Andrew Sanborn: Legislators walk from revenue, leave towns to fend

To the Daily Sun,

New Hampshire’s property tax crisis didn’t fall from the sky. It wasn’t caused by reckless local spending sprees or runaway school boards. It was engineered — slowly, deliberately, and with full knowledge of the consequences — by lawmakers who have spent the past decade hollowing out the state’s revenue system while insisting that towns “live within their means.”

The truth is simple: Concord keeps cutting taxes for the wealthiest households and the most profitable corporations, and then pretends to be shocked when municipalities are forced to raise property taxes to keep the lights on. Homeowners are paying the price for a political experiment that benefits a select few while starving the public services everyone else relies on. Start with the interest and dividends tax. This wasn’t a tax on working families. It wasn’t a tax on retirees living on Social Security. It applied only to people with significant investment income — people who are doing just fine. Yet lawmakers decided that even this modest contribution from the state’s wealthiest residents was too much to ask. They began phasing it out in 2023, and by 2025 it will be gone entirely.

That’s not tax relief. That’s a handout. Then look at business taxes. The business profits tax has been chipped away year after year, dropping from 7.9% to 7.5%. The business enterprise tax — once a stable, predictable revenue source — has been slashed from 0.75% to 0.55%, with talk of cutting it even further. These reductions may sound small, but across the entire business sector they add up to tens of millions of dollars the state no longer collects.

Where does that money come from now? Readers' property tax bill.

No amount of penny‑pinching at the town level can make up for the revenue the state has deliberately walked away from.

Andrew Sanborn

Sanbornton