This question was posed to me the other day by a friend (I will paraphrase and omit the profanities): “How is it that New Hampshire, a state roughly the same geographic size of Vermont with about twice the population spends half the amount of taxpayer money that we do?”
Here are the actual numbers. New Hampshire’s population is about 1.4 million, and Vermont’s is about 640,000, so we’re slightly less than half. Vermont’s current budget is $8.5 billion while New Hampshire’s is $3.1 billion, so we spend well over two and a half times – nearly triple — more. Naturally, this means that, compared to Vermont, New Hampshire is in a state of total neglect. Children wandering the streets uneducated. The sick left to suffer and die. The poor abandoned hungry and unsheltered. Criminals terrorizing the citizenry…. Umm… no.
In fact, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, New Hampshire has 11.6 homeless people per 10,000 population, while Vermont has 43 — nearly four times as many! There are a few possible explanations for this. One is our economic and social welfare policymakers are such inept doofuses that they’re driving more citizens into systemic poverty. Another is our policies are so out of whack “generous” that homeless people are flocking to Vermont to free ride on the backs of Vermont taxpayers. But since homeless advocates are adamant that the latter is not happening (yeah, sure), we’ll have to go with the doofus hypothesis for now. (It actually applies to both scenarios).
When it comes to educating children, Vermont, according to US News & World Report, ranks 11th for student outcomes. Pretty good! But New Hampshire ranks 4th. Do they spend more to get better outcomes than we do. Nope. New Hampshire spends twenty percent LESS at $19,633 per pupil compared to Vermont’s $24,666 – and these numbers are before the coming 14% property tax increase, new internet service tax and short-term rental tax fueling a $200 million plus K-12 spending increase for next year.
Healthcare? According to Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Vermont comes in 9th for overall quality. Still, New Hampshire comes in 6th. Is New Hampshire paying more for that higher quality. No. Oh, no… MoneyGeek reports a New Hampshirite’s annual health insurance bill comes in at $6072, or the tenth lowest nationally. A Vermonter’s? (Scrolling down… scrolling down… scrolling down…) There we are! Number 47 at $10,236.
What it comes down to is “Return on Investment” (ROI), or in layman’s terms, bang for the taxpayer’s buck. WalletHub does an annual analysis for ROI on state spending and, low and behold, New Hampshire is number one. Their legislators spend wisely and to good effect. Vermont is (scrolling down… scrolling down… scrolling down…) 43rd. Sandwiched between New Jersey and Arkansas of all the appalling places to find oneself. Our legislators, it seems, have a propensity to, rather than “invest’ our money as they would have us believe, something akin to piling it on the State House lawn and setting fire to it.
According to the WalleHub analysis of New Hampshire,
The Granite State’s tax resources have had a good impact on crime prevention and the environment, as the state has the second-lowest crime rate and the second-lowest air pollution in the country. It has one of the best public school systems as well…. New Hampshire residents are doing very well for themselves, considering they’re paying out less money in taxes, and the state has some of the lowest unemployment and poverty rates in the country.
And they do this with no income tax, no sales tax, and the sixteenth-lowest per capita state and local tax burden versus Vermont’s (scrolling down… scrolling down… scrolling down) forty-seventh. So, when you get your next property tax bill with its massive increase and try to cover it with a paycheck suddenly made smaller by a new payroll tax, etcetera, and so on, know that it doesn’t have to be this way.
Our politicians on the Left tell us Vermonters want more expensive government. No, we don’t. We want a cost-effective government. We might be willing to spend more if it meant getting better results, but that’s not happening. We’re paying a lot more for, quite frankly, really crappy service. The solution: stop electing doofuses who think your tax money is their ideological plaything, and start electing responsible adults who take seriously their responsibility according to the Vermont Constitution, Article 18, to apply a “firm adherence to… frugality.”
