Stuck in Reverse

The day after being elected governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu started talking about voter fraud. He’s deeply concerned about it – though not so deeply as to question the legitimacy of his own election. No, our new governor is content to mutter about the need for “reform.” He’s even called for the elimination of same day voter registration. Apparently no one has explained what that would mean to our newly elected Governor.

In 1993, the National Voter Registration Act was signed into law. It requires states governments to provide the opportunity for any eligible person who applies for a driver’s license or a renewal, or for some form of public assistance to also register to vote.  The state would be required to register applicants by mail, using federal registration forms. Private entities would be able to hold voter registration drives and register voters.

New Hampshire Republicans have always hated this idea. Registering welfare recipients to vote? Registration drives on college campuses? In poor neighborhoods? Oh, hell no! They hated the idea so much that they got out of complying with the motor voter law by having same day voter registration instead. Given a choice between the two, I am certain that they will continue to prefer same-day registration, and that someone will explain all this to Chris Sununu.

Representative David Bates (R-Windham) has adopted the cause of fauxfraud as his new mission, and has filed 13 bills and one constitutional amendment to solve the non-existent problem. Imagine if he and his fellow legislators were even half as interested in solving the very real problem of our state’s crumbling infrastructure?

In speaking about his priorities, our new governor’s top 3 were voting, guns, and union busting. Sununu would like to eliminate the requirement for licensing a concealed handgun. Current law (written by Republicans, by the way) requires one’s local chief of police issue a permit. The chief has the discretion of being able to refuse to give a license to someone he knows to be a bad tempered drunk or domestic abuser. That isn’t enough for the gun crowd, who will not be happy until there are zero gun laws in our state. In fact, some of the gun happy legislators are opposed to domestic abusers losing their guns. Fifty percent of the women murdered in this state are murdered by their abusive partners, but apparently women are easily replaceable in the eyes of the MOAR GUNZ crowd. It is interesting though, that in a state that has so few gun laws, that the governor elect considers this a priority.

Sununu also wants to sign right-to-work (for less) legislation, which we also call union busting. Less than 10% of the NH workforce is unionized, but it’s been the mission of the far right to eliminate that small percentage altogether for decades. They love to opine that it will cause businesses to relocate to NH, because RTW states are doing so well. They’re states in warm climates (no NH energy costs), states with good infrastructure in place, and states that invest in education – AND they don’t have NH property taxes. It’s really all about eliminating the perceived political influence of unions. Well, that and their deep belief that business should be able to pay workers just as badly as they want to.

Our new Gov wants to “fix” the state budget, so he’s brought in Charlie Arlinghaus of the Koch funded Josiah Bartlett Center. Arlinghaus is going to find all the “pork”. It would be laughable if it weren’t so serious. The voter fraud crowd wails about how voter affidavits aren’t investigated quickly, while failing to acknowledge that they underfund the state agency that is in charge of doing the work. Giving the Koch brothers more influence over our state government spending will ensure that not only will we continue to have the 11^th worst infrastructure in the United States; we’ll climb higher on the list.

Sununu also wants to cut business taxes, because that will “send the message that NH is open for business.” It’s uncertain who will be hearing that siren call – but if they do, they may decide that our utility costs, crumbling infrastructure, limited telecommunications options, property taxes, and failure to invest in higher education may not be what they’re looking for. One thing you can count on though, if all the business tax cuts are enacted, your property taxes will be going up. The money to run the state (even to run it as if it were going out of business) does have to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is your property. Other states have income and sales taxes. NH has you, the property owner. As businesses pay less and less of their fair share, you’ll be picking up the slack. Live free or die – and be sure to keep voting for the pledge takers.

Sununu wants to ensure that Medicaid beneficiaries work if they are able. I’m guessing that what he meant by that was the NH Health Protection Program, which is the NH version of expanded Medicaid. Most of the people who are enrolled in the NHHPP are low-wage workers – heck, some of them probably work at Waterville Valley. They already are working. The GOP is desperate to convince us that these folks are milking the system somehow to get health care benefits. Thing is – the NHHPP doesn’t pay the rent, buy the groceries, or put gas in the car. The people who make these claims either don’t understand how this works, or they don’t care, because it’s easier to get people all jacked up by lying to them. There are work requirements for food stamp recipients, by the way. You never hear about that, do you?

In this way when the legislature votes next year (and they will) to end the NHHPP, if they’ve told enough big lies, they’ll still get reelected. Even when 40,000 low-wage workers lose their health insurance.

None of this will help NH’s stagnant economy. As long as the state is stuck in reverse, there’s no hope of moving into the future. 

