False Economy

Senate Bill #7 (SB7) was introduced on January 19, after the legislature was already in session, after most bills had been put forward. Apparently it was languishing in someone’s back pocket, and that someone wasn’t keen on the idea of the bill getting a lot of advance attention. It was wise to hide this nasty bit of business from the public eye for as long as possible.

Conservatives never object to military spending. Over half of the federal discretionary budget goes to the Pentagon, and much of it is wasted. No one ever says boo. The tiny little sliver of the budget that goes to food stamps, however, is a constant source of angst for Republicans. They are unable to accept the fact that trickle down economics are a failure, and that a great many working people in our state can’t afford to pay their rent, pay childcare, and put food on the table all at the same time. Accepting that would mean acknowledging that trickle down is a failure, and we’ll have none of that kind of crazy talk!

Food stamps (properly called SNAP – supplemental nutrition assistance program) are 100% funded by the federal government. The state pays for half of the administrative costs. Only food can be bought with food stamps. One cannot buy diapers, soap, toothpaste – or any non-food item. There is a work requirement. There are strict income (both gross and net) and asset guidelines, and the application process is rigorous. At least 30 states simplify the application process with what is called “expanded categorical eligibility” in order to help more people. NH doesn’t really want to help more people, so we use a limited version of this, and it applies only to families with children.

That means that low wage working families who have income over the gross income limit of 130% of the federal poverty level who have high basic living expenses (like rent and childcare) can be under the net income limit of 100% of the FPL.

SB 7 stipulates that NH cannot ask for or ever receive a waiver for the federal work requirement. There are some towns where that work requirement has been waived, where unemployment is pretty much permanent. Mostly those towns are in Coos County, but there are two in Grafton and one in Carroll County. SB 7 would take food stamps, and any remaining hope away from these folks. SB 7 would eliminate the expanded categorical eligibility. This would affect an estimated 17,000 working families in our state, families already struggling to stay afloat.

State Senator Kevin Avard of Nashua is the main sponsor of the bill, which is model legislation written by a conservative think tank from Florida. Avard is quoted by NHPR as saying that food stamps are a disincentive to work, and that this will get people back into the work force. Except that there already is a work requirement in place, and thousands of food stamp recipients are already working and still don’t earn enough.

Avard also made the astounding statement that a person could have a million dollars in a trust fund and collect food stamps.

No, Senator, this is NOT possible. This is a big, irresponsible, public lie. NH Republicans are far too practiced at telling these whoppers. When expanded Medicaid was on the horizon, State Reps. Neal Kurk and Laurie Sanborn wrote an op-ed that expressed concern that low-income yacht dwellers would take advantage of “free” health care. Has anyone ever found a low-income yacht dweller? Busloads of people from Massachusetts vote in our elections. It’s an endless stream of craven nonsense, and no one in our media ever seems to challenge it.

This bill will save NH taxpayers ZERO dollars. It will cost us plenty.  Remember, NH pays for half the administrative costs of food stamps. This bill will increase those costs. The bill will also mean that NH food pantries, already stretched to the max, will see a huge increase in need. Town welfare officers will see a budget breaking increase in residents requesting help. Town welfare officers testified against this bill for that very reason.

One might think Senator Avard would have a hard time getting cosponsors to sign on to such a loathsome bill. One would be wrong. The Senate co-sponsors are Birdsell, Guida, Reagan, Senate President Chuck Morse, and our own multimillionaire Senator Jeb Bradley. House sponsors are Representatives: Kotowski, LeBrun, Kimberly Rice, and Speaker of the House Shawn Jasper.

Between this and the gun bill, it seems Senator Bradley is afraid of a primary challenge by a hard-core ideologue, so he’s turning into one.

One wonders if the leadership of both bodies understood this bill when they signed on to it. To summarize: this legislation hurts people, hurts children, saves no money, and will in fact cost taxpayers more.

False economy – it’s the NH way. 

published as an op-ed in March 3, 2017 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 

MOAR GUNZ!

The annual state-by-state health rankings are in from the United Health Foundation. NH is in 5^th place nationally when it comes to the overall health of its residents. This places NH in the middle of the top ten, which is surely nothing to sneer at. That’s the message in every NH mainstream media story about the health rankings thus far. What the NH media isn’t pointing out is that in 2012, NH was in third place. In 2011 we were in second place. Fifth place isn’t terrible, but to get there we had to drop two places, something that one might think is worthy of media mention.

That kind of slippage is the new normal in NH. Our health isn’t as good; our child poverty rate has risen at what should be considered an alarming pace. Our roads and bridges are in terrible condition, our state parks are in increasing disrepair, some of our highway rest stops are still closed, and our telecommunications infrastructure is an embarrassment. Poverty, hunger, and homelessness are on the rise. But hey, NH has some of the least restrictive gun laws in the nation and THAT, my friends, is what is really important. So important that at least a dozen gun bills have been filed for the 2014 legislative session.  Perhaps if we all go out and wave our guns at one of the hundreds of red listed bridges in our state, they will magically repair themselves.

NH has never been a forward thinking state, and now we’re sliding backward. Today’s NH GOP has been taken over by Tea Partiers and libertarians, who think MOAR GUNZ is the answer to everything. They hate planning of any sort, and are actively trying to prevent it on county and regional levels. The libertarians don’t believe in public anything, or that the state should be in charge of roads and bridges. The private sector would do a better job. The Free Staters have yet to volunteer to fix a bridge or repair a highway to show us how well this will work in the future, when they succeed in transforming us into Aynrandshire. Surely a network of differently maintained toll roads will be a real asset when one is attempting to attract business to the state.

Tourism is the #2 business in New Hampshire. Our Fish and Game Dept. is in trouble financially because of our regressive tax structure. Rather than address that, Republican Senator Bob Odell has filed a bill that would require canoe and kayak owners to pay an annual $10 fee for using their non-polluting vessels on our rivers and lakes. The best part of this (from a GOP standpoint) is that the bill (sponsored by a Republican) is being blamed on Democrats. This is right up there with last session’s bill sponsored by GOP Senator Nancy Stiles that would have forced senior citizens to buy a season’s pass each year to use our state parks. Currently, NH residents over the age of 65 are granted free access to state parks. This bill would have initiated a $20 fee for a senior citizen pass. Unfortunately, the NH GOP is far from being ashamed of the lengths that they will go to (gouging old people and canoe owners) to prevent NH’s 27,000 millionaires from paying their fair share of taxes.

NH Republicans made sure that there would be no state exchange system set up to handle the ACA. Now they complain about how things are working (or not working) without state exchanges. The states that created their own exchange networks early on are doing quite well with the ACA. NH Republicans also torpedoed the expansion of Medicaid that would have provided basic insurance coverage to some 50,000 low-wage workers in our state.  This is the kind of thinking that caused NH to drop to 5^th place nationally in terms of overall health. NH’s health ranking has always been a matter of pride for our state, and one that is used as an enticement for companies and families to move here. The Free Staters use it in their advertisements to entice more anarchists to move here to take over the state. Given how many states have embraced expanded Medicaid, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that NH’s numbers will continue to be on a downward spiral while other states will see improved health numbers.

We don’t care about the health of our residents. (Though to be fair, Representatives Neal Kurk and Laurie Sanborn do worry about subsidizing health care for NH’s substantial population of low-income yacht dwellers.) We don’t care about the health of our highways, roads, dams, and bridges. We don’t care about the health of our telecommunications infrastructure. We have a long history of not caring about education. NH ranks a firm 50^th in the nation in state spending on our university system. What do we care about? Spending no money, and MOAR GUNZ!

Recent studies have also shown that NH is not bouncing back from the Great Recession as well or as quickly as our fellow New England states. We have no one but ourselves to blame. NH has failed to invest in the future for decades, and it’s begun to marginalize us and hurt our economy. Nothing short of a disaster is likely to turn that around. If one ever doubts the accuracy of the nickname “granite state” one has only to spend a Wednesday at the NH House of Representatives listening to floor speeches.

© sbruce 2013. Published as a bi-weekly column in the Conway Daily Sun newspaper.