2,000 Votes
How One Primary Election in 1972 Is Still Determining Your Property Tax Bill — And Why May 14th Matters
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.
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