This was published as an op-ed in the December 9 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper 

What About the Yacht Dwellers?

The New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute (NHFPI) recently released a report called, Taking the Measure of Need in the Granite State. NHPI looks at NH issues, and also examines problems with the federal poverty guidelines.

The poverty rate in NH is the lowest in the nation, at 9.2 percent. The federal poverty threshold was created in the 1960’s. At that time, a research showed that a family of three spent approximately one third of its budget on food.  After that, official poverty thresholds were created by multiplying the cost of a minimum food diet by three. Over time occasional adjustments have been made to account for inflation. In 1995, the Census Bureau created a supplemental poverty measure, which didn’t replace the poverty threshold, but exists to provide alternative information.

No adjustments have been made for the cost of housing. These days, housing costs account for upwards of two thirds of a poverty level budget. That’s another problem, the poverty threshold does not account for geographic differences in housing or other costs. As we all know, NH has some of the highest energy costs in the nation – as well as some of the highest property taxes and housing costs. Rent, day care, and health care costs combined make up at least half of the average working family’s budget.

The report finds that jobs in NH don’t match up with the cost of living. Only 30% of the jobs pay enough for a single parent with one child to have an “adequate” standard of living. The availability of those jobs depends greatly on where one resides in the state. The further north one travels, the more likely it is that the region is dependent on low wage service jobs. The cost of living does not decrease proportionally.

We all know that young people flee our state to avoid crushing student debt. We know they don’t come back because the employment prospects are limited and the exorbitant property taxes limit their ability to buy a house. There’s a shortage of rental property, so the rents are too damn high. We also know that many towns rely on volunteers to serve as firefighters and EMTs. This creates a conundrum in an aging population.

What are we doing about it? Well….nothing. We rely on volunteers to populate our legislature. Many of them are old and retired, and their sole interest is protecting their pensions. Some are businessmen whose sole interest is either passing or preventing legislation that applies to their businesses. Some are younger people who have no visible means of support. They generally do have a lot of expensive video equipment and plenty of weapons.

We are a state that lacks any kind of vision for the future. We live in and are legislated by the past.

Senator Jeb Bradley has been tweeting out lovely photos of his climbs up our 4000 footers in our various state parks. The same state parks we fund with user fees. NH is the only state that does it, because every other state was smart enough to realize that it doesn’t work. We are so miserly that we’ve created a mess. To fix the state parks would require a large infusion of cash. Our visionless legislature has been kicking the infrastructure can down the road for decades. You have only to drive down East Conway Road to see the results of that brilliant strategy. It would have been cheaper and smarter to keep up the maintenance of our roads and bridges all along, but that would have meant spending money, and we don’t do that here. As I’ve said far too many times – we prefer to pay the pound of cure. NH would rather amputate a limb than buy a band-aid.

The NH Senate will be voting on extending the NH Health Protection Plan (NHHPP) this week. Our Republican brethren don’t want to do it, because only people who can afford health insurance deserve it. The 50,000 low-wage workers in our state that are currently covered by the NHHPP apparently aren’t “deserving.” Greg Moore, the head of Americans for Prosperity in NH, was quoted at a hearing on the bill, as saying that “we aren’t getting a return on our investment,” when it comes to the NHHPP. The health of our residents isn’t worth investing in. It’s all about money for the Moores of the world. When everything has a price, nothing has any value.

Moore is a mouthpiece for the Koch Brothers, the funders of Americans for Prosperity. He was included in secret budget meetings last year. The Kochs aren’t creating any jobs here, other than Greg Moore’s. Luckily for the Kochs, we know that money is speech, and they get to speechify aplenty in a state where they have no investments other than AFP and the Free State Project.

The Senate is intent on attaching a work provision to the NHHPP. These are people who have been marinating in Reagan mythology for so long that they’re unable to accept reality. The welfare queen was a myth, and so is trickle down economics. When the NHHPP was first proposed, State Representatives Laurie Sanborn and Neal Kurk penned a letter to the editor that bemoaned the fact that “low income yacht dwellers” would be taking advantage of “free” health care. Has anyone found a low income yacht dweller in NH? The Republicans in our legislature believe that workers will quit their good paying jobs so that they can get “free” health care. Because that “free” health care will pay their rent and buy their groceries? These same legislators conveniently forget the fact that low-wage workers pay taxes. The same taxes that fund the NHHPP. 

