New Hampshire’s Republican Majority has done some decent work on lowering taxes in this year’s session. Two of the measures they are promoting including returning more rooms and meals (sales) tax revenue to cities and towns. Another is a spending cap bill.
Related: “Ax The Property Tax” and Replace it With What?
SB99 sends more rooms and meal taxes back to towns to offset or lower property taxes. This is a great move financially and politically. Democrats have been running on lowering property taxes for years. Their solution is to raise new taxes. Broad-based taxes. Take more from this pocket while pretending to give some back to the other.
The net effect of this shell game is a higher overall tax burden and a reliance on sales and income taxes that never go down and never go away. All while your local taxes climb alongside them – which means any momentary reduction is erased, and the total tax burden grows.
Democrats never shrink government; they never cut total spending. Therefore taxes can never go down. Never.
Republicans are returning a larger percentage of the rooms and meals tax (previously spent at the state level) to the cities and towns where it was taxed. (They are also lowering that tax).
The lower tax is more attractive for tourism and more likely to encourage dining out (than raising that tax), which adds potential for more revenue alongside the increased percentage of revenue returned by the state.
The other bill is SB52 which addresses voting to override local tax caps if a city or town has one.
Here’s Sen. Avard on both bills.
