubernatorial primary to Dan Feltes. Through all of it, the constitutional obligation he established in 1993 remained unmet — generating lawsuit after lawsuit, ruling after ruling, each one finding the state in violation of the right his litigation created.

In March 2026, Volinsky released the 3-3 Tax Savings Plan — a proposal pairing a 3 percent state education income tax with a $3 statewide property tax, designed to replace the local property tax burden that has been absorbing the state’s constitutional shortfall for three decades. Simultaneously, he launched NHTaxSavingsCalculator.com — a tool allowing any Granite Stater to calculate their personal financial outcome under the restructured system.

Three polls followed within two months. Volinsky analyzed all three. His analysis is available at his Substack publication and is recommended reading alongside this series.

The constitutional right he established in 1993 is the same right the adequacy fraud backgrounder documented being systematically dismantled — through HB 1815, through the Attorney General’s request to overturn Claremont entirely, through a Supreme Court panel four of whose five justices have been asked to recuse themselves from the appeal. The polling data he is analyzing in 2026 is evidence of whether the political will to finally meet that obligation may be developing.

Volinsky is not a peripheral figure citing interesting data. He is the attorney who created the legal obligation the state has spent thirty-three years avoiding. The documented record presents those facts in sequence. What they add up to is a conclusion the reader is equipped to reach without assistance.

Section Four: What the Polling Tells Us

The three polls conducted in the weeks following the 3-3 plan’s release asked what was nominally the same question — do you support a New Hampshire income tax — but framed it differently. The results were not the same.

St. Anselm’s Institute of Politics asked the bare question: would you support or oppose a New Hampshire state income tax? No context. No purpose. No fairness framing. No connection to property tax relief. Among Democrats — the group most predisposed to support restructuring — opposition exceeded support by nine percentage points.

The UNH Survey Center added context: a 3 percent income tax paired with a $3 statewide property tax, with advocates claiming it would reduce local property taxes. Among Democrats, opposition narrowed to two percentage points — a seven-point shift — though the “unsure” category increased, likely because two instruments were bundled in a single question and the word “advocates” introduced a credibility qualifier.

A private poll conducted simultaneously in Congressional District 1 removed the credibility qualifier and added something neither previous poll had included: explicit reference to generous deductions protecting working class and middle class families. Among Democrats, support flipped to a majority.

Three polls. The same underlying question. A seventeen-point swing in Democratic response based entirely on whether the question included fairness framing and specific protections for working families.

This is not a polling anomaly. It is a confirmation of what this publication described in its opening backgrounder’s framing — that identity-protective cognition operates by stripping context from the question. “Do you support an income tax?” activates the Live Free or Die identity before the respondent has processed any information about what the tax would do, who it would protect, or how it compares to what they are already paying. Add the context — add the fairness, the purpose, the specific protections — and the reflex weakens. The underlying policy preference, unclouded by the brand, begins to emerge.

Volinsky identified four specific facts that none of the three polls included — facts that, had they been presented as benchmarking information before the question was asked, would likely have shifted the results further:

One hundred thousand Granite Staters already pay an income tax — to other states where they work. They are paying one right now. They would pay no additional tax under the 3-3 plan.

Sixty-five thousand people commute into New Hampshire for work and currently contribute nothing to the state’s revenue base. They use New Hampshire roads, benefit from its public safety infrastructure, and pay nothing toward it. They would contribute under a restructured system.

Eighty percent of New Hampshire property owners would pay less under the 3-3 plan than under the current system.

Renters — who bear the invisible property tax burden this series documented in detail — would receive either an income tax credit or a direct payment of $750 per year.

These are not arguments for the 3-3 plan specifically. This publication takes no position on any particular legislative proposal. They are arguments for having the conversation — the one The Pledge has foreclosed for fifty years by ensuring the question is always asked without them.

Volinsky’s own assessment, extrapolating from the three polls: positive support for tax restructuring stands at roughly a quarter to a third of the electorate before any benchmarking information is introduced. With benchmarking — with the specific documented costs of the current system and the specific documented benefits of restructuring — he believes that number could reach fifty percent or more.

The treadmill has been running for fifty years. The polling data suggests that enough people have noticed the speed is increasing that the conversation may finally be possible. From my perspective, as one who worked professionally with the nuances of New Hampshire's antiquated property taxation system — where individual valuations are, at best, estimates of value — it is long past time that estimate stopped being the primary instrument by which New Hampshire funds its public life.

Section Five: The Brand Defending Itself

On March 3, 2026, the 3-3 Tax Savings Plan was announced on the steps of the State House by a group of former and current legislators and civic leaders, led by Andru Volinsky and former State Senator Mark Fernald — the 2002 Democratic nominee for governor.

Governor Kelly Ayotte’s response was immediate: “Absolutely not. I’ve said it before, and I will say it again — no income tax, no sales tax. Not now, not ever.”

The record this series has established is worth noting here. As documented in this publication’s backgrounder “What Do You Mean By ‘Broad-Based’?”, New Hampshire has collected a sales tax since 1967 — the Meals and Rooms Tax, currently assessed at 8.5 percent, a rate higher than Massachusetts’s general sales tax. And New Hampshire collected an income tax from 1923 until 2025 — the Interest and Dividends Tax, which ran for 102 years while The Pledge was being sworn against it. The battle cry has never accurately described New Hampshire’s tax reality. It has described New Hampshire’s preferred tax vocabulary. Those are not the same thing.

Not an analysis of the plan’s merits. Not an engagement with the 80 percent of property owners who would pay less. Not a response to the constitutional shortfall the plan was designed to address. Seven words of policy proposal met seven words of brand reflex.

In April 2026, the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute published its comprehensive property tax report — the nonpartisan analysis this series has drawn on extensively, which documented 63 percent revenue dependence, the widening burden disparity, and the structural consequences of the current system. The report did not recommend an income tax. It recommended structural adjustments to reduce property tax dependence and better distribute the burden.

In the same month, 109 New Hampshire communities received less state adequacy aid in fiscal year 2026 than in fiscal year 2025 — losing an average of $137,115.96 in school funding, with cuts scheduled to grow every two years as the Hold Harmless Grant phases out through 2034. These are not abstractions. They are school board line items in Derry, Laconia, Concord, and Weare, among 105 other communities, where the gap between what the state constitutionally owes and what it pays has become a specific dollar amount that someone has to cover.

Free Stater House Majority Leader Jason Osborne’s response to the NHFPI report was published the same week: “If your property tax bill looks like a ransom note, don’t let the NHFPI lie to your face. They want you to believe your town has a ‘revenue problem.’”

The NHFPI had not recommended an income tax. It had published data. The data was called a lie.

Three days before this backgrounder was written, a former school board member and House Education Committee veteran published an opinion piece in the Concord Monitor arguing that the school funding debate is “a Trojan Horse to advance a hidden agenda that involves creating a state income tax.” He described New Hampshire as “an island of fiscal sanity in a blue ocean of overspending and overtaxing.”

The 109 communities losing school funding that month were not mentioned.

This is political fatigue by design operating in real time. The brand does not engage the documented evidence. It discredits the source, invokes the identity, and redirects the audience’s attention to the label rather than the instrument. It has worked for fifty years. It is working now.

The question the polling data raises is whether it will keep working — or whether the accumulation of evidence, the specificity of the documented harm, and the availability of tools like the NHTaxSavingsCalculator that let individuals see their own numbers rather than relying on the brand’s framing, might finally be enough to move the conversation past the reflex.

Section Six: What an Honest Reckoning Requires

This series has not argued for an income tax. It has not argued for a sales tax. It has not endorsed the 3-3 plan or any other specific legislative proposal. What it has argued — across six backgrounders, drawing on court decisions, legislative records, peer-reviewed research, and independent journalism — is that an honest conversation about New Hampshire’s fiscal future requires four acknowledgments that the current political environment has made nearly impossible to voice.

First: New Hampshire has a broad-based tax. It has always had one. It is called the property tax. It raises 63 percent of all government revenue. It falls on every resident. It is the most regressive primary fiscal instrument in the country. Any conversation about New Hampshire’s tax structure that does not begin with this acknowledgment is a conversation about something other than New Hampshire’s actual tax structure.

Second: The constitutional obligation to fund an adequate education exists. It has been established by the courts, reaffirmed eight times, and documented in two landmark rulings in 2025 alone. The legislature’s response has been to redefine the obligation downward and ask the Supreme Court to eliminate it entirely. The four justices who will likely hear that appeal each have documented professional histories opposing the constitutional right they are being asked to adjudicate — and each will decide for himself whether that constitutes a conflict requiring recusal.

Third: The instruments that could correct the current distribution exist. They have been proposed. They have been foreclosed — first by political pledge, now by pending constitutional amendment. The people whose effective tax rate of 2.8 percent depends on the current system remaining unchanged are the same people whose political infrastructure has spent fifty years ensuring the question of changing it cannot survive a campaign.

Fourth: The people most harmed by the current system are the people the treadmill has most effectively exhausted. The working family in Claremont paying 8.9 percent of their income in state and local taxes — more than their counterpart in Massachusetts, the state they are told to fear — does not have the bandwidth the system requires to demand the conversation it prevents. That is not an accident of circumstance. It is a documented structural outcome.

An honest reckoning does not require agreeing on the solution. It requires agreeing on what the problem actually is — which requires being willing to read the instruments rather than the labels, follow the numbers rather than the motto, and notice, carefully and without prejudgment, who each policy decision benefits and who carries the additional burden.

The attorney who established the constitutional right thirty-three years ago is watching the polling data. I’m doing likewise.

The seven words are still available.

What do you mean by broad-based?

The next backgrounder in this series will examine what policy analysts call the starve and blame strategy — the documented pattern by which public institutions are systematically defunded, their predictable failures attributed to inherent dysfunction rather than deliberate underfunding, and a pre-positioned alternative presented as the solution. The evidence that this pattern is underway in New Hampshire’s public education system is already in the record. The next piece will name it.

Sources

The following sources informed this piece. Readers are encouraged to consult them directly. Prior backgrounders in this series contain their own full source lists, which are not duplicated here.

1. Andru Volinsky, “Policy, Polling, and Politics,” Andru’s Substack, April 2026. andruvolinsky.substack.com

2. NHTaxSavingsCalculator.com, “The 3-3 Tax Savings Plan,” 2026. nhtaxsavingscalculator.com

3. Concord Monitor, “Reducing Property Tax Burden NH,” March 3, 2026. concordmonitor.com

4. NH Fiscal Policy Institute, “Property Taxes in New Hampshire: How They Work and How They Compare,” April 2026. nhfpi.org

5. NHFPI, “In 2026, 109 New Hampshire Communities Lost School Funding,” April 2026. nhfpi.org

6. New Hampshire Bulletin, “New Hampshire Unique Among States in Reliance on Property Tax,” April 15, 2026. newhampshirebulletin.com

7. Valley News, “New Hampshire’s New Education Funding Formula,” April 24, 2026. vnews.com

8. Concord Monitor, “My Turn: New Hampshire Education Funding Truth,” April 28, 2026. concordmonitor.com

9. Wikipedia, “Andru Volinsky,” en.wikipedia.org

10. Steven, “Your Tax Dollars at Work: How New Hampshire Funds Private Education for Students Who Never Attended Public School,” The Quiet Cost. thequietcost.substack.com

11. Steven, “The Adequacy Fraud: Thirty-Three Years of a Promise New Hampshire Has Never Kept,” The Quiet Cost. thequietcost.substack.com

12. Steven, “The Quiet Cost of Redefining Adequacy,” The Quiet Cost. thequietcost.substack.com

13. Steven, “The Quiet Cost of Locking the Tax Door in New Hampshire,” The Quiet Cost. thequietcost.substack.com

14. Steven, “The Invisible Income Tax: What ‘No Income Tax, No Sales Tax’ Actually Costs in New Hampshire,” The Quiet Cost. thequietcost.substack.com

15. Steven, “What Do You Mean By ‘Broad-Based’? How New Hampshire’s Most Famous Tax Pledge Was Built on a Definition Nobody Ever Examined,” The Quiet Cost. thequietcost.substack.com

This piece reflects the author’s independent analysis of publicly available data, court decisions, legislative records, and journalism by the sources cited above. It is not legal or financial advice. Where specific figures or findings originate in reporting by named journalists or organizations, that attribution is made in the text.

About sources and drafting methods →

How New Hampshire’s Most Famous Tax Pledge Was Built on a Definition Nobody Ever Examined

A note before we begin. This piece is, in part, a history lesson. It is also, in part, an exercise in what property appraisers and tax assessors do professionally every day: read the actual instrument in front of you rather than the label on the outside of the box. New Hampshire’s tax system has a label on the outside that says one thing. The instruments inside say something else entirely. This piece is an attempt to read what is actually there.

What do you mean by broad-based?

It is a simple question. Seven words. It has been available to ask for more than fifty years. And in five decades of New Hampshire gubernatorial campaigns, legislative debates, editorial page battles, and constitutional amendment fights, it has almost never been seriously asked — because the battle cry that made it necessary was repeated with enough confidence, for long enough, that most residents assumed someone, somewhere, had already worked out the answer.

Nobody did. Or if they did, the answer was inconvenient enough that it stayed in the room.

Because the honest answer — the one that emerges when you read the actual instruments rather than the labels — is this:

New Hampshire already has a broad-based tax. It has always had one.

And New Hampshire has had a sales tax since 1967. And New Hampshire had an income tax from 1923 until 2025. It called them other things. But the instruments themselves — the mechanisms, the calculations, the remittances to the state — have been there the whole time.

The king, it turns out, has always been wearing the same clothes. The court has simply been very successful at insisting everyone admire the ones he isn’t wearing.

The Birth of a Battle Cry

To understand how this happened, you need to go back to 1972 — and to two men whose collaboration produced one of the most durable pieces of political brand management in American state politics.

The first was Meldrim Thomson, a conservative Republican who had lost two consecutive gubernatorial primaries to the moderate incumbent Walter Peterson. Thomson’s defining issue was fierce opposition to any broad-based tax — which he defined, specifically and deliberately, as a general income tax or a general sales tax.

The second was William Loeb, the publisher of the Manchester Union-Leader, the statewide newspaper whose front-page editorials functioned, in that era, as the dominant force in New Hampshire Republican politics. Loeb despised Peterson’s proposal for a state income tax. He took up Thomson’s cause with the full force of his paper — pummeling Peterson and his family in front-page editorials until Thomson won the 1972 primary.

Thomson went on to serve three terms as governor, from 1973 to 1979. During those years, he and Loeb cemented what became known simply as “The Pledge” — the promise every serious candidate for governor was expected to make: veto any sales or income tax that reached the desk.

The song “Live Free or Die” comes from “Keep New Hampshire #1,” a record of songs produced to promote Thomson’s campaign for a third term. The state motto — now inseparable from New Hampshire’s identity — was not widespread before Thomson’s era. The anti-tax pledge and the Live Free or Die identity were, from the beginning, products of the same political moment, promoted by the same political actors, for the same political purposes.

By bundling support for either a sales or an income tax into a single “pro-tax” moniker, backers of the Pledge successfully moved the likelihood of a broad-based tax from “implausible to nearly impossible.”

The Coalition of New Hampshire Taxpayers, which administers the modern pledge, is explicit about its origins: the original no-broad-based-tax pledge originated with former Governor Meldrim Thomson. The pledge as currently administered asks signers to promise never to vote for “a broad-based tax which includes a general income tax, general sales tax, or an increase in a current broad-based tax such as rooms and meals, etc.”

Read that again carefully. Such as rooms and meals. The organization administering the pledge against broad-based taxes explicitly acknowledges that the Meals and Rooms Tax is a broad-based tax — and includes it in the definition of what signers promise not to increase. The pledge’s own language concedes the point this piece is making. It has been hiding in plain sight for decades.

The Instruments That Were Always There

While The Pledge was being administered and sworn and campaigned upon, three tax instruments were operating simultaneously in New Hampshire that collectively constitute exactly what The Pledge claimed did not exist.

Instrument One: The Property Tax — The Broad-Based Tax That Dare Not Speak Its Name

This publication’s previous backgrounder, “The Invisible Income Tax,” documented this in full. Sixty-three percent of all New Hampshire state and local government revenue comes from the property tax — the highest dependence on a single tax source of any state in the country, by a margin that is not close. It falls on every resident whether they own or rent. It funds schools, roads, police, fire departments, county services, and the statewide education property tax. It is assessed on land and buildings but paid by everyone.

By every neutral definition of the term — a tax that is wide in its application, general in its reach, and primary in its revenue yield — the New Hampshire property tax is a broad-based tax. It is simply not called one. And because The Pledge was defined around specific labels rather than functional descriptions, the property tax has escaped the scrutiny that any instrument extracting two-thirds of all government revenue ought to receive.

Instrument Two: The Meals and Rooms Tax — The Sales Tax That Isn’t Called One

The Meals and Rentals Tax was enacted in 1967. The tax is assessed upon patrons of hotels and restaurants, as well as on motor vehicle rentals. It is paid by the consumer and collected and remitted to the state on the 15th of each month by operators of hotels, restaurants, or other businesses. The tax rate is 8.5 percent for taxable periods beginning October 1, 2021.

A tax assessed upon consumers at the point of transaction, calculated as a percentage of the purchase price, collected by the seller and remitted to the state on a regular schedule. That is the definition of a sales tax. New Hampshire has been collecting one since 1967.

The NH Business Review put it plainly in 2018: “In 1967, New Hampshire enacted a sales tax. It is only on prepared meals, rooms, and vehicle rentals.” The Federation of Tax Administrators, which compiles national data on state sales taxes, lists New Hampshire with a footnote rather than a rate — but lists it nonetheless: New Hampshire imposes a tax on meals and rooms with a vendor discount. It is in the database. It is just not called what it is.

The current rate is 8.5 percent. For comparison, the general sales tax rate in Massachusetts — the state New Hampshire residents cross the border to avoid — is 6.25 percent. New Hampshire’s sales tax on a restaurant meal or hotel room is higher than Massachusetts’s general sales tax. The Pledge has been protecting residents from a tax they have been paying, at a higher rate than the neighboring state they were supposedly being protected from, for nearly sixty years.

Instrument Three: The Interest and Dividends Tax — The Income Tax That Wasn’t Called One

The Interest and Dividends Tax was enacted in 1923. The tax was assessed on interest and dividend income. It ran at 5 percent from 1977 to 2022. It was reported on a tax return. It was calculated as a percentage of income from financial assets. It was remitted to the state annually.

A tax calculated as a percentage of income, reported on a return, and remitted to the state. That is the definition of an income tax. New Hampshire collected one for 102 years.

Originally enacted in 1923, the Interest and Dividends Tax applied to residents earning more than $2,400 in interest and dividend income as individuals or $4,800 for joint filers. It was not a tax on wages — which is what most people mean when they say “income tax” — but it was unambiguously a tax on a specific category of income, calculated as a percentage of that income, and remitted annually. The distinction between “income tax” and “Interest and Dividends Tax” is a labeling convention, not a functional difference.

The Pledge was sworn against an income tax. The state collected one for 102 years while the pledge was being sworn. House Bill 2, passed by the New Hampshire General Court and signed into law by Governor Chris Sununu during the 2023 legislative session, repealed the Interest and Dividends Tax, effective January 1, 2025. The repeal was accelerated from its originally scheduled 2027 date.

As this publication documented in “The Invisible Income Tax,” more than half of the Interest and Dividends Tax revenue was paid by Granite State households with more than $200,000 in interest, dividend, and distribution income. The repeal eliminated the one instrument in New Hampshire’s tax system that asked more of those with more investment income — and produced no measurable benefit for the bottom 80 percent of earners.

The state did not eliminate its only income tax. It eliminated the one it had spent a century pretending wasn’t one. And it did so exclusively for the benefit of the people whose investment income it had been taxing — while leaving the property tax, the meals tax, and the rooms tax fully intact for everyone else.

The Precise Definition Problem

Here is where the intellectual sleight of hand becomes visible, once you know where to look.

The Pledge, as originally formulated by Thomson and Loeb and as currently administered by the Coalition of New Hampshire Taxpayers, defines broad-based taxes as a general income tax or a general sales tax. The word “general” is doing enormous work in that definition. It means: applied across all income, or applied across all retail transactions.

The property tax is not called an income tax — even though it functions as one, extracting a percentage of effective household income at rates three times higher for low earners than for wealthy ones.

The Meals and Rooms Tax is not called a general sales tax — even though it is a percentage levy on transactions, collected at point of sale, remitted by the seller to the state, at a rate higher than most neighboring states’ general sales taxes.

The Interest and Dividends Tax was not called a general income tax — even though it was a percentage levy on a specific category of income, reported on a return, and remitted annually.

None of them are “general.” All of them are taxes. The Pledge protected residents from the label while the instruments operated freely underneath it.

The infamous pledge is not really about any broad-based tax, but about not expanding democracy to those who may not be lucky or wealthy enough to afford avoiding taxes. Garry Rayno of InDepthNH.org, writing in April 2026, noted that New Hampshire has long operated on a “don’t tax me, tax the guy behind the tree” narrative — using sin taxes, rooms and meals taxes, and gambling revenue to fill the state’s coffers from sources that could be framed as voluntary or visitor-borne rather than resident-borne.

The pledge was never a description of New Hampshire’s tax reality. It was a description of New Hampshire’s preferred tax vocabulary. And vocabulary, maintained with enough confidence for long enough, becomes identity.

The Naked Emperor in the Legislative Chamber

Hans Christian Andersen’s emperor, you will recall, was not actually naked by accident. Two swindlers told him they were weaving magnificent clothes from a fabric visible only to the competent and the wise. The emperor — unwilling to admit he could not see them — praised the invisible clothes. His courtiers — unwilling to admit the same — praised them too. The procession set off. The crowd cheered, because the crowd understood that admitting they could see nothing meant admitting they were neither competent nor wise.

New Hampshire’s version of the story has its own two figures playing the swindlers’ role — Thomson and Loeb — who told the state they were weaving magnificent tax protection from a fabric called The Pledge. The protection was real against two specific labels. It was not real against the tax instruments that operated under different labels. The court — every governor of both parties who took The Pledge, every legislator who swore it — praised the invisible protection. The crowd cheered, because admitting they could see nothing meant admitting they had been paying broad-based taxes all along while being told they were protected from them.

The child pointing — the seven words that end the procession — is simply: What do you mean by broad-based?

Because the moment that question is answered honestly:

The property tax is a broad-based tax. Always was. It funds 63 percent of all government revenue. The Meals and Rooms Tax is a sales tax. Always was. It has been collected since 1967 at a rate now higher than Massachusetts’s general sales tax. The Interest and Dividends Tax was an income tax. Always was. It ran for 102 years before being repealed exclusively for the benefit of the wealthiest residents.

The Pledge protected New Hampshire from three words. It did not protect New Hampshire from the instruments those words describe. And the gap between the protection promised and the protection delivered has been absorbed — for fifty years — by working Granite Staters who believed the label on the box without examining what was inside.

The tailors are still at work. In October 2025, the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy — celebrating New Hampshire’s jump to third place on the Tax Foundation’s State Tax Competitiveness Index following the Interest and Dividends Tax repeal — boasted that New Hampshire is now “the only state with no individual income or sales taxes at either the state or local level.” That claim was published while the Meals and Rooms Tax was collecting 8.5 percent on every restaurant meal, hotel stay, and car rental in the state — a rate higher than Massachusetts’s general sales tax. The emperor’s tailors did not pause. They simply updated the inventory of invisible garments and continued the procession.

What the Pledge Actually Protected

This is the part of the story that requires the most precision, because it is the part most likely to be dismissed as partisan.

The Pledge has protected something. Just not what it claimed to protect.

A general income tax — one applied to wages and salaries across all earners — would, by definition, ask more of higher earners and less of lower earners. A graduated income tax would ask progressively more as income rises. Either form would shift a portion of the tax burden upward from the property tax, which shifts it downward.

A general sales tax — one applied broadly across retail transactions — would distribute the burden differently than the property tax, and would capture some portion of the spending of higher-income residents that currently escapes any state levy. It would be imperfect. It would have its own regressive elements. But it would be an alternative instrument, and alternative instruments create the possibility of a less concentrated system.

The Pledge has prevented both alternatives from being seriously considered — or, when seriously considered, from surviving politically — for fifty years. In their absence, the property tax has grown to dominate 63 percent of all government revenue. The burden it places on working families has grown. The disparity between what the lowest earners pay as a percentage of income and what the highest earners pay has widened.

There is a dimension to that outcome that rarely surfaces in the policy debate, but that any working family in Claremont or Berlin or Pittsfield understands viscerally: the treadmill runs faster every year.

Political economists who study regressive fiscal systems have documented what happens when a single instrument — one that extracts a disproportionate share of income from those with the least — becomes the primary mechanism of government finance. The first phenomenon is called the treadmill effect: as property taxes rise, working families must work more hours, take additional jobs, defer retirement, or sacrifice other needs simply to remain in homes they already own. They are running harder to stay in place. The tax does not rise because their circumstances improved. It rises because the state transferred its obligations downward, cut taxes at the top, and called the result a low-tax environment. The treadmill does not announce itself. It simply gets faster.

The second phenomenon follows directly. It is called fiscal exhaustion: the burden imposed by the system consumes precisely the time, energy, and civic capacity that would otherwise be available to understand, question, and challenge it. A family working two jobs to cover a property tax bill consuming 8.9 percent of their income does not have bandwidth to attend legislative hearings, track budget debates, or organize politically around a funding mechanism most people don’t fully understand in the first place. The people with the most at stake in reforming the system are the ones the system has most effectively stripped of the capacity to demand reform. Civic participation declines. Political pressure for structural change weakens. The burden grows further. The cycle is self-reinforcing — and considerably easier to maintain than it was to create.

The third phenomenon is what makes the first two durable: political fatigue by design. The Pledge does not merely protect the current distribution of tax burden. It exhausts the debate itself. Every election cycle in which The Pledge dominates the conversation — every campaign in which “no income tax, no sales tax” functions as a litmus test rather than a policy position — is an election cycle in which the actual burden on working families is not the subject under examination. The 8.9 percent effective rate. The $17,000 gap between neighboring towns for the same constitutional obligation. The widening disparity between what the lowest earners pay and what the wealthiest pay. None of that enters the debate, because the debate has been successfully confined to the labels.

The treadmill keeps running. The debate stays on the labels. The people who most need the conversation to change are too exhausted to redirect it. And the political and financial interests that benefit most from that arrangement have every incentive to keep The Pledge exactly where it is — not as a tax policy, but as a conversation stopper.

Three terms. One documented cycle. Fifty years of uninterrupted operation.

The people who benefit most from that outcome are precisely the people whose investment income, wage income, and high-value property holdings would bear a greater share of the burden under any alternative system. The people who benefit least — who pay the most as a percentage of income under the current system and would pay less under virtually any alternative — are the working families who have been most loyal to The Pledge because they believed it was protecting them.

Whether the word “tax” is used next to words like income, sales, paint or almost anything but property does not matter, as long as it results in demonization and ridicule in the eyes of the public.

The emperor’s clothes were never about keeping residents warm. They were about keeping the procession moving.

What an Honest Conversation Would Actually Look Like

This piece is not an argument for an income tax. It is not an argument for a sales tax. It is not an argument for any specific alternative to the current system.

It is an argument for honesty about what the current system is — and what the fifty-year debate about it has actually been.

An honest conversation about New Hampshire’s tax structure would begin with four acknowledgments:

First: New Hampshire has a broad-based tax. It is called the property tax. It funds 63 percent of all government revenue. Any conversation about tax policy that does not begin here is a conversation about something other than New Hampshire’s actual tax system.

Second: New Hampshire has had a sales tax since 1967. It is called the Meals and Rooms Tax. It is currently 8.5 percent. It is higher than the general sales tax in Massachusetts. Declining to call it a sales tax does not change what it is.

Third: New Hampshire had an income tax from 1923 to 2025. It was called the Interest and Dividends Tax. Repealing it did not eliminate New Hampshire’s experience with income taxation — it eliminated 102 years of it, in a single act that benefited the top fraction of earners and no one else.

Fourth: The debate that has dominated New Hampshire politics for fifty years — framed as a battle between broad-based taxation and freedom from it — has been conducted almost entirely on false premises. The question was never whether New Hampshire would have broad-based taxes. It always had them. The question was which instruments would be used, and who would bear the burden of each.

That fourth acknowledgment is the one The Pledge was designed to prevent. Because the moment it is made, the debate changes entirely. It is no longer about whether New Hampshire will have a broad-based tax. It is about whether the broad-based tax it already has is the fairest, most efficient, and most honest way to fund the public life Granite Staters depend on.

And that is a question the property tax — regressive, assessment-distorted, place-dependent, and falling most heavily on those least able to pay it — does not answer well.

The Kicker

The child in Andersen’s story says six words: “But he hasn’t got anything on.”

New Hampshire’s version requires only seven: What do you mean by broad-based?

The answer is now documented. The property tax is broad-based. The Meals and Rooms Tax is a sales tax. The Interest and Dividends Tax was an income tax. The Pledge protected residents from three labels while the instruments operated freely underneath them for a combined total of more than 150 years of collected broad-based taxation.

The king has no clothes.

He never did.

The only thing that kept the procession moving was the crowd’s willingness to keep cheering — and the political cost imposed on anyone who pointed.

That cost has been real. Every candidate who refused The Pledge and lost. Every editorial that was pummeled off the front page. Every legislator who understood the math and said nothing. The swindlers were effective not because the clothes were convincing, but because the social and political cost of saying otherwise was higher than most people were willing to pay.

This publication is willing to pay it.

What do you mean by broad-based?

We mean: look at the instruments, not the labels. Follow the money, not the motto. And notice — carefully, without prejudgment — who the current system benefits, and who has been paying for fifty years under the impression they were being protected from something they were paying all along.

The procession has been moving for fifty years.

The tailors are still describing the clothes. The court is still praising them. The crowd is still cheering — or at least, still not saying what it can plainly see.

Somewhere in Claremont, or Berlin, or Pittsfield, someone is working a second job to cover a property tax bill on a home the state’s fiscal system has decided they should subsidize the wealthy to own. They are too exhausted to attend the town meeting. The treadmill is running.

The child has spoken. Seven words. The answer is documented. The sources are public. The math is available to anyone willing to examine it.

How much longer until the crowd listens?

The king has no clothes.

The Pledge never had any either.

Sources

The following sources informed this piece. Readers are encouraged to consult them directly.

1. NH Department of Revenue Administration, “Transparency — Meals and Rooms (Rentals) Tax.” revenue.nh.gov

2. NH Department of Revenue Administration, “Transparency — Interest and Dividends Tax.” revenue.nh.gov

3. NH Department of Revenue Administration, “Repeal of NH Interest and Dividends Tax Now in Effect,” January 2025. revenue.nh.gov

4. NH Bulletin, “Repeal of Interest and Dividends Tax Disproportionately Benefits Wealthy NH Households,” March 30, 2023. newhampshirebulletin.com

5. NH Fiscal Policy Institute, “Households with High Incomes Disproportionately Benefit from Interest and Dividends Tax Repeal,” April 2023. nhfpi.org

6. StateImpact New Hampshire / NPR, “A History of the Pledge,” October 10, 2012. stateimpact.npr.org

7. New Hampshire Public Radio, “You Asked, We Answered: Why is New Hampshire SO Against Having an Income Tax?” February 9, 2018. nhpr.org

8. Andru Volinsky, “How Did NH Get to Its Current State of Affairs in Education? Part 3 — The Pledge,” InDepthNH.org, February 16, 2024. indepthnh.org

9. Garry Rayno, “Historically Taxes Are a Reflection of the State of Our Democracy,” InDepthNH.org, April 4, 2026. indepthnh.org

10. NH Business Review, “In 1967, New Hampshire Enacted a Sales Tax,” November 2018. nhbr.com

11. Coalition of New Hampshire Taxpayers, “The Pledge.” cnht.org

12. Stateline / Pew, “Tax Pledge Permeates New Hampshire Politics,” October 25, 2012. stateline.org

13. Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, “Killing the I&D Tax Leaps NH to No. 3 on National Tax Competitiveness Index,” October 30, 2025. jbartlett.org

14. Steven, “The Invisible Income Tax: What ‘No Income Tax, No Sales Tax’ Actually Costs in New Hampshire,” The Quiet Cost, April 2026. thequietcost.substack.com

15. Steven, “The Adequacy Fraud: Thirty-Three Years of a Promise New Hampshire Has Never Kept,” The Quiet Cost, April 2026. thequietcost.substack.com

16. Steven, “The Quiet Cost of Locking the Tax Door in New Hampshire,” The Quiet Cost, April 9, 2026. thequietcost.substack.com

This piece reflects the author’s independent analysis of publicly available data, historical records, and journalism by the sources cited above. It is not legal or financial advice. Where specific figures or findings originate in reporting by named journalists or organizations, that attribution is made in the text.

About sources and drafting methods →

New Hampshire has a brand. It is one of the most durable political brands in American public life, and it is built on two facts stated as a single identity: no income tax, no sales tax.

The brand is real. Those taxes do not exist here. And for decades, the absence of those two familiar tax forms has been marketed — successfully — as evidence that New Hampshire is a low-tax state, a free state, a state that trusts its residents with their own money rather than extracting it through the mechanisms other states use.

There is just one problem with that brand. It is describing the wrong thing.

New Hampshire does have a broad-based tax. It taxes your income, your spending, your housing, your children’s schools, your fire department, your roads, your police. It taxes you whether you earn $28,000 a year or $280,000. It taxes renters as well as owners. It taxes the working family in Claremont and the seasonal resident in Moultonborough — just at very different rates, bearing very different burdens, producing very different outcomes.

It is called the property tax. And the reason most people do not recognize it as a broad-based tax on nearly everything is that it has been successfully framed as something else — a local issue, a community choice, an expression of the Live Free or Die identity rather than the primary mechanism by which New Hampshire funds virtually all of its public life.

That framing is worth examining carefully. Because the numbers behind it tell a different story entirely.

This is not a funding shortage. It is a funding choice.

New Hampshire Stands Alone

Every state uses property taxes. The question is how much — and compared to what.

According to the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute’s most recent comprehensive analysis:

63 percent of all state and local government tax revenue in New Hampshire comes from property taxes. Not the largest share. Not a leading share. The largest share of any state in the country, by a margin that is not close.

The next most property-tax-dependent state is Texas, at approximately 40 to 41 percent. The national average is 27 percent.

New Hampshire is more than 50 percent more dependent on property taxes than its nearest competitor. It raises more than twice the national average share of its total government revenue from property taxes. Several states — Hawaii, Arkansas, Delaware, Alabama, New Mexico — raise less than 18 percent of their total state and local tax revenue from property taxes. New Hampshire raises 63 percent.

When 63 percent of all government revenue flows from a single source, that source is not a local tax. It is the tax. Everything else is marginal by comparison.

In dollar terms, New Hampshire property taxpayers paid $3,388 per person in fiscal year 2022 — the second highest per-person property tax payment in the country, behind only New Jersey at $3,617. The national average was $1,943. The lowest-paying state, Alabama, averaged $697. New Hampshire residents pay nearly five times what Alabama residents pay, per person, in property taxes.

Despite paying the second-highest property taxes per person in the country, New Hampshire cities and towns rank 40th in overall revenue per capita — because the state provides almost nothing back. New Hampshire ranks 48th in per-person state aid to municipalities. Granite Staters pay at near-record levels and receive near-bottom levels of services in return, because the structural design of the system ensures that most of what is raised stays local rather than being distributed to meet statewide need.

That is not an accident of geography or demography. It is the direct consequence of a tax system designed around a brand.

What the Property Tax Actually Funds

The framing of “local tax” suggests that the property tax funds something discrete and contained — your town’s roads, your local fire department, perhaps your school. The reality is considerably broader.

In New Hampshire, your property tax bill funds four distinct categories, all rolled into a single bill: municipal taxes, school taxes, the statewide education property tax, and county taxes. The school tax alone — because the state funds education at the lowest proportional rate in the country — typically constitutes the largest single component of a New Hampshire property tax bill. In property-poor communities with high school costs relative to their tax base, the school tax can consume 54 to 64 cents of every dollar paid.

That means your property tax is, simultaneously: your income tax substitute, your education tax, your county services tax, your municipal services tax, and a portion of a statewide education funding mechanism that the courts have repeatedly found unconstitutional in its current form.

It is not a local tax. It is the state’s primary fiscal instrument, administered locally, with local variation doing the work that a graduated income tax would otherwise do — except in reverse. A graduated income tax asks more of those who earn more. The property tax, as structured in New Hampshire, does the opposite.

The Burden by Income — Who the Tax Actually Hits

This is where the brand and the reality diverge most sharply.

According to modeling by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, cited by the NH Fiscal Policy Institute:

Bottom 20% of earners (under ~$35,000/year): effective state and local tax rate of 8.9 percent of income. Middle 20%: 6.7 percent. Top 1 percent (over $721,000/year): 2.8 percent.

The bottom earners pay more than three times the effective tax rate of the wealthiest residents.

Looking specifically at property taxes: low-income families pay 5.9 percent of their income in property taxes. High earners pay approximately 2 percent. The ratio is nearly three to one, from a tax that carries the same nominal rate within any given town.

This is the definitional structure of a regressive tax — one that extracts a larger share of income from those with less, and a smaller share from those with more. New Hampshire does not simply have a regressive tax. It has built its entire fiscal architecture around one.

There is a compounding factor that makes this worse — one that has recently received serious scholarly attention at the highest levels of legal and economic research.

In February 2025, Professor David Schleicher of Yale Law School published a comprehensive analysis in the Harvard Journal on Legislation titled “Your House Is Worth More Than They Think: The Strange Case of Property Tax Assessment Regressivity.” His finding, drawn from a body of peer-reviewed research, is direct: in virtually all jurisdictions in the country, expensive homes are undervalued by property tax assessors and hence under-taxed, while less expensive homes are overvalued and over-taxed. Professor Schleicher named this phenomenon Property Tax Assessment Regressivity — PTAR — and documented that it is nearly universal across American jurisdictions.

There is a foundational reality about property taxation that professionals in the field understand but that rarely reaches public discussion: assessed value is not a fact. It is an educated estimate. Every assessed value on every property tax bill in New Hampshire — and in every other state — is the product of a mass appraisal methodology that applies statistical models to imperfect data across thousands of properties simultaneously. Individual appraisals, conducted on a single property with full inspection and market analysis, carry their own margin of uncertainty. Mass appraisals, conducted across entire municipalities with limited individual review, carry considerably more.

This matters because the entire weight of New Hampshire’s fiscal architecture rests on that estimate. When 63 percent of all government revenue flows from a tax calculated on estimated values, the accuracy of those estimates is not a technical footnote — it is the foundation of the system. And when that foundation is systematically tilted — as Professor Schleicher’s research documents, consistently overvaluing modest properties and undervaluing expensive ones — the margin of error is not random. It is directional. It runs consistently against those least able to absorb it, and consistently in favor of those best positioned to challenge it.

Wealthy property owners and large commercial interests have the resources to hire professional appraisers, file abatement requests, and contest assessments through the legal system. The working family in Berlin or Claremont typically does not. The educated estimate, when it runs wrong, runs wrong at their expense — and stays wrong, unchallenged, year after year.

The system does not merely apply the same tax rate to unequal wealth. It applies an inflated assessed value to modest homes and a discounted assessed value to expensive ones — and then applies the tax rate to those already-distorted numbers. The regressivity is compounded before the bill is even calculated.

Professor Schleicher’s analysis includes an important nuance that intellectual honesty requires noting. He argues that in jurisdictions where PTAR has existed for a long time, the effect may have been partially absorbed into property values over the years — meaning the current owner of an expensive home may have paid more for that home precisely because its tax burden was historically understated, rather than receiving an ongoing windfall today. The research suggests the original beneficiaries of long-standing PTAR were earlier owners who sold at inflated prices. That is a meaningful qualification, and it is included here because the research deserves to be represented accurately.

What it does not change is the burden on the other side of the ledger. The owner of a modest home that has been systematically overvalued pays more than their fair share on the way in and on the way out — and unlike the owner of an expensive property, they have no inflated sale price to offset that burden when they eventually sell. The Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s own research on assessment regressivity found that a corrected valuation methodology could increase poor homeowners’ net worth by more than ten percent. The current system produces the opposite effect.

The Renter’s Hidden Tax Bill

The property tax conversation in New Hampshire almost always centers on homeowners. That framing misses a significant portion of the population — and the portion least likely to have access to any of the modest relief programs that exist.

Renters pay property taxes. They do not pay them directly, but they pay them through their rent. Landlords factor property tax costs into rental pricing. When property taxes rise — and they have risen 12.1 percent adjusted for inflation over the past decade — rents follow. The tenant paying $1,400 a month in Manchester or Nashua or Concord is absorbing their landlord’s property tax increase without any of the elderly exemptions, veterans’ credits, or low-and-moderate-income homeowner relief programs available to owners.

Phil Sletten, research director at the NH Fiscal Policy Institute and author of the institute’s recent comprehensive property tax report, noted explicitly that rising property taxes affect renters as well as owners. They tend to earn less. They have no relief programs available. And they have no vote in the town meeting that sets the local tax rate.

The low and moderate income homeowner relief program — the state’s primary mechanism for providing property tax relief to lower-income residents — is available only to homeowners. The maximum benefit is $1,100. In 2023, average relief per applicant was $201.66. The program cost the state approximately $5.4 million to run — roughly 1.5 percent of the $363 million collected annually through the statewide education property tax alone.

Renters in the state’s larger cities, where rental housing is concentrated and property taxes are highest in dollar terms, are the least represented in that program. They bear the cost and access none of the mitigation.

The Same Tax, Dramatically Different Rates

The within-state variation in New Hampshire property tax rates is not a minor statistical footnote. It is the structural consequence of a system that places the entire burden of local government finance on a single source while providing almost no equalization from the state.

In 2025, property tax rates across New Hampshire ranged from $2.62 per $1,000 of assessed value to $36.54 per $1,000 — a ratio of nearly 14 to one between the lowest and highest rate in the state.

For a $500,000 home, that range produces a tax bill anywhere from $1,310 to $18,270 — a difference of nearly $17,000 per year for the same-valued property, funded by the same constitutional obligation, in the same state.

Neighboring towns produce numbers that illustrate the absurdity concretely. A $500,000 home in Lee carries a tax bill of $13,805. The same home across the town line in Nottingham pays $6,600. In Acworth, $8,030. In neighboring Charlestown, $18,270. These are not different states with different tax philosophies. They are communities separated by a town line, served by the same constitutional framework, funded by a system that produces radically unequal burdens based on the accident of where a property sits.

The cause of those differences is not primarily spending decisions. It is the property tax base — the total value of taxable property in a town divided by the number of people and services that base must support. A community bordering a lake, or hosting significant commercial or industrial development, or sitting in a high-demand housing corridor, can fund the same services with a fraction of the rate charged in a community with lower property values and equivalent needs. The structural outcome is that the towns with the greatest needs, the lowest incomes, and the fewest resources pay the highest rates — and receive the least from the state to compensate.

The Interest and Dividends Tax Repeal — Who Benefited

In 2025, New Hampshire completed the phaseout of its Interest and Dividends Tax — the last vestige of any tax on investment income in the state. The elimination was presented as a further expression of the Live Free or Die tax philosophy: one more tax removed, one more burden lifted.

Only individuals and families in the top 5 percent of income earners experienced any reduction in their effective tax rate from the repeal. The bottom 80 percent of earners saw no change in their effective rate. Half of all Interest and Dividends Tax revenue had come from the 2.5 percent of filers reporting more than $200,000 in taxable investment income — income generated from financial asset portfolios likely totaling several million dollars per taxpayer.

The repeal reduced the tax burden on the wealthiest residents and produced no measurable relief for anyone else. At the same time, the revenue that had been collected through the Interest and Dividends Tax no longer flows to the state. The services that revenue supported must now be funded from somewhere else. The somewhere else, in New Hampshire’s structural reality, is the property tax.

When state-level taxes that fall more heavily on higher incomes are reduced or eliminated, the resulting pressure lands on the property tax — which falls more heavily on lower incomes. The tax system does not become less burdensome. The burden shifts downward.

The Dillon’s Rule Trap

One reason the property tax dominates New Hampshire’s fiscal landscape so completely is structural rather than purely ideological: municipalities are legally prohibited from finding alternatives.

New Hampshire is what is known as a Dillon’s Rule state. Cities and towns may only exercise powers explicitly granted to them by the state legislature. The legislature has not authorized individual municipalities to levy sales taxes, gas taxes, or restaurant and lodging taxes. Because local governments have no other significant revenue lever available, the property tax is not merely their primary tool — it is effectively their only tool.

When a town’s costs increase — because a school needs a new roof, because fuel prices rise, because a contract comes due — the only available response is to raise the property tax rate. There is no alternative mechanism. The state has not provided one, and the Dillon’s Rule structure means municipalities cannot create one for themselves.

The result is a system in which every cost increase, every unfunded mandate, every shortfall in state education aid, every infrastructure need, ultimately converts into property tax. The property tax is not simply the largest tax in New Hampshire. It is the tax of last resort for every level of government below the state — and because the state provides so little, nearly everything ends up there.

Closing the Door Before the Debate Begins

The math documented in this piece points toward an obvious question: if the property tax is this regressive, this unevenly distributed, and this structurally punishing to working Granite Staters, why hasn’t the legislature done something about it?

Part of the answer is political will — or its absence. Part of it is the no-income, no-sales-tax pledge that has functioned as a bipartisan litmus test for decades, making any suggestion of tax restructuring politically toxic before the first argument is even made.

But there is a third part of the answer that is newer, more deliberate, and more consequential than either of the first two: an active legislative effort to move the no-income-tax position out of the realm of political preference and into the realm of constitutional prohibition.

CACR 12 — introduced in 2026 by fourteen Republican state senators, with no Democratic sponsors — would require a two-thirds supermajority vote of the legislature to enact any broad-based tax, including an income tax, a sales tax, a capital gains tax, or an estate tax. For context: New Hampshire Republicans currently hold a majority, but not a supermajority, in both chambers. A two-thirds threshold is not a high bar. It is a near-permanent bar in a closely divided state.

The amendment does not respond to a tax that is being enacted. There is no income tax proposal moving through the legislature. What CACR 12 responds to is a possibility — the possibility that a future legislature, faced with the documented consequences of the current system, might want to consider alternatives. The amendment’s purpose is to answer that future debate before it occurs, by making one category of solutions constitutionally out of reach.

To be precise about who benefits from that arrangement: the NH Fiscal Policy Institute and ITEP data documented earlier in this piece show that the top 1 percent of NH earners pay 2.8 percent of their income in state and local taxes. A restructured system that shifted any portion of the burden from property to income would, almost by definition, ask more of that group and less of the working families paying 8.9 percent. CACR 12 protects the current distribution. The sponsors are all from the party whose donors and constituencies benefit most from that distribution.

Governor Ayotte’s response to the one recent restructuring proposal that received public attention — a plan combining a uniform $3 statewide property tax with a modest 3 percent income tax to fund education — was immediate rejection. Republican and Democratic legislative leaders followed. A University of New Hampshire law professor noted the proposal would face “very significant constitutional hurdles” in any case — meaning the legal architecture to foreclose alternatives is already partially in place, with CACR 12 designed to complete it.

This publication has examined CACR 12 in full in a previous backgrounder, “The Quiet Cost of Locking the Tax Door in New Hampshire.” The point for this piece is narrower: the data showing who bears the burden of New Hampshire’s current tax system, and the political effort to make that system constitutionally permanent, are not separate stories. They are the same story — the first half documenting the cost, the second half documenting the effort to ensure it cannot be changed.

The Brand Versus the Math

The Live Free or Die brand has served a specific political purpose for decades: it has allowed New Hampshire to describe its tax system in terms of what it lacks — income tax, sales tax — rather than what it contains. The absence is real. The implication — that New Hampshire is therefore a low-tax state — requires looking away from the property tax to sustain.

The math does not cooperate with the brand when examined directly.

New Hampshire residents earning under $35,000 per year pay 8.9 percent of their income in state and local taxes — higher than the effective rate in Massachusetts for comparable earners, a state routinely cited as a high-tax cautionary tale. The top 1 percent of New Hampshire earners pay 2.8 percent — genuinely low, genuinely favorable, genuinely the product of a system designed to produce that outcome.

The New Hampshire advantage is real. It is just not evenly distributed. It is concentrated at the top of the income scale, where the absence of an income tax produces substantial savings on investment returns, dividends, and high earned income. For a household earning $35,000 a year in Claremont or Berlin or Pittsfield, the advantage looks different — because 8.9 percent of $35,000 is $3,115 per year in state and local taxes, paid primarily through the property tax, on income that leaves very little margin for a tax at any rate.

The property tax is not a local tax. It is not a modest tax. It is not an alternative to broad-based taxation. It is New Hampshire’s broad-based tax. It funds schools, roads, fire departments, police, county services, and the statewide education property tax. It is assessed on land and buildings but paid by everyone — owners through their bills, renters through their rent, businesses through their operating costs and ultimately their prices.

It just does not look like an income tax. And that, precisely, is the point.

The Kicker

New Hampshire politicians have spent decades campaigning on the promise that this state will never have a broad-based tax. The promise has been kept — technically, and in the narrowest possible sense.

But New Hampshire has always had a broad-based tax. It taxes income indirectly through property values. It taxes spending indirectly through business property costs. It taxes the purchase of a home. It taxes the decision to stay in a community rather than move to one with lower rates. It funds nearly every public service most residents will ever use.

It is just called something else.

And because it is called something else — because it arrives as a property tax bill rather than a line on a paycheck, because it is set by town meeting rather than the legislature, because it is framed as local control rather than state fiscal policy — it has escaped the political scrutiny that any tax extracting two-thirds of all government revenue from a single source, falling most heavily on those least able to pay it, ought to receive.

The question for Granite Staters is not whether they want a broad-based tax. They already have one. The question is whether the one they have is the fairest, most efficient, and most honest way to fund the public life they depend on — or whether the brand has been doing work that the math, examined plainly, would not support.

The math is now available for examination. The NHFPI report is public. The ITEP analysis is public. The town-by-town rate data is public.

The only thing standing between most Granite Staters and that math is the brand.

Not One Problem. One System.

This piece has documented one instrument. But the property tax does not operate in isolation — and understanding what it costs requires seeing it alongside the other instruments operating simultaneously in the same direction.

This publication has documented those instruments across four backgrounders. Read together, they describe something more than a series of independent policy decisions.

The adequacy fraud piece documented that New Hampshire withholds more than $500 million annually in constitutionally owed education funding from public schools — money the state is legally required to pay but does not, forcing the shortfall onto local property taxes, most heavily in the communities least able to carry it.

The EFA piece documented that $113.5 million is simultaneously being drawn from the same Education Trust Fund — primarily to subsidize families who were never in the public school system — draining the fund, creating a projected $60 million deficit, and telling public school districts there is no money for adequacy payments while finding the resources to subsidize private, religious, and homeschool families who made no claim on the public system.

The locking piece documented that CACR 12 — introduced by fourteen Republican state senators with no Democratic sponsors — would constitutionally entrench the current system by requiring a two-thirds supermajority to enact any broad-based tax alternative, removing the question from democratic reach before the debate can begin.

And this piece has documented that the Interest and Dividends Tax repeal — the most recent in a series of state-level tax reductions benefiting primarily upper-income residents — produced no measurable relief for the bottom 80 percent of earners while removing revenue that must now be replaced from somewhere else. In New Hampshire’s structural reality, somewhere else is always the property tax.

There is one additional instrument this piece has not yet named directly: fees. As traditional state revenue mechanisms are reduced or eliminated — business tax cuts, the I&D repeal, reduced state aid to municipalities — the gap is increasingly filled not only by property taxes but by rising fees across every level of government. Licensing fees, court fees, municipal fees, recreational fees. Fees are functionally a flat charge — they fall on everyone equally regardless of income, making them more regressive than even the property tax. They do not appear on a tax bill. They do not generate political debate. They accumulate quietly in household budgets, most visibly in the budgets of those with the least margin to absorb them.

Taken individually, each of these instruments has a defensible political rationale. No income tax protects individual freedom. EFA grants expand parental choice. Business tax reductions attract investment. Fees fund specific services for the people who use them. Constitutional protection of the tax structure provides certainty.

Taken together, they describe a fiscal architecture with a consistent direction:

Reduce the tax burden at the top of the income scale across every available instrument. Replace the lost revenue with mechanisms that fall most heavily on those least able to pay — property taxes, fees, underfunded mandates absorbed locally. Redirect public funds from universal obligations toward selective beneficiaries. Lock the structure constitutionally so that future democratic majorities cannot correct it.

That is not an accusation. It is a description of the documented record, assembled from publicly available data, court decisions, legislative records, and independent journalism. Each piece of that record has been examined in this publication separately. The question this synthesis raises is whether Granite Staters, looking at the full picture, recognize the architecture for what it is — and whether the brand has done enough work, for long enough, to keep most of them from looking.

Sources

The following sources informed this piece. Readers are encouraged to consult them directly.

1. Phil Sletten, “Property Taxes in New Hampshire: How They Work and How They Compare,” NH Fiscal Policy Institute, April 2026. nhfpi.org

2. NH Fiscal Policy Institute, “Granite Staters with Lowest Incomes Have Highest Effective State and Local Tax Rate,” January 2024. nhfpi.org

3. Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, “Who Pays? 7th Edition,” 2024. itep.org

4. Ethan DeWitt, “New Hampshire Unique Among States in Reliance on Property Tax, Report Finds,” New Hampshire Bulletin, April 15, 2026. newhampshirebulletin.com

5. Valley News, “Property Tax Rates Vary Widely Across New Hampshire,” April 13, 2026. vnews.com

6. Business NH Magazine, “New Analysis Details NH’s Massive Variation in Property Taxes,” April 2026. businessnhmagazine.com

7. Garry Rayno, “The State’s Inequitable Tax System Impacts Communities,” InDepthNH.org, April 11, 2026. indepthnh.org

8. NH School Funding Fairness Project, “Low and Moderate Income Homeowners Property Tax Relief Program Explained,” December 2024. fairfundingnh.org

9. NH Fiscal Policy Institute, “Low and Moderate Income Homeowners Property Tax Relief Program,” June 2023. nhfpi.org

10. NH Fiscal Policy Institute, “New Hampshire Ranks Last in the U.S. for State Support of Public Higher Education Per Student,” August 2025. nhfpi.org

11. Steven, “The Quiet Cost of Locking the Tax Door in New Hampshire,” The Quiet Cost, April 9, 2026. thequietcost.substack.com

12. Citizens Count, CACR 12 bill summary and status, 2026. citizenscount.org

13. LegiScan, CACR 12 sponsor list and party classification, 2026 NH legislative session. legiscan.com

14. nhtaxsavingscalculator.com, “3–3 Tax Savings Plan,” 2026.

15. David Schleicher, “Your House Is Worth More Than They Think: The Strange Case of Property Tax Assessment Regressivity,” Harvard Journal on Legislation, February 22, 2025. journals.law.harvard.edu

16. Philadelphia Federal Reserve, “Why Are Residential Property Tax Rates Regressive?” Consumer Finance Institute Working Paper, 2024. philadelphiafed.org

17. Steven, “Your Tax Dollars at Work: How New Hampshire Funds Private Education for Students Who Never Attended Public School,” The Quiet Cost, April 28, 2026. thequietcost.substack.com

18. Steven, “The Adequacy Fraud: Thirty-Three Years of a Promise New Hampshire Has Never Kept,” The Quiet Cost, April 2026. thequietcost.substack.com

This piece reflects the author’s independent analysis of publicly available data, reports, and journalism by the sources cited above. It is not legal or financial advice. Where specific figures or findings originate in reporting by named journalists or organizations, that attribution is made in the text.

About sources and drafting methods →

A note on this piece. My background is in property appraisal and tax assessment. The professional questions I spent a career asking are the same ones this story requires: Is the burden being assigned by consistent principle, or by convenience? Does the stated obligation match the documented reality? And who absorbs the cost when the answer to that second question is no? In the case of New Hampshire’s school funding system, those questions have specific, documented answers going back more than three decades. This piece is an attempt to put them in one place.

There is a promise written into the New Hampshire Constitution. It has been there since 1784. It is not ambiguous. It is not a matter of interpretation. And for thirty-three years, the New Hampshire Supreme Court has said, in ruling after ruling, that the state is not keeping it.

The promise is this: New Hampshire bears the exclusive constitutional obligation to define an adequate education and to pay for it. Not local communities. Not property taxpayers in Pittsfield or Berlin or Claremont. The state.

That obligation has never been fully met. The cost of that failure does not disappear. It lands somewhere. And for three decades, it has landed on your property tax bill — most heavily in the communities that can least afford to carry it.

This is not a funding shortage. It is a funding choice. And the people making that choice have recently decided, rather than meet the obligation the constitution assigns them, to rewrite the definition of the obligation itself.

The Constitutional Foundation — What the Law Actually Says

In 1993, the New Hampshire Supreme Court decided Claremont School District v. Governor, known as Claremont I. The ruling was direct: the state constitution imposes a duty on New Hampshire to provide a constitutionally adequate public education to every child and to guarantee its funding. Not to help fund it. Not to contribute toward it. To guarantee it.

Four years later, in Claremont II, the court went further. It ruled that the property taxes used to fund education are, by the nature of the state’s obligation, state taxes — not local ones. And because they are state taxes, the constitution requires them to be equal in valuation and uniform in rate throughout the state. Pittsfield cannot be taxed at four times the rate of Moultonborough to fulfill the same constitutional purpose.

The core holding from those two decisions has been reiterated by the court in eight subsequent opinions. It has never been overturned. It is settled law: the state, not the town, bears the exclusive obligation to fund an adequate education. Whatever the state designates as adequate, it must pay for. None of that financial obligation can legally be shifted to local school districts, regardless of their relative wealth or need.

Twice a year now — in most New Hampshire towns, property tax bills arrive in both July and December — that settled law is being violated at scale. The courts have said so, repeatedly, in plain language. The legislature has responded, repeatedly, by finding new ways not to comply.

Thirty-Three Years of the Gap

The state currently pays approximately $4,266 in base adequacy aid per pupil per year to New Hampshire public schools. That number did not emerge from a rigorous analysis of what it actually costs to educate a child. It emerged from a political negotiation — and the history of that negotiation is worth being precise about, because the failure has never been purely partisan.

The original adequacy formula was established in 1999 under Democratic Governor Jeanne Shaheen, with a Republican-controlled legislature. Shaheen signed the bill. The Valley News editorial board, in a 2025 retrospective on her career, wrote plainly that on the school funding question she “failed to rise to the occasion,” noting that while she searched for a revenue source that avoided an income tax, “the moment passed, thus consigning generations of New Hampshire schoolchildren to an education inadequately funded by the state, in plain contravention of the Supreme Court’s ruling.” The Republican legislature set a number it was willing to pay. The Democratic governor signed it. Both branches called it adequate. Neither branch was right.

What has changed since then is the posture. Today’s Republican-controlled legislature has moved beyond passive inadequacy to active resistance — passing legislation to rewrite the definition of adequacy downward, and asking the Supreme Court to erase the constitutional foundation entirely. That is a different thing, and this piece will return to it.

On July 1, 2025, the New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled in Contoocook Valley School District v. State of New Hampshire — known as ConVal — that this number is unconstitutionally low. The court, in a 3-2 decision, upheld Rockingham County Superior Court Judge David Ruoff’s finding that the constitutional minimum is at least $7,356.01 per pupil per year. The court noted explicitly that the true cost is likely higher than that.

The gap between what the state pays and what the court says the constitution requires: roughly $3,100 per student, per year.

Across approximately 168,000 public school students in New Hampshire, that gap represents more than $500 million annually — money the state constitutionally owes to public school children but is not paying.

That money does not vanish. It shows up somewhere. Where it shows up is in local property tax bills, in the budgets of school districts asked to deliver a constitutionally adequate education on unconstitutionally inadequate state funding, and in the widening gulf between what students in property-rich communities receive and what students in property-poor communities can access.

Judge Ruoff, in his ConVal ruling, was unsparing. The state, he found, offered no affirmative evidence at trial to justify the sufficiency of its current funding levels. Not a single expert witness presented by the state had an opinion on what the cost of adequacy should actually be. The state’s strategy, across years of litigation, was not to defend its number. It was to attack the alternatives.

The Special Education Number

The base adequacy gap is the headline. But there is a number beneath it that deserves its own accounting, because it is the one most likely to be personal.

New Hampshire provides $2,100 in additional state aid per year for students receiving special education services. That is the state’s contribution toward the legal obligation — under both state and federal law — to provide a free and appropriate public education to every child with a disability.

In 2023-2024, the average actual cost of serving a special education student in New Hampshire was $49,812 per year.

The state provides $2,100. The actual cost is $49,812. Local property taxes absorbed 83 percent of special education revenues statewide.