The report from NHFPI shows that we use an outmoded tool to assess poverty, in a nation (and our state) where it is increasing. It’s difficult to imagine that this is an accident. The wealthiest country in the world doesn’t want to have accurate information about the poverty of its citizens, because that might require doing something about it. Right now, we’re more than content to blame that poverty on the poor.

published as an op-ed in the April 1 edition of the Conway Daily Sun 

Feeding the Unicorn

At the end of the last legislative session, Governor Hassan vetoed the state budget that was written by the far right libertea crowd, with an assist from the Koch brothers. This week, the Governor announced that a compromise had been reached.

All summer long, the NH GOP has attacked the governor for vetoing their budget. Their budget enacted business tax cuts that would have left $90 million dollar holes in future budgets, yet they claimed it was responsible. Somehow, magically, a pristine white unicorn would ride in on that wave of tax cuts and fart rainbow fairy dust all over the state, and all that needs funding would somehow magically be funded. Infrastructure! State parks! State employees! Feed that unicorn some beans!

NH does not ever budget in a fiscally responsible way. Most of us wouldn’t patronize a business that was attempting to run with broken equipment and a leaky roof, because the owner was too cheap to invest in his business. That is exactly the business model by which we run our state.

Our Republican brethren are still mired in the trickle down theories embraced by their beloved/invented Saint Ronnie. That those theories have been disproven time and time again doesn’t matter to these folks. They are incapable of grasping reality. They have no plan for the future.

The Democrats aren’t much better. They make a little noise, but ultimately they cave in to the pledge politics that rule our state. Governor Hassan has made a deal that is politically expedient, but it’s not responsible. It will, however, allow her to run for the US Senate, without too much GOP braying about how she vetoed their budget. The agreement also gives cover to those House Republicans pondering a run for governor.

This budget does not ensure that there is enough money to run our state in a responsible way. The Department of Corrections doesn’t have sufficient staff, so they are soliciting volunteers to work as file clerks. The site reminds us that these are unpaid, volunteer positions. There will be a background check, they say. There will be a two-hour orientation. There is no mention of confidentiality.  This is a perfect illustration of how dysfunctional our state has become.

Volunteers. Remember former Governor Craig Benson’s volunteers? He had an entire shadow government comprised of his Cabletron cronies who were called “volunteers.” He refused to give us the names of the volunteers or list their duties – at least not until the scandals started breaking. Volunteer Linda Pepin negotiated a no-bid contract for state employees health care, despite the fact that she wasn’t qualified or empowered to do so. She took only one bid. Benson fired Pepin. He asked his AG, Peter Heed to look into the matter. Heed was a Benson appointee, (that was bad enough) and he included Kelly Ayotte, (then assistant AG) in the investigation. Ayotte had been Benson’s attorney only months before. The Benson administration was rife with corruption, which is why he only served one term. It’s also why Republicans never trot him out as a success story. Oh, and he still hasn’t paid the artist he commissioned to paint his portrait which was intended to hang in the State House. Sleazy till the end.

Volunteers are wonderful. We rely on them to keep our towns running, in so many ways. We should not rely on them to fill positions that should be filled by paid employees, or to run our state government, a la Benson.

The budget agreement does not include reauthorizing the NH Health Protection Program, (aka expanded Medicaid) which insures some 40,000 low-income working folk in our state. The NH GOP spent the summer carping about the heroin epidemic, and how the governor was allegedly contributing to it by refusing to sign off on their odious budget. As treatment experts have said again and again, the NHHPP is one of the best tools they have in the fight against addiction, because it pays for substance abuse treatment. It appears their concern for the dead and the dying was no more than a cudgel for them to beat the governor with. In the governor’s statement, on this agreement, she states that she is taking Republican leadership at their word that they will take up legislation reauthorizing the NHHPP as soon as possible. Given that these are the same folks who refused to honor the contract negotiated in good faith between the state and the state employees, I don’t share her willingness to take them at their word.

What this budget does is tread water in the name of political expediency. What it does not do is move our state forward in any way. This budget kicks the infrastructure can down the road, as it has been kicked by previous legislatures for decades now. We will still have hundreds of bridges on the state’s red list for being structurally impaired. It will not move us from our pathetic ranking of 50^th place in state spending on our state university system. NH college students will continue to graduate with the highest debt load in the nation.

None of this, by the way, is attractive to business. Big businesses locate in states that have robust infrastructure. They want good roads, bridges, ports, and airports. They want to move their employees to states where housing is affordable. NH has the second highest property taxes in the nation. Our telecommunications infrastructure is lacking, especially in the top half of the state. The companies that serve our telecommunication needs are few and hardly competitively priced.

Better feed that unicorn some beans.
  

Published as an op-ed in the Sept. 18 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper.