It's Veto Time

 Governor Sununu smiling after solving the problem of deli cheese labeling at  Market Basket

Another legislative session has come to an end. Over a thousand bills have been passed, killed, or held in committee.  After months of working on a budget, first in the House, then in the Senate, and finally in Committees of Conference, a budget was also passed. Even though the legislature gave Governor Sununu at least 90 percent of what he asked for, he vetoed it. 

The Committee of Conference (CoC) removed the paid family and medical leave program that was something he actually campaigned on. As I mentioned in my last column, other states use it as an incentive to attract skilled workers. We seem to think that being NH is sufficient attraction.

The sticking point is something the governor is calling a tax increase. A couple of years ago, business tax cuts were passed that decreased the business tax rate incrementally. Some of the decreases have already taken effect – including one at the beginning of this year. The vetoed budget puts the next cut on hold. A tax cut that isn’t being enacted shouldn’t properly be called a tax increase, but once again, if the words “income tax” and “guns” were removed from the lexicon, our NH Republicans would have nothing to say. The very last thing we want to do is have an adult discussion about our tax structure.

The freeze on this tax cut would only affect about 60 out-of-state big corporations. Most small businesses don’t even pay the business profits tax. Unfortunately most of us aren’t especially well educated about the state budget, or where the money comes from to fund our state government. The NH Fiscal Policy Institute did a good analysis of the current money flow, which you can find on their website, nhfpi.org, dated May 22. 

In the absence of a budget, the state is running on a continuing resolution that expires on October 1.In the meantime, however, towns aren’t getting the property tax relief that was part of the budget, and school districts aren’t getting the infusion of funding that they so desperately need. The new secure psychiatric hospital won’t be happening, the affordable housing fund will not be getting $5 million, and rates for mental health and substance abuse providers will not be increased.    

Governor Sununu’s mask of affability has fallen off, and what lurks underneath is an ambitious Trump acolyte. He’s more interested in feathering the nest of his own political future  than doing what is right for the state. The care and feeding of big business is very important to him, since they are his donors, and he’s going to need them even more when he runs for higher office. 

In the current age of ideology, doing right by your state means passing budgets that don’t invest in the state or its people. In New Hampshire, “living within our means” is a bogus justification for our unwillingness to invest. We have means – NH is the seventh wealthiest state. We choose not to use those means in order to perpetuate the illusion that The Pledge is working for NH in the 21^stcentury. We have intentionally failed to properly fund education for decades. Now we have an unqualified Commissioner of Education who is doing his level best to dismantle our system of public education. That failure to invest is one reason why the state has so much trouble attracting young people. We’ve got plenty of wealthy retirees – but at some point they’re going to need caregivers to wipe their behinds. Where will those workers come from? 

The governor is expected to veto a bill that would create a state minimum wage, and set it at $10 an hour. NH uses the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, which was established in 2009. Ten years ago. The cost of living hasn’t been frozen in amber, but attitudes about paying workers certainly have. Rents have increased by 28.33 percent in that time period, which has a dramatic effect on the lives of low-wage workers in our state, given the lack of affordable housing. At $10 an hour, NH would still have the lowest minimum wage in New England. At $10 an hour, workers still can’t afford rental housing. Paying wages too low to live on is an expression of contempt for workers.

The veto will be couched in terms of how it would hurt business, because that is always the only real concern. There’s a lot of breast beating about how businesses can’t find workers, but there’s no willingness to take any corrective action. NH has an abundance of low wage service jobs. A lot of working folks juggle several of them at once. Workers in other states don’t seem to be sufficiently motivated to move to NH for a low wage career. Hard to imagine, isn’t it? Don’t they know it’s New Hampshire? 

Failure