In the Rand case, plaintiffs proved that the $2,100 in special education differentiated aid is so far below the actual cost of services that evaluations alone — the initial assessments required before a single service is delivered — averaged $1,667 per student. The state’s contribution, in many cases, did not cover the cost of determining what a child needed before the cost of providing it was even calculated.

Judge Ruoff, in his August 2025 ruling in Rand v. State of New Hampshire, found the special education differentiated aid unconstitutionally insufficient. The state, once again, offered no affirmative defense of the adequacy of its funding. Once again, the gap is absorbed by local property taxes — assessed at wildly varying rates depending on which town a child with a disability happens to live in.

Two Lawsuits. One Answer. No Action.

The ConVal ruling in July 2025 and the Rand ruling in August 2025 together constitute the most comprehensive judicial indictment of New Hampshire’s education funding system in three decades of litigation.

ConVal established the constitutional minimum for base adequacy: at least $7,356.01 per pupil — nearly double what the state currently pays.

Rand established that the special education differentiated aid is unconstitutionally insufficient, and that the property tax rates required to bridge the gap between state funding and constitutional adequacy vary so widely between communities that they constitute an unconstitutional state tax assessed at unequal rates.

Taken together, the two rulings say this: the state is failing its constitutional obligation to fund adequate education, it is failing its constitutional obligation to fund special education, and the mechanism it uses to paper over both failures — varying local property taxes — is itself unconstitutional.

The court, in both cases, left it to the legislature to determine how to remedy the violations. The legislature’s response is the subject of the next section of this piece.

The Legislature’s Answer: Rewrite the Ruler

When a court finds that your ruler is giving the wrong measurement, one response is to recalibrate the ruler. Another is to rewrite the definition of an inch.

New Hampshire’s Republican-controlled legislature chose the second approach.

In February 2026, Representative Bob Lynn — a Windham Republican and former New Hampshire Supreme Court chief justice — introduced House Bill 1815. Its stated purpose was to provide clarity on the definition of educational adequacy following the ConVal ruling. Its practical effect, as described by its opponents, was something different.

HB 1815 would:

• Redefine public education as an “integrated system of shared responsibility” between the state and local governments — directly contradicting the constitutional holding that the obligation belongs exclusively to the state

• Remove statutory language guaranteeing students the opportunity for an adequate education

• Eliminate language tying adequacy to minimum school approval standards

• Change the cost framework so that state aid is only “computed toward” the cost of adequacy rather than constituting that cost

• Add language asserting that decisions about how education is funded are political questions reserved to the legislature and governor — insulating them from judicial review

Senator Debra Altschiller, a Stratham Democrat, described the bill’s mechanism with precision: “This does not raise the funding floor — it shortens the ruler — so things seem better than they are.”

One thousand thirty-three people submitted testimony opposing the bill. Eight supported it. Among those in opposition, this publication submitted written testimony and separately published 'The Quiet Cost of Redefining Adequacy' — a structural analysis of what the law actually does and who absorbs the cost when a constitutional obligation is redefined rather than met. That piece examined the mechanism. This one examines the thirty-three year record that made the mechanism necessary.

Regardless, the bill passed along party lines. Governor Kelly Ayotte signed it.

Asked directly, during a committee hearing, whether his bill would increase state funding to schools, Representative Lynn said: “No.” Asked whether he believed the state is currently adequately funding education, he said: “Yes.”

The New Hampshire Department of Justice — which has represented the state in both the ConVal and Rand cases — endorsed the bill, arguing it provides “needed clarity.” This is the same Department of Justice that, in the state’s appeal of the Rand case, took a step that no attorney general’s office had taken in thirty-three years of school funding litigation: it asked the New Hampshire Supreme Court to overturn the original Claremont I and Claremont II decisions entirely.

To be precise about what that means: the state’s chief law enforcement officer has asked the court to eliminate the constitutional foundation for adequate education funding that has been settled law since 1993 — not to interpret it differently, but to erase it.

The Property Taxpayer as the Permanent Underwriter

Step back from the legal architecture and look at what it means in practice, on the ground, in the communities where it lands.

When the state underfunds its constitutional obligation by $3,100 per student per year, the school district does not simply provide $3,100 less education per child. It is legally required — under state and federal law — to provide the services its students need. So it raises the difference locally.

The mechanism for raising it locally is the property tax.

In Plymouth, the town where lead plaintiff Steven Rand lives, there is approximately $942,600 in property value available to fund the education of each student. In nearby Waterville Valley, there is more than $5.4 million. The statewide average is $1.3 million. These are not lifestyle differences. They are structural inequities produced by a funding system that constitutionally requires uniform rates but practically produces wildly varying ones.

The NH Fiscal Policy Institute documented that local property taxes paid to cities, towns, counties, and school districts increased $1.52 billion — nearly 48 percent — between 2016 and 2025. The Education Trust Fund shortfall is a direct contributor to that increase. While the state withholds its constitutional obligation, property taxpayers absorb the difference — not proportionally, not uniformly, but in inverse relationship to their community’s capacity to carry the burden.

Communities with less property wealth pay higher rates. They educate students with greater needs. They receive less per-pupil state funding relative to their costs. And they have no constitutional mechanism to stop it, because the legislature — tasked with fixing the system — has spent three decades finding ways to avoid doing so.

The Court Being Asked to Undo Claremont — And Who Will Decide

There is one further structural fact the public record requires noting, because it bears directly on whether the appeal the Attorney General has filed — asking the Supreme Court to overturn the Claremont decisions entirely — can be decided by an impartial tribunal.

As reported by Damien Fisher of InDepthNH.org, plaintiffs in the Rand case have asked Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald and Associate Justices Dan Will, Patrick Donovan, and Stephen Gould to recuse themselves from hearing the Rand appeal. The grounds are specific and documented. MacDonald served as the state’s Attorney General when the ConVal case was filed and his office represented the state against the school funding plaintiffs — he has already recused himself from ConVal for that reason. Will served as Solicitor General. Donovan served as Assistant Attorney General, working in official capacities against schools that sued the state over education funding. And Gould served as legal counsel for the state Republican Party while it actively advocated for overturning the original Claremont decisions.

Four of the five sitting justices. Each with a documented professional history connected to the precise legal question they are now being asked to decide.

The court ruled in April 2026 that it would not suspend Rule 21A — the procedural rule under which each justice decides for himself whether he is too conflicted to hear a case about a conflict he was personally involved in. The recusal motions for the individual justices remain pending.

The significance for this backgrounder is direct. Attorney General Formella has asked this court — potentially including justices who spent their prior careers opposing the constitutional right to adequate education funding — to reverse the 1993 and 1997 Claremont decisions that established that right. Governor Ayotte has since appointed two new justices to the court through a Republican-controlled Executive Council. Those justices will sit on the panel that hears the appeal.

Whether that panel can be trusted to decide the question impartially is a question the court’s own procedural rules have left to the justices themselves to answer.

The Same Fund, Two Directions

Readers of this publication’s previous backgrounder on the Education Freedom Account program will recognize the structural logic.

The Education Trust Fund — which was established specifically to fulfill the state’s constitutional obligation to fund public education — is the same fund from which EFA grants are drawn. The same legislature that tells public school districts there is no money to increase adequacy payments to the constitutional minimum found $113.5 million over the current biennium for the EFA program. Garry Rayno of InDepthNH.org has reported that the combined effect will drain the Education Trust Fund and produce a deficit of approximately $60 million requiring replacement from general funds.

These are not separate policy choices. They are the same choice, made twice, in opposite directions: away from the constitutional obligation to the 94 percent of New Hampshire children in public schools, and toward a program the majority of whose beneficiaries were never in the public school system to begin with.

The Education Trust Fund was not designed or resourced to carry both obligations simultaneously. When it runs short — and it is running short — the difference is paid by property taxpayers, at the local level, at unequal rates, in communities that have been waiting thirty-three years for the state to fulfill a promise the constitution assigned it in 1784.

What This Is Really About

This is not an argument about whether the legislature has the right to set education policy. It does. The courts have said so repeatedly, and have repeatedly deferred to the legislature to determine how to meet the constitutional obligation rather than dictating a specific remedy.

The problem is not the exercise of legislative authority. The problem is the persistent use of that authority to avoid an obligation the constitution clearly assigns, while transferring the cost of that avoidance to the people least able to carry it — property taxpayers in communities with modest tax bases, families with children in special education, school districts asked to deliver services the state is legally required to fund but refuses to pay for.

When a property taxpayer in Claremont pays a school tax rate twelve times higher than a property taxpayer in Moultonborough to fund the same constitutional obligation, that is not local control. That is the state outsourcing its constitutional debt to the people who can afford it least.

When the state provides $2,100 for a child whose special education services cost $49,812, and local property taxes absorb the remaining 83 percent, that is not a funding gap. That is a legal mandate being honored on paper and violated in practice.

And when the legislature’s response to two consecutive court rulings finding the system unconstitutional is to pass a bill redefining adequacy downward, sign it into law, and ask the court to overturn the thirty-three-year-old decisions that created the obligation in the first place — that is not a policy disagreement. That is a branch of government systematically dismantling the constitutional protections of the children it was elected to serve.

The question is not whether New Hampshire values education. The state ranks well on outcome measures, and communities across the state invest heavily in their schools precisely because residents understand the stakes.

The question is who is paying for that investment, and whether the people deciding how the burden is distributed have been honest about what they are doing.

The thirty-three year record suggests they have not. The obligation didn't disappear. It was moved — quietly, and at your expense.

Note: The Rand case is now expected to reach the Supreme Court, where the recusal questions outlined above will determine who sits in judgment of three decades of broken promises.

Sources

The following sources informed this piece. Readers are encouraged to consult them directly.

1. Claremont School District v. Governor, 138 N.H. 183 (1993) (Claremont I). law.justia.com

2. Claremont School District v. Governor, 142 N.H. 462 (1997) (Claremont II). law.justia.com

3. Contoocook Valley School District v. State of New Hampshire (ConVal), NH Supreme Court, July 1, 2025. edlawcenter.org

4. Rand v. State of New Hampshire, Rockingham County Superior Court, Judge David Ruoff, August 18-19, 2025. fairfundingnh.org

5. Judge Ruoff’s Order Denying Reconsideration in Rand, January 27, 2026. InDepthNH.org

6. Garry Rayno, “NH’s Latest School Funding Case,” InDepthNH.org, July 12, 2025. indepthnh.org

7. Ethan DeWitt, “State Supreme Court Holds New Hampshire School Spending Unconstitutionally Low,” New Hampshire Bulletin, July 1, 2025. newhampshirebulletin.com

8. Ethan DeWitt, “New Hampshire Education Funding Is Already Adequate, Republican Bill Asserts,” New Hampshire Bulletin, February 18, 2026. newhampshirebulletin.com

9. “Bill to Ignore Supreme Court’s Call to Boost School Aid Clears Final Hurdle,” Union Leader, March 26, 2026. unionleader.com

10. NH School Funding Fairness Project, “Two Quiet Bills. Big Consequences for Public Education and Property Taxes.” fairfundingnh.org, February 11, 2026.

11. NH School Funding Fairness Project, “What Could Have Been: Missed Opportunities in the 2026–2027 NH State Budget.” fairfundingnh.org

12. NH Fiscal Policy Institute, Property Tax Data and Education Funding Analysis, 2025. nhfpi.org

13. Garry Rayno, “New Education Freedom Account Data Tells A Different Story,” InDepthNH.org, December 6, 2025. indepthnh.org

14. NH Business Review, “Judge Rules NH Is Not Funding an Adequate Education,” August 21, 2025. nhbr.com

15. Valley News, “Property Tax Rates Vary Widely Across New Hampshire,” April 13, 2026. vnews.com

16. Damien Fisher, "Supreme Court Won't Change Rules In Rand Education Funding Appeal," InDepthNH.org, April 28, 2026. indepthnh.org

This piece reflects the author’s independent analysis of publicly available data, court decisions, legislative records, and journalism by the sources cited above. It is not legal or financial advice. Where specific figures or findings originate in reporting by named journalists or organizations, that attribution is made in the text.

About sources and drafting methods →

While public schools go underfunded, the Education Trust Fund bleeds millions to private administrators, a foreign-backed payment platform, and families who were never part of the public system to begin with

A note on this piece. My background is in property appraisal and tax assessment, not education policy. But the structural questions are the same ones I spent a career asking: is the burden being assigned by consistent principle, or by convenience? Is the stated purpose of a program matching its documented reality? And who controls the information that would let the public answer those questions for themselves? In the case of New Hampshire's Education Freedom Account program, those questions have specific, documented answers. This piece is an attempt to put them in one place.

There is a version of this story the program’s advocates tell often and well. It goes like this: New Hampshire created the Education Freedom Account program to give parents — particularly low-income parents — the ability to choose the school that best fits their child’s needs. Every child deserves a chance at a good education, not just the children whose families can already afford to opt out of the public system. The program is transparent, audited, well-run, and saving taxpayers money.

Some of that is true. Some of it is carefully constructed to be difficult to verify. And some of it obscures a set of structural facts that New Hampshire taxpayers deserve to understand plainly before the program costs them another $113 million in the coming biennium.

This piece is an attempt to lay those facts out. Not to argue that no child should have educational choices. But to ask a specific, structural question: who is this program actually serving, who is getting paid along the way, and what is it costing the public education system that the vast majority of New Hampshire children depend on?

Those questions have answers. They are not the answers the program’s advocates prefer to discuss.

What the Program Actually Is

The Education Freedom Account program, created in 2021, allows New Hampshire families to take the state’s per-pupil adequacy grant — money drawn from the Education Trust Fund, which was established to fulfill the state’s constitutional obligation to fund public education — and redirect it toward private school tuition, homeschooling expenses, tutoring, educational technology, and other approved costs. The average grant runs approximately $4,800 per student per year.

Governor Ayotte signed Senate Bill 295 in June 2025, removing the income cap entirely and making New Hampshire the 19th state to establish a universal school voucher system. Prior to that change, eligibility had been limited to families at or below 350 percent of the federal poverty level. The removal of the income cap means any New Hampshire family, regardless of income, can now redirect their child’s state education grant away from the public school system.

The program now enrolls 10,510 students at a projected cost of $51.6 million for the current school year and $61.9 million the following year — a combined $113.5 million for the biennium, running $26.7 million over the original budget estimate, according to data reported by Garry Rayno of InDepthNH.org. Rayno further reports that this biennium’s state operating budget will drain the Education Trust Fund entirely and create a projected deficit of approximately $60 million that will have to be replaced with general funds.

That money does not come from a new source. It comes from the same Education Trust Fund that pays for public school aid — a fund already insufficient to meet the state’s constitutional adequacy obligations, in a state that ranks among the lowest in the country for its share of public education funding.

The Promise Versus the Record

The program was sold to the public on a specific promise: it would give low-income families who couldn’t afford private school the ability to choose an alternative. The intended beneficiary was clear — the child stuck in a school that wasn’t working, whose family lacked the resources to do anything about it.

The data does not support the claim that this is who the program primarily serves.

Of the 10,510 students currently enrolled in the EFA program, only 343 left a public school to join it this year. That is 3.26 percent of total enrollment. The remaining 96.7 percent were already in private schools, religious schools, or homeschooling programs when their families applied for the grant. This enrollment origin data is reported by the New Hampshire Department of Education and confirmed by independent analysis from the New Hampshire Bulletin.

Reporting by Garry Rayno of InDepthNH.org calculates that between $47.18 million and $49.92 million of the $51.6 million projected cost this school year is going to students who were not in public schools when they joined the program. That is money the state was not previously paying to educate these children — it is entirely new spending drawn from a fund that was not designed or resourced to carry it.

The program’s advocates counter that over one-third of participants come from low-income households, citing CSFNH’s own data. Independent analysts at Reaching Higher NH note that the income distribution has shifted significantly since the cap was removed, with the percentage of low-income recipients declining as overall enrollment expanded. What is not in dispute is the enrollment origin figure: fewer than one in thirty students in the program came from the public school system in the year they enrolled.

Former DOE Commissioner Frank Edelblut regularly claimed the program was saving school districts money by removing students from their rolls. As Democrats and independent analysts have consistently noted, removing three percent of students does not reduce a school district’s fixed costs by three percent. Buildings still need to be heated. Teachers still need to be paid. The overhead does not scale proportionally with enrollment.

Where the Money Actually Goes

Beyond the enrollment composition question, the expenditure data reveals something equally important about what the program’s funds are actually purchasing — and for whom.

According to expenditure reports analyzed by Garry Rayno of InDepthNH.org, 57 percent of all EFA grant money goes to private school tuition payments. Of the top recipients, the concentration in religious institutions is striking. Seven private religious schools collected more than $1 million each over the program’s first four years. The top five recipients for the most recent school year — Portsmouth Christian Academy, Trinity High School, Trinity Christian School Concord, Concord Christian Academy, and Mount Royal Academy in Sunapee — are all religious institutions. The first non-religious school on the full vendor list sits at number 39.

Over four years, the seven highest-earning religious schools collectively received more than $9 million in EFA funds. Concord Christian Academy alone has received $1.586 million since the program began. As Rayno observes, it is no wonder that many of these schools have launched expansion programs to enlarge their facilities.

The New Hampshire constitution contains a provision separate from the Blaine Amendment — which the U.S. Supreme Court has addressed in other states — that forbids the use of public money or property for religious purposes. Whether the EFA program’s concentration of public funds in religious institutions raises a question under that provision has not been adjudicated. It has not, as far as the public record shows, been seriously examined.

The approved expenditure list extends well beyond school tuition. EFA funds have been used to pay for ski passes at Pat’s Peak and Waterville Valley, summer camp fees at multiple Christian camps, mountain biking park access, membership in the Association of Pickleball Players, entrance fees to the Naples Zoo, Colonial Williamsburg, and the Kennedy Space Center, and curriculum from the Libertas Institute — a libertarian think tank in Utah. Little League fees, Boy Scout and Girl Scout memberships, and food from a local food hub also appear on the expenditure record, as reported by Rayno.

None of these expenditures are necessarily fraudulent under the program’s current rules. That is precisely the point. The rules are broad enough to permit them. And while EFA funds flow to ski resorts and pickleball associations, the state’s own Driving Education Scholarship Fund — designed specifically to help low-income students pay for the driver education classes now required by law but no longer offered in public schools — currently has its financial awards on hold for lack of resources.

The unspent funds pattern compounds the concern. Over the program’s four years, a combined $24.1 million in distributed EFA grants went unspent at year’s end — including $10.1 million in the most recent year alone. By statute, unspent funds are to be returned to the state, but the law permits families to roll them over year to year until a student graduates or leaves the program. In a program whose stated purpose is helping families who cannot otherwise afford educational alternatives, $10 million sitting unused in digital wallets at year-end raises a question that the program’s advocates have not addressed directly: how many of those families needed the subsidy to begin with?

Follow the Money

Now follow the money through the chain of hands it passes through before reaching its stated purpose.

When the state of New Hampshire approves an EFA grant, the funds do not go directly to the family or the school. The first stop is the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, a New York-based nonprofit that was awarded a sole-source contract — meaning no competitive bidding process — by the Executive Council to administer the program, as documented by Reaching Higher NH. CSFNH reviews applications, determines eligibility, and manages the grant accounts. For this service, it retains an administrative fee currently reported at 7.83 percent of total program funds, according to CSFNH’s own December 2025 press release. On $51.6 million, that is approximately $4 million annually retained by a private out-of-state nonprofit before a single dollar reaches a New Hampshire child.

The 7.83 percent figure is presented by CSFNH as evidence of fiscal discipline, and it does sit below the 10 percent cap written into state law. What is not addressed is why a sole-source, no-bid contract to a private out-of-state organization was the appropriate mechanism for administering a public education program, or what a competitive process might have produced.

The remaining funds flow from CSFNH to ClassWallet, a Florida-based private technology company serving as the digital payment platform through which families access and spend their grants. ClassWallet’s specific fee within the program is not disclosed as a separate public line item — it is folded into CSFNH’s reported administrative rate. What ClassWallet extracts from the total, and on what contractual terms, is not independently verifiable from publicly available records.

What is publicly verifiable is ClassWallet’s investor profile. Reporting by Garry Rayno of InDepthNH.org identified that ClassWallet received early-stage investment from Sinovation Ventures, a Chinese-based venture capital firm co-founded by former China Google President Kai-Fu Lee. A 2018 Defense Department report flagged Sinovation Ventures as participating in China’s technology transfer strategy. Several states using ClassWallet for school choice fund distribution — including Arizona and Missouri — have raised formal concerns about data security and foreign influence.

New Hampshire has not — despite Governor Ayotte having issued Executive Order 2025-04 directing state agencies to avoid doing business with companies whose investor profiles raise national security concerns. As Rayno reported, ClassWallet does not technically contract with the state directly. It contracts with CSFNH, the state’s contractor — a distinction that appears to place it outside the executive order’s reach, while achieving the same practical result: New Hampshire family financial and educational data flows through a platform with documented foreign venture capital ties, and the state has taken no formal action to address it.

The Audit That Isn’t What It Claims to Be

The program’s advocates point to a December 2025 audit as proof of accountability. The Children’s Scholarship Fund NH received what is called an unqualified audit opinion from Grant Thornton LLP, covering financial controls, ClassWallet transactions, and administrative processes. CSFNH described the result as confirming its commitment to integrity and responsible administration.

That audit is real. What it does not resolve is the far more important question of independent oversight — and the distinction matters enormously.

The state’s own Legislative Budget Assistant — the independent auditing arm of the New Hampshire legislature — attempted to conduct a performance audit of the EFA program as required by law. According to LBA testimony before the Joint Legislative Performance Audit Oversight Committee, as reported by InDepthNH.org, the LBA was denied access to the program’s data. The Department of Education and the Attorney General’s office took the position that the data belongs to CSFNH, not to the state. The LBA sought the information directly from CSFNH and was refused, under the advice of then-Commissioner Edelblut. The LBA was ultimately forced to limit its audit scope to the DOE’s oversight of the program rather than the program itself.

A program administrator commissioning a clean audit of itself, by an auditor it hired, covering records it controls, while simultaneously blocking the state legislature’s independent auditors from accessing those same records, is not transparency. It is the appearance of transparency. Those are not the same thing.

The compliance record that does exist from the state’s own oversight compounds the concern. A compliance report covering the program’s first two years found a 25 percent error rate in applications sampled — approvals granted without the required documentation, as reported by Garry Rayno of InDepthNH.org. The state received a rebate only for the specific applications found to be improperly approved, not for 25 percent of the program’s total costs. The full scale of potential misallocation was never independently calculated or made public.

It is also worth noting that CSFNH removed the program’s expenditure reports from its website at one point before restoring them. The reports that Rayno analyzed — revealing the religious school concentration and the scope of approved expenditures — were only available because CSFNH chose to repost them. A program that controls its own data, controls its own audit, and controls its own public disclosures is not operating under independent accountability. It is operating under the appearance of it.

The Fund That Was Never Meant to Carry This

Step back from the specific mechanics and look at the structural picture.

New Hampshire funds its public schools through the Education Trust Fund, drawing on statewide property taxes, business taxes, tobacco settlement funds, and other sources. That fund has never been sufficient to meet the state’s constitutional obligation to provide an adequate education. New Hampshire ranks among the lowest in the country for its state share of public education funding, placing an outsized burden on local property taxes.

Into that already-strained fund, the legislature has directed a program costing $113.5 million over the current biennium — $26.7 million over budget — the vast majority of which is going to students who were never in the public system. Rayno’s reporting indicates the combined effect will drain the Education Trust Fund and produce a deficit of approximately $60 million requiring replacement from general funds. At the same time, Republican-controlled legislative sessions have consistently resisted proposals to increase the state’s adequacy payments to public schools, citing insufficient funds.

According to the NH Fiscal Policy Institute, New Hampshire’s local property taxes paid to cities, towns, counties, and school districts increased $1.52 billion — nearly 48 percent — between 2016 and 2025. The Education Trust Fund shortfall is a direct contributor to that increase. The EFA program draws from that same fund while lawmakers tell public school districts there is no money available to increase the state’s share.

When lawmakers say the state cannot afford to increase its share of public education costs, what the data shows is more precise: the state has chosen to prioritize $113.5 million in EFA spending — the majority of which subsidizes families who were already paying for private education without state assistance, with 57 percent flowing to private school tuition and the top recipients overwhelmingly religious institutions — over increasing adequacy payments to public schools serving the other 94 percent of New Hampshire children.

That is not a funding shortage. It is a funding choice. And the people absorbing the cost of that choice are the property taxpayers whose bills keep rising, the public school students whose per-pupil resources keep shrinking, and the communities whose municipal budgets keep tightening because the state’s share of school funding keeps falling short.

What This Is Really About

None of this is an argument that no child should have educational choices. There are families for whom the EFA program has been genuinely useful — children with learning differences not well-served by their district, students in genuinely unsafe environments, families with specific needs the public system could not meet.

Those cases exist. They are real. And they are not what $113.5 million buys.

What $113.5 million buys, at the current enrollment composition, is primarily a subsidy for families who were already choosing and paying for private education — funneled through a New York nonprofit on a no-bid contract, processed by a Florida technology company with Chinese venture capital backing, shielded from independent legislative audit, concentrated in religious institutions at a rate that raises unexamined constitutional questions, and drawn from a fund that was established to educate the children it is now being redirected away from.

Along the way, it pays for ski passes and summer camps and pickleball memberships. It leaves $10 million unspent in digital wallets at year-end. And it drains a trust fund that public school districts depend on, in a state where the property tax burden on ordinary residents has grown 48 percent in a decade.

Garry Rayno of InDepthNH.org described it plainly: Robin Hood in reverse. The expenditure data, the enrollment record, and the compliance history support that description in full.

There is one further fact the closing argument requires. The Education Trust Fund was not created as a discretionary account. It was created in direct response to the Claremont court decisions — New Hampshire Supreme Court rulings establishing the state’s constitutional obligation to define and fund an adequate education for every child. The state has never fully met that obligation. Court orders requiring greater adequacy funding have gone unmet across multiple legislative sessions. In 2026, the Republican-controlled House passed legislation that legal observers described as an attempt to redefine adequacy downward — specifically to reduce the state’s court-ordered financial obligation to public schools.

In that context, the redirection of $113.5 million from the Education Trust Fund into a program serving students outside the public system is not merely a funding choice. It is the state declining to comply with its constitutional obligations to public school children while simultaneously finding the resources to subsidize private, religious, and homeschool families who made no claim on the public system to begin with.

Consider what that fund actually is. It is not a state abstraction. It is built, in significant part, from the property taxes raised locally — in your town, from your neighbors, from your own tax bill — and sent to Concord to fulfill the state’s constitutional obligation to educate New Hampshire children in public schools. That money is now being redirected out of the communities that raised it, out of the public education system it was designed to serve, and into a chain of private entities — a New York nonprofit, a Florida technology company, religious institutions, and families who were already paying for private education without public assistance — with no competitive bidding, limited independent oversight, and a compliance record the state’s own auditors were prevented from fully examining.

The question is not whether to support educational choice. The question is whether this is what New Hampshire taxpayers agreed to when they funded the Education Trust Fund — and whether the people making that choice on your behalf have been honest about what it costs, who it serves, and who gets paid along the way.

The record has already answered that question.

It suggests they have not.

Sources

The following sources informed this piece. Readers are encouraged to consult them directly.

1. Garry Rayno, “New Education Freedom Account Data Tells A Different Story,” InDepthNH.org, December 6, 2025. indepthnh.org

2. Garry Rayno, “7 Religious Schools Collect More than $1M Each in 4 Years from Education Freedom Accounts,” InDepthNH.org, January 3, 2026. indepthnh.org

3. Garry Rayno, “Education Freedom Account Program to Cost $51.6 Million This School Year,” InDepthNH.org, November 7, 2025. indepthnh.org

4. Garry Rayno, “State Education Freedom Account Administrator’s Financial Audit Touted,” InDepthNH.org, December 9, 2025. indepthnh.org

5. Ethan DeWitt, “As New Hampshire Education Freedom Accounts Double, Percentage of Low-Income Recipients Drops,” New Hampshire Bulletin, December 3, 2025. newhampshirebulletin.com

6. Reaching Higher NH, “School Vouchers: What Can We Expect from Expansion?” reachinghighernh.org, August 2025.

7. Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, “CSFNH Receives Unqualified Audit Opinion for 2024–2025, Reports Administrative Rate of 7.83 Percent,” Press Release, December 9, 2025. nh.scholarshipfund.org

8. New Hampshire Department of Education, EFA Grants Data Sheets and Reports, 2024–2025. education.nh.gov

9. NH Fiscal Policy Institute, Property Tax Data and Education Funding Analysis, 2025. nhfpi.org

10. Legislative Budget Assistant, Testimony before the Joint Legislative Performance Audit Oversight Committee, November 2025. As reported by InDepthNH.org.

11. U.S. Department of Defense, Technology Transfer and National Security Report, 2018. Referenced in InDepthNH.org reporting.

12. CSFNH EFA Expenditure Reports, 2021–2025. nh.scholarshipfund.org/efa-reporting-and-fact-sheets/

This piece reflects the author’s independent analysis of publicly available data, legislative records, audit documents, and journalism by the sources cited above. It is not legal or financial advice. Where specific figures or findings originate in reporting by Garry Rayno of InDepthNH.org, that attribution is made in the text. InDepthNH.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization covering New Hampshire state government.

About sources and drafting methods →

A note on this piece.

This is the third in a series. The first examined the structural mechanics of how New Hampshire’s housing shortage moves its costs quietly and unequally through the property tax system. The second looked at what the party platforms don’t say, what a specific ideological bloc inside the current governing majority believes about land use regulation, and what questions voters should be demanding candidates answer before the 2026 elections.

This one completes the trilogy. It is the answer to the question both prior pieces ended with: so what actually needs to happen?

I want to be honest about the framing before we begin. A clean, staged solution plan is easy to write and satisfying to read. It is also, in this case, not quite true to the situation. Some of the structural solutions to New Hampshire’s housing crisis are already known. Some have been partially enacted. And some are being actively undermined at the same moment they are being celebrated. That layered reality — progress made, progress threatened, deeper problems still untouched — is more useful to you than a tidy roadmap that leaves the resistance out.

So that is what follows: the solutions, staged honestly, with the obstacles named alongside them.

Start with what is not in dispute.

New Hampshire needs somewhere between 60,000 and 90,000 additional housing units by 2040 to meet projected demand. The median price of a single-family home reached $535,000 in 2025 — a 78 percent increase from 2019, placing ownership out of reach for the vast majority of Granite Staters. Rents have risen more than 30 percent statewide since 2019, and more than 50 percent in some communities. Vacancy rates remain near historic lows.

