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New Hampshire this year slipped ahead of Texas to claim the No. 6 spot on a national index of state tax competitiveness published by the Tax Foundation. Formerly the Business Tax Climate Index, the newly redesigned 2025 State Tax Competitiveness Index combines the Tax Foundation’s indexes for corporate, individual income, sales, property, and unemployment insurance … Read more
New Hampshire is the No. 3 state in the country for outbound cigarette smuggling, resulting in a revenue windfall, concludes the latest annual report on interstate cigarette smuggling from the Tax Foundation and Mackinac Center for Public Policy. From 2007-2022, New Hampshire earned $955 million in state revenue from cigarette buyers who then smuggled their purchases to … Read more
The big question many pundits ask in the wake of the significant Republican pick-ups in the state house and senate is what they will do with their newfound numbers. Six pick-ups in the Vermont State Senate and what looks like around twenty in the house (there will be at least one contested outcome in Bennington-1 … Read more
Businesses not paying their fair share. Shrinking state revenues. A tax burden shifted from businesses to property tax payers. Those were the predictions critics have made since 2015, when New Hampshire legislators began a series of business tax cuts. Not only did those predictions fail to materialize, but the exact opposite happened. Since the rate … Read more
New Hampshire has been doing something crazy. Lowering taxes. Business taxes have systematically been reduced for years. Small. Incremental. Persistent. Drew Cline wrote a piece debunking the lies that this harmed New Hampshire somehow. The Republican Legislature also repealed the state’s only tax on income (we don’t have a traditional income tax on individual wages) … Read more
Nine years after the state began reducing business tax rates, five narratives are driving the policy discussion of those cuts. All five are false. In a new briefing paper, we debunk the five most common myths about the business tax cuts that ran from 2015-2022. Background: From 2015-2022, legislators cut the Business Profits Tax from 8.5% … Read more
On Monday, Donald Trump floated the idea that he might seek to replace the federal income tax with federal taxes on imports—also known as tariffs. This is potentially a good idea, but not for economic reasons. There is no economic reason why tariffs are any better or any worse than the income tax. A tariff, which is just a … Read more
Massachusetts’ millionaires tax makes it harder for the New England Patriots to recruit top players, former Patriots coach Bill Belichick said on Monday. Asked about the millionaires tax on The Pat McAfee show, Belichick said, “That’s Taxachusetts. They take more from you.” Because the NFL’s high pay makes most players millionaires these days, the tax implications … Read more
It’s election season, and once again, progressives are advocating higher taxes by claiming that legislators over the last decade have cut taxes for “big businesses,” “large, out-of-state corporations,” and “millionaires and billionaires.” These claims are intentionally misleading. They rely on voter ignorance about New Hampshire’s tax system to create the impression that lawmakers in recent … Read more
There has been so much talk in the last few weeks, and it appears that there are only two schools of economics, and they have very different views on the impact on the economy. The ironic fact is that both parties use tariffs, including Biden/Harris, but the mainstream media only wants to go after Trump … Read more
A nullity” and “we declare these acts void“ This was the bold conclusion about British Acts that Thomas Jefferson came to in his powerful 1774 pamphlet, A Summary View of the Rights of British America. Written nearly two years before the Declaration of Independence, it foreshadowed ideas Jefferson would later develop further. He asserted several fundamental principles that … Read more
Here at the ‘Grok, we’ve had the good misfortune of watching how Democrats create the need for new taxes in real time. This is important. Dems will run on a platform with no tax hikes or new taxes if they must, but these promises are empty. Once in charge, the first order of business is … Read more
In the movie Tootsie, Bill Murray’s character is a playwright who has a running conversation with Dustin Hoffman about a scene he’s writing, “the necktie scene,” that’s just not working. He finally surrenders to Hoffman’s diagnosis of the problem, “I’m rewriting the necktie scene without the necktie.” I was reminded of this joke when I saw … Read more
I’d never heard of this loser until today. His name is Misah Pride (sounds made up to me). He is the mayor of South Portland. It’s across the Fore River from North Portland. It is safer than the way Joyce Craig left Manchester, NH (most cities are), is mostly white, picked Biden over Trump in … Read more
Among the various new taxes proposed by Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign are increased levies on capital gains and taxation of unrealized capital gains on wealthy Americans. Given recent history, this is particularly sneaky. The Biden-Harris team sparked rapid inflation, so now the Harris-Waltz duo wants to tax the phantom inflationary gain even before citizens holding … Read more
A few sentences into his recent piece in InDepthNH (and other places), Andru Volinsky demonstrates that he has no idea how the statewide education tax actually works, let alone how it should work. First, no one gets excused from paying anything. Every district collects the full SWEPT tax, spends it on adequacy, and applies … Read more
As mentioned in [Part 1], the most straightforward (and least Marxist) way to fund schools would be to use a uniform (per capita) tax. You take the budget, divide it by the number of taxpayers, and that’s the tax each one pays. But even that ends up implementing a sort of reverse Marxism, taking money … Read more
By Jane L Johnson | Mises Wire – No American politician running for office wants to talk about taxes—unless, of course, it’s to promise a tax cut. No Misesian views taxes with anything but suspicion, and Mises himself held some principled views on taxes: Taxes are necessary. But the system of discriminatory taxation universally accepted under the misleading … Read more
After looking at [Part 1] and [Part 2], we can consider a third case, where the kid who takes the EFA comes from a district that would be tuitioning him to a school outside the district, because the district doesn’t offer the grade that he’s in. For example, suppose each district pays $15,000 to tuition … Read more
Okay, so given what we saw in Part 1, let’s consider what happens when a student leaves each of the two districts to open an Education Freedom Account (EFA). In District 1, what changes? Things that change are highlighted below: Before After Taxpayers 1000 1000 Students 100 99 Budget $2M $2M Adequacy $400,000 $396,000 … Read more