These are not contested figures. They come from the NH Fiscal Policy Institute, NH Housing, and the NH Council on Housing Stability. The disagreement in Concord is not about whether the problem is real. It is about what to do, how fast, who pays for it, and — underneath all of those questions — who gets to decide.

The solutions exist. They are not mysteries. What has been missing is the sustained political will to implement them in combination, at sufficient scale, without dismantling them between sessions.

Stage One: Defend and implement what already exists

The first stage of any serious solution is not glamorous. It is holding the line on what was just won.

The 2025 legislative session produced a meaningful package of reforms: accessory dwelling units by right on most residential lots, residential construction permitted in most commercial zones, parking requirement caps for new developments, and a streamlined 60-day state permitting process for qualifying projects. These were real steps, passed with bipartisan support, and early data suggests modest but genuine results — housing inventory has increased slightly, and some construction timelines have shortened.

But within months of those laws taking effect, more than a dozen repeal bills were filed for the 2026 session. The NH Municipal Association, representing selectboards and planning boards, has opposed most of the zoning overhaul measures. The argument for repeal is local control. The structural reality is that local control, exercised without state accountability, has produced 30 years of constrained supply and a crisis that the locals cannot solve on their own.

A St. Anselm College poll found that 78 percent of New Hampshire residents believe their community needs more affordable housing. That majority has not translated into municipal action — in the year before the 2025 reforms, towns collectively made 59 liberalizing zoning changes against 13 restrictive ones. The pace is not sufficient for the scale of the need.

Stage One is therefore this: the 2025 reforms must be defended, implemented, and given time to work before any rollback is considered. The Housing Champions program — which awarded $5 million in grants to municipalities that adopted pro-housing zoning and enabled 2,280 additional units — must be restored and funded consistently, not defunded in alternate budget cycles. And the 90-day permitting streamline must be adequately staffed to function as written rather than as aspiration.

None of this requires new legislation. It requires the political will to protect what the legislature already passed.

Stage Two: Address the infrastructure problem no one wanted to talk about

Here is the constraint that the zoning conversation almost entirely skipped over.

Zoning reform can change what is legally permitted on a parcel of land. It cannot install water and sewer lines. And according to the NH Zoning Atlas — the most comprehensive mapping of buildable land in the state — only 5.6 percent of New Hampshire’s buildable land has access to both water and sewer infrastructure. Just 12 percent has access to either one.

This means that the zoning reforms passed in 2025, however well-designed, can only reach a small fraction of the land they theoretically affect. A developer permitted to build multi-family housing in a commercial zone cannot build it where there is no water or sewer capacity to support it. The market will not solve this. Infrastructure investment is a public function, and it has been systematically underfunded.

One of the biggest barriers to housing development is not always the private project itself. It is the cost of the public infrastructure needed to support it. — Read into the record on behalf of sponsor Rep. Joe Sweeney, R-Salem, during committee hearings on HB 1588

Several approaches are moving through the 2026 legislative session. HB 1588 would enable municipalities to create special assessment districts — allowing infrastructure improvements to be financed through developer assessments on specific parcels that benefit, repaid over up to 20 years through municipal bonds. This is not a state mandate or a tax increase. It is a financing tool that removes the upfront barrier that has stopped dozens of viable projects.

A parallel approach involves regional infrastructure cooperation. The 2018 collaboration between six southern NH towns and the city of Manchester to share water supply — funded partly by environmental lawsuit settlements — is the most significant example of what regional cooperation can produce. It unlocked development capacity that no single town could have achieved alone. That template needs to be replicated deliberately, with state coordination and dedicated funding, rather than left to arise from litigation settlements.

Alternative wastewater technology also belongs in this stage. Aerobic treatment systems and community septic systems can enable housing development in areas with poor soil conditions or limited municipal infrastructure — particularly relevant in rural communities that have used infrastructure constraints as a rationale for large minimum lot sizes. The NH Department of Environmental Services has the authority and expertise to support this. What has been missing is consistent direction and funding to make it a priority rather than a workaround.

Stage Three: Break the perverse incentive at the root

This is the hardest stage, the most consequential, and the one that almost no one in a position of authority in Concord is currently willing to act on. Which is itself instructive.

New Hampshire funds its public schools primarily through local property taxes. That structural choice — which makes the Granite State an outlier among American states — creates a documented and specific perverse incentive that works directly against housing affordability.

The mechanism is straightforward: when a town approves new housing, particularly starter homes and multi-family units, it increases the school-age population, which drives up school costs, which drives up property taxes. Towns have therefore developed a rational, self-protective pattern of approving age-restricted housing for residents over 55 while blocking starter homes and affordable units. The people excluded from that calculation are young families — exactly the households the state most needs to retain its workforce and tax base over the coming decades.

One reason we don’t have enough housing is that property taxes fund schools. Towns block affordable housing because it brings in kids and drives up school costs. So you get this perverse incentive where towns approve 55-plus housing but not starter homes. — Jon Kiper, Democratic candidate for governor, January 2026

In March 2026, a group of Democratic lawmakers and former gubernatorial candidates unveiled what they called the “3-3 Tax Savings Plan” — a proposal to introduce a 3 percent income tax and a $3 per $1,000 statewide property tax to raise $2 billion annually for the Education Trust Fund, allowing the state to pay $10,000 in base adequacy aid per student and dramatically reduce local property tax burdens. The plan includes a $250,000 primary residence exemption for homeowners and a $750 annual credit for renters to offset the property tax costs passed through in their rent.

The proposal was immediately denounced by Republican leaders and received skepticism from Democrats as well. New Hampshire’s political culture has long treated any income tax as a third rail. The plan’s advocates have framed it not as a new tax but as a structural swap — one that would lower overall tax burdens for most residents while severing the link between local housing decisions and local school funding costs.

Whether this specific proposal advances or not, the structural problem it attempts to address is real, documented, and not going away. Every housing solution implemented at Stage One and Stage Two is working against a current created by the education funding structure. Zoning reform loosens restrictions. Infrastructure investment enables construction. But as long as approving a family home raises a town’s tax bill, the incentive to block those homes remains embedded in the system.

So here is the honest accounting of where New Hampshire stands.

Stage One work — defending and implementing the 2025 zoning reforms — has, so far, largely held. More than a dozen repeal bills were filed for the 2026 session by Republican legislators aligned with the NH Liberty Alliance and the Free State Project’s anti-regulation bloc. By crossover in March 2026, all of the regulatory repeal bills had been defeated or were on the path to defeat. The Housing Champions repeal bill — HB 1196, sponsored by Rep. Michael Drew, R-Manchester — passed the House 185-166 in February along party lines, but was blocked by a 5-0 Senate committee vote and opposed publicly by the governor, who stated plainly that she did not support repealing the program. As of late April 2026, the program survives.

That is genuine good news. It is also a reminder of how close the margin was, and how much sustained attention it required to hold ground that was already won. The same legislators who voted to dismantle a program their own party created will be back next session. The ideological pressure that produced those votes has not changed. That is not a reason for complacency. It is a reason to stay informed, stay organized, and stay present — because the next session will bring the same fight, and the margin will not always hold on its own.

Stage Two work — the infrastructure investment needed to make zoning reform functional — is beginning to move in the 2026 session, with HB 1588 showing genuine bipartisan support. But the scale of what is needed far exceeds what any single piece of legislation can address. The $35 million in one-time housing investments from the 2024-2025 budget cycle was not renewed. Trump directed Federal housing assistance programs are under pressure from proposed cuts at the national level. The financing tools are being built just as the funding environment is deteriorating.

Stage Three — the structural reform of education funding that would remove the perverse incentive at the root of local resistance to housing — has no current legislative path. The most serious proposal in a generation was unveiled in March 2026 and dismissed within days by the majority party.

New Hampshire’s local property taxes paid to cities, towns, counties, and school districts increased $1.52 billion — nearly 48 percent — between 2016 and 2025. That burden falls most heavily on residents with lower, middle, and upper-middle incomes. It does not fall on those with the highest incomes at the same rate. The system is not neutral.

The pattern of exclusionary zoning — what critics call snob zoning — that a friend from the southern region has documented in his corner of New Hampshire is not an anomaly. It is the predictable output of a system in which towns are financially penalized for approving the housing their region most needs. Fixing snob zoning requires more than changing the ordinances. It requires changing the incentive that makes those ordinances rational from a municipal finance perspective.

What to watch in the coming months.

HB 1588 — the special assessment district infrastructure bill — has passed the House and moved to the Senate. If it becomes law, it provides a financing mechanism that could unlock significant development on the 5.6 percent of buildable land already served by water and sewer. Watch whether it survives the Senate and reaches the governor’s desk intact.

The repeal bills targeting the 2025 zoning reforms will face votes in the 2026 session. The governor has signaled she would veto rollbacks. Whether that hold persists against sustained pressure from the Municipal Association and local officials opposed to state-level mandates is not yet certain.

The education funding conversation will continue outside the legislature this year, with the 3-3 plan’s advocates explicitly targeting the 2026 election cycle to build candidate support. Whether that effort gains traction — particularly among Republican candidates who face a genuine housing crisis in their own districts — will reveal whether the structural conversation is finally becoming politically possible.

And the federal picture matters here in ways that are not yet fully clear. The LIHTC expansion passed in 2025 at the federal level represents meaningful additional financing capacity for affordable housing developers. But under Trump, proposed federal budget cuts to HUD programs, rental assistance, and community development block grants could remove resources that New Hampshire’s affordable housing pipeline depends on. The state cannot fully compensate for federal retreat. The interaction of those two forces is one of the most important things to watch.

The solutions are not complicated. They are documented, debated, and in several cases already partially enacted. What they require is something harder than novelty.

They require defending progress against the forces that benefit from the status quo. They require investing in infrastructure that has been allowed to age and constrain for decades. And they require confronting an education funding structure that has quietly organized local housing policy against affordability for a generation.

That last part — defending progress — does not happen in Concord alone. It happens when New Hampshire citizens make clear to their lawmakers, repeatedly and on the record, where they stand. Until recently, votes in the House and Senate followed pressure. The margin on the Housing Champions repeal was nineteen votes. Nineteen. That is not an abstraction. That is constituent (you and me) calls, letters, and testimony. The will of the public and the votes of its representatives do not align automatically. They align because people insist on it. We must remind our elected we’re watching how they’re voting on these issues.

None of that happens without sustained public pressure, informed by an understanding of what the structure actually is and what it actually does. That is what this series has been an attempt to provide.

The work that needs doing is known. The question has always been whether the people carrying it will be allowed to carry it — or whether, as has happened before, the structure will find a way to reassign the burden to those least positioned to refuse it.

That question remains open. The 2026 elections are part of the answer. Please vote.

This backgrounder reflects my analysis of publicly available housing data, legislative records, and policy research. It is not legal or financial advice. This is the third piece in The Quiet Cost New Hampshire Housing Series. If you find an error in facts presented, please let me know, so I can issue a correction.

About sources and drafting methods →

On platform language that says nothing, a legislative bloc that means what it says, and the questions every candidate for state office should be required to answer — without being asked

Election seasons have a reliable rhythm in New Hampshire. Candidates talk about housing. Voters say housing is their top concern. Polls confirm it. And then the session ends, the next campaign begins, and the structural conditions that make housing unaffordable in this state remain essentially unchanged.

That pattern is not an accident. It is the predictable result of a political environment in which vague language about housing is accepted as a substitute for specific commitments — and in which the voters asking the questions have not yet demanded something more.

This piece is an attempt to change that, in the small way a backgrounder can. What follows is an honest accounting of what the party platforms actually say, what the legislative record reveals about intent versus action, and what a specific, named force inside New Hampshire’s governing coalition believes about the regulation of land and property — and what that belief, applied at scale, would mean for homeowners, renters, and the mortgage markets that underpin the value of nearly every home in this state.

The 2026 elections are coming. The question voters should be carrying into them is not whether a candidate supports housing. Every candidate will say they do. The question is what, specifically, they will do — and for whose benefit.

Start with the party platforms, because they are the clearest window into what each party believes it owes the public by way of explanation.

The New Hampshire Democratic Party platform describes housing this way: “Democrats believe affordable housing is essential to the growth of our economy, the strength of our families, and our communities. We support policies that ensure access to safe, affordable, accessible housing without discrimination.”

The New Hampshire Republican Party platform does not address housing as a specific policy area. Its organizing principles center on limited government, local control, individual liberty, and opposition to regulatory expansion. Housing, as a named priority with named mechanisms, does not appear.

Neither platform gives a voter anything measurable to hold a candidate to. One offers a principle. The other offers a silence. Both function as permission for candidates to say whatever the moment requires without being bound to anything specific.

This is not a partisan observation. It is a structural one. Platform language of this generality is designed to be agreeable rather than accountable. It works until voters decide to require more.

The platform language is one window. The legislative record is another, and what it shows is more instructive.

New Hampshire entered 2025 with a Republican trifecta — the governorship, a 16-8 Senate majority, and a 221-177 House majority — giving one party full control of the legislative agenda for the first time in years. Housing was named by leaders of both parties as the top priority of the session. What followed was a mixed record that reveals more about the coalition in power than any platform statement could.

On the supply side, the legislature passed a meaningful package of zoning reform bills in 2025: expanding accessory dwelling units by right, allowing residential construction in most commercial zones, capping municipal parking requirements, and streamlining state permitting to a 90-day process for large developers. These were genuine steps, and the governor signed them. Housing inventory has since shown a modest increase.

But the same session that passed those bills also cut or capped funding for affordable housing programs, leaving advocates to describe the approach as supply-side deregulation without the financing tools needed to reach lower-income households. The Housing Champions program — a $5 million fund designed to reward communities that adopted pro-housing zoning — was targeted for repeal by House Republicans in early 2026 before the session had fully absorbed the reforms it was designed to incentivize.

A St. Anselm College poll conducted in August 2025 found that 78 percent of New Hampshire residents believe their community needs more affordable housing to be built. That number did not prevent more than a dozen repeal bills from being filed in 2026 to roll back the very zoning reforms the same legislature had passed months earlier.

That gap — between what a supermajority of residents want and what a legislative majority pursues — is not incidental. It reflects the composition of the coalition holding power and the priorities that coalition has consistently demonstrated when public testimony and voting records diverge. The French have a phrase for this posture, most often misattributed to Marie Antoinette but no less accurate for that: qu'ils mangent de la brioche. Let them eat cake. The sentiment, whoever first expressed it, has always described the same thing — power that has stopped pretending to listen.

To understand what is driving that gap, it is necessary to be direct about something the political conversation in New Hampshire often talks around.

There is a governing bloc in the current Republican majority that is not simply conservative in the traditional New Hampshire sense. It is the product of a deliberate, two-decade migration strategy. The Free State Project, founded in 2001 and committed to New Hampshire since 2003, has recruited libertarians from across the country to move to this state with the explicit goal of making it a stronghold for what its mission statement calls “the maximum role of government” being limited to “the protection of life, liberty, and property.” As of 2026, approximately 6,000 participants have relocated to New Hampshire for this purpose.

The political results are no longer theoretical. Approximately 30 members of the current Republican House caucus are affiliated with the Free State Project, including House Majority Leader Jason Osborne. The NH Liberty Alliance — founded by the Free State Project in 2003 — distributes a weekly “Gold Standard” voting guide to legislators before floor votes, rating bills on their adherence to libertarian principles and publishing annual “liberty ratings” for every member of the House and Senate. The organization’s influence on voting behavior is direct and documented.

At the 2026 New Hampshire Liberty Forum, House Majority Leader Osborne told the assembled crowd: “Sometimes you have to go on the 6 o’clock news and say with a straight face something that you don’t actually believe.” He described the Free State Project as no longer a political liability. “It’s not a smear anymore,” he said. “It’s a description of where the center of New Hampshire political thought is today.”

This bloc operates within a broader coalition that includes MAGA-aligned Republicans and is organized — as Osborne himself has described — around showing up, picking a team, and voting for imperfect candidates when necessary to hold power. It has passed bills on school vouchers, immigration enforcement, gun rights, and gender-related restrictions. It has done so repeatedly in the face of public testimony running heavily against those bills — in one documented case, with opponents outnumbering supporters at public hearings by nearly six to one.

The current governor won her office by nearly ten points, despite winning, the state’s presidential vote going narrowly the other way. She has been described by observers across the political spectrum as having aligned her administration with MAGA priorities, and her first-year legislative record reflects a working partnership with this coalition rather than a check on it.

Now bring this back to housing. Because the implications of this governing coalition’s ideology for land use, property values, and housing policy are specific, documented, and rarely discussed plainly in the same conversation.

The Free State Project’s position on zoning and land use regulation is not ambiguous. It is part of the broader libertarian project to eliminate what it regards as government interference in private property decisions. At the most extreme end of that philosophy sits what the movement calls anarcho-capitalism — the abolition of centralized regulatory authority in favor of purely private enforcement of property rights. That position is not held by all Free Staters, but it is openly discussed within the movement and has influenced legislation in ways that matter to ordinary homeowners.

The documented example is Grafton, New Hampshire. In 2004, a Free State Project splinter group called the Free Town Project moved to Grafton specifically because it had no zoning laws.

What followed over the next decade included the first two murders in the town’s recorded history, an increase in crime, residents establishing dwellings in yurts, recreational vehicles, shipping containers, and tents, a 30% cut to the town’s already minimal budget, and the elimination of funding to the county senior citizens’ council. Grafton became a case study in what the ideology produces at community scale.

The zoning implications for housing markets are not abstract. They are a matter of property law and mortgage finance, and this is where my professional background is directly relevant.

Zoning is not merely a planning tool. It is a value protection mechanism. It is what separates a residential neighborhood from a commercial corridor, a family home from an adjacent industrial operation. When zoning is eliminated or severely weakened, the protective assumption that underlies every residential property appraisal — that the use of surrounding land is predictable and compatible — collapses.

Consider the practical consequence. Under New Hampshire’s RSA 432:33, once an agricultural operation has been in place for one year or more, it cannot be found to be a nuisance due to changed conditions in the surrounding area. In plain language: if a large-scale hog or poultry operation establishes itself in an unzoned area before residential development arrives, the homeowners who build or buy nearby have no legal nuisance remedy. The protection runs to the agricultural operation, not to the neighborhood.

This is not a hypothetical. In an environment where zoning protections are systematically weakened or eliminated, a large-scale livestock operation, a salvage yard, a rendering facility, or an industrial use of any kind can legally establish itself adjacent to established residential neighborhoods. The effect on surrounding property values is immediate and severe. A home that appraised at $450,000 in a stable residential context does not appraise at the same value when the adjacent parcel is an active hog farm. The loan-to-value ratios on every mortgage in the surrounding area become unreliable overnight.

Lenders understand this. When appraised values in a market become structurally unpredictable due to weakened land use controls, underwriting standards tighten or lending retreats from that market entirely. The people most exposed are not wealthy homeowners who can absorb a decline. They are first-time buyers, fixed-income seniors, and working families whose primary asset is their home.

The argument for eliminating zoning is framed as an expansion of individual freedom. What it actually produces, at the neighborhood scale, is a transfer of risk — from the person placing the incompatible use onto the people who already live there and can do nothing about it.

The 2026 elections will feature candidates at every level of state government who will describe housing as a priority. Some will mean it. Some will be performing it. The platform language will not tell you which is which.

What will tell you is specificity. Here are the questions every candidate for state office should be required to answer, in writing, before the election:

1. Do you support maintaining the 2025 zoning reform laws, including the expansion of accessory dwelling units by right and the prohibition on excessive municipal parking requirements? If not, which specific provisions would you repeal, and what would replace them?

1. Do you support state funding for affordable housing programs, including the Housing Champions program? If yes, at what funding level, and from what source?

1. Do you believe municipalities should retain the authority to establish zoning regulations that protect residential neighborhoods from incompatible land uses? If not, what legal mechanism would protect existing homeowners and their property values in the absence of those regulations?

1. New Hampshire’s reliance on local property taxes to fund public education creates a documented disincentive for towns to approve starter homes. Do you support reforming that funding structure? If so, how, and on what timeline?

1. New Hampshire needs tens of thousands of additional housing units by 2040. What is your specific, numeric target for housing production during your term, and what mechanism enforces it? Not a goal. A mechanism.

A candidate who cannot answer these questions specifically does not have a housing plan. They have a housing position. Those are not the same thing.

New Hampshire has a governing trifecta in which one coalition holds the governor’s office and both legislative chambers. That coalition includes a libertarian movement that has been transparent — at its own events, in its own publications, through its own voting guides — about its intention to dismantle regulatory structures it regards as incompatible with individual liberty. Land use regulation is explicitly on that list.

Housing advocates and ordinary homeowners are not on opposite sides of this question. They want the same thing: a stable, predictable market in which supply increases, values are protected, and the rules that govern what can be built next to your home are knowable before you buy it. Those goals require regulation — thoughtful, reformed, and better-targeted than what New Hampshire has now, but present, enforceable, and accountable to the public interest.

The question for 2026 is not whether candidates support housing. It is whether they support the structural conditions that make housing markets function fairly — for the people trying to get into them, and for the people already in them whose equity depends on those conditions holding.

Aspiration, in a platform statement, costs nothing. Specificity costs something. That cost is exactly what voters should be demanding.

Ask the questions. Require the answers. Watch what happens when you do.

This piece reflects the author’s analysis of publicly available legislative records, party platforms, and documented statements by public officials. It is not legal or financial advice.

About sources and drafting methods →

A note on where this piece came from.

Mondays always seem like a natural starting point for a structural question — and this particular one has been quietly dominating conversations across New Hampshire. It earned its place at the front.

Housing in New Hampshire is a topic I know from the inside — not as an observer, but as someone who spent a career as a NH/VT certified real property appraiser and NH certified property tax assessor before retiring. In that work, the principle of equality wasn’t abstract. It was the job. Every assessment carried an obligation: treat like properties alike, assign burden by consistent principle, and name clearly the gap between what something is stated to be worth and what it actually costs the people living with it.

The housing conversation in this state rarely goes that deep. It tends to stop at supply numbers and development proposals — which are real and important — and never quite arrives at the structural question underneath: who carries the cost, how that burden is distributed, and whether anyone in a position to shape the answer has a financial stake in the outcome.

That last part, as it turns out, deserves its own section.

New Hampshire is talking about housing more than almost anything else right now.

You’ll hear that we need more units. You’ll hear about “missing middle” developments. You’ll hear about specific projects — Liberty Lane and others like it — as examples of the kind of supply the state needs to add.

All of that is true.

But here is the part of the conversation that tends to stay quiet:

New Hampshire doesn’t just have a housing shortage. It has a structure problem. And structure problems don’t announce themselves. They accumulate.

When housing supply falls behind demand, prices don’t hold still. They rise. And when prices rise in a system as heavily dependent on property tax revenue as this one, something else happens — predictably, quietly, at a remove from the original cause.

The burden moves.

The gap didn’t appear overnight.

It built the way these things usually build: construction lagged behind population growth; zoning restricted what could be built and where; development costs climbed; communities resisted density changes at the local level, one town meeting at a time. Meanwhile, demand kept rising. Young families. Workers relocating from higher-cost states. People looking for somewhere they could still afford to put down roots.

New Hampshire is now projected to need tens of thousands of additional housing units by 2040 just to meet that demand. The number is significant. But the number isn’t really the point.

The point is what pressure does when it has nowhere to go.

Pressure finds an outlet. In a housing market, that outlet is price.

This is the part most people don’t see clearly, because it requires holding two things in mind at the same time: the housing market and the tax structure.

When housing supply doesn’t keep pace with demand, home prices rise and rents rise alongside them. Over the past decade, median home prices in New Hampshire have more than doubled. Ownership has moved out of reach for a growing number of families — not because those families changed, but because the arithmetic changed under them.

But the price increase doesn’t stop there.

Rising market values eventually move into assessed values. And in New Hampshire, assessed values are the foundation of the local property tax — the mechanism by which the state funds its public services, including education. New Hampshire relies more heavily on local property taxes than most states in the country. That is not incidental to this story. It is central to it.

When housing values rise, property tax pressure rises with them. The cost of the shortage doesn’t disappear. It moves — into rent, into tax bills, into the monthly calculation of whether staying in place is still possible.

This is what I mean by a structure problem. The shortage creates the price pressure. The price pressure feeds the tax pressure. The tax pressure distributes costs across households in ways that have nothing to do with ability to bear them. Each step follows from the one before. None of it is accidental. And none of it resolves itself without intervention at the supply level.

The burden does not land evenly. It never does.

First-time buyers find themselves priced out of a market their parents entered with less difficulty and less income. Young families delay ownership, or abandon the idea of it. Seniors on fixed incomes — many of them long-established in their homes, not arriving from somewhere else — watch their tax bills climb against income that does not.

Renters absorb the increases with no equity in return. That last part bears emphasis. When a homeowner’s assessed value rises, there is at least an asset that has gained value on paper. The renter pays the increased cost — passed through in higher monthly rent — and owns nothing at the end of it. In many New Hampshire communities, renters now make up a growing share of households. Vacancy rates remain extremely low. The combination keeps upward pressure on rents in ways that are structural, not seasonal.

This is where the housing conversation becomes something else. It becomes a question about how costs are distributed — and who gets to decide.

The phrase “missing middle” gets used a great deal in planning conversations. It refers to the housing types that sit between single-family homes and large apartment complexes — duplexes, townhomes, small multi-family buildings. The argument for adding them is straightforward: more supply moderates price pressure.

That argument is correct, as far as it goes.

Projects like the Liberty Lane redevelopment — adding hundreds of units aimed at that middle tier — are genuine attempts to add supply and relieve structural pressure. They are trying to do the right thing in a market that has been allowed to tighten for a long time.

But the honest accounting has to include the trade-offs.

Build more housing: supply increases, price pressure moderates, but communities face infrastructure strain and resistance from existing residents who prefer the status quo. Don’t build: supply remains constrained, prices continue rising, displacement accelerates, and property tax pressure keeps distributing costs onto people with the least capacity to absorb them.

There are no cost-free options in this. There are only different ways of distributing the cost. The question is not whether someone pays. The question is who.

Before we get to the closing question, there is something else worth naming — because it sits directly in the path of any serious answer.

In discussions of housing costs, you will often hear the name BlackRock invoked as a primary villain. The claim is that BlackRock has been buying up single-family homes and pricing out ordinary buyers. That specific claim is not accurate. BlackRock is an asset manager; it has stated clearly that it does not purchase individual homes in the United States. The confusion is widespread and stems from conflating BlackRock with a different firm entirely: Blackstone.

Blackstone is a private equity company and the largest corporate landlord in the world, owning more than 300,000 single-family homes in the U.S. It is not a myth or a misidentification. And it has a documented presence in New Hampshire — including Royal Crest Estates in Nashua, a 904-unit apartment complex; student housing near UNH in Durham; and apartments in Lebanon.

This matters for a specific reason.

New Hampshire’s current governor, Kelly Ayotte, served on Blackstone’s board of directors from 2019 until taking office in 2025. During that period, she was paid $150,000 annually and accumulated more than $544,000 in cash compensation, along with stock holdings that at one point exceeded $3 million in value — including shares structured not to vest until after she took office, according to SEC filings and reporting by the New Hampshire Union Leader.

Rent for a two-bedroom apartment in New Hampshire rose more than 30 percent between 2019 and the time of the 2024 campaign. In Nashua — where the governor lives, and where Blackstone owns Royal Crest Estates — the increase exceeded 50 percent over the same period.

Governor Ayotte and Blackstone have both disputed the claim that Blackstone’s practices materially contributed to rising housing costs, characterizing such arguments as politically motivated. That debate is ongoing. What is not in dispute is the documented record: the person now overseeing housing policy in New Hampshire held years of financial relationships with the state’s most prominent corporate landlord, worth millions of dollars, before taking office.

I am not in the business of assigning motive. What I am in the business of — from long professional habit — is identifying when the structure of a situation creates conditions for a conflict of interest. In property assessment, there is a name for when the person determining value has a financial stake in the outcome. We call it a conflict of interest, or at minimum, the appearance of one — something that requires disclosure, recusal, or both.

Whether it has functioned as one here is a question the record does not yet fully answer. But it is a question worth asking plainly. And the fact that it isn’t being asked more loudly in the public conversation about New Hampshire housing is itself something worth sitting with.

I spent a career asking a version of this question in a professional context: are like things being treated alike? Is the burden being assigned by consistent principle, or is it being assigned by convenience — falling on whoever is least positioned to push back?

I can tell you from direct experience that the answer is not always what it should be.

During my time as a certified property tax assessor, I identified significant valuation irregularities in multifamily and apartment properties within my taxing jurisdiction — the kind of errors that, left uncorrected, meant those properties were carrying more than their fair share of the tax burden, a condition referred to in the profession as being disproportionately assessed. When I moved to address the inequities, certain members of the city council intervened — convening a non-public session to instruct me not to release the findings and to deny the department the funding needed to correct them.

What followed had a particular shape. Several of those same council members owned multifamily and/or apartment properties. With access to information the public was being denied, they were positioned to file for property tax abatements on their own holdings — abatements the general public had every legal right to pursue as well, but no knowledge they had grounds to file.

That is not a failure of principle. The principle was clear enough. It is a failure of structure — of who controls information, who controls funding, and who is therefore positioned to act on what they know while everyone else waits.

I did not stay quiet about it. As their assessor, my professional obligation ran to the taxpayers of that municipality — all of them, not a select group of well-positioned people who happened to hold seats on the city council. Acting in that spirit, and as a New Hampshire resident and taxpayer rather than in my official capacity, I made those irregularities known publicly. That, along with other findings I had surfaced, led to my termination.

That is not a complaint. It is context. It is what happens, sometimes, when the structure is working exactly as certain people intend it to — and someone decides to say so out loud.

The answer in New Hampshire’s housing market, at this moment, has that same shape.

The cost of a decade of constrained supply has been distributed quietly and unequally. It sits in the rent payments of people building no equity. It sits in the tax bills of seniors who never asked for a rising market. It sits in the deferred homeownership of young families who did everything right and still cannot close the gap.

The structure created this. The structure can change it. But only if the conversation gets honest about what the structure is actually doing — not what it intends, not what it promises, but what it does, and to whom.

The real question is not whether New Hampshire builds more housing. The real question is who carries the cost if it doesn’t.

That question has an answer. The people absorbing the cost already know what it is. The people in a position to change it have so far found the current arrangement acceptable.

That gap — between who pays and who decides — is where the work begins.

This piece reflects the author’s analysis of publicly available housing and tax data. It is not legal or financial advice.

About sources and drafting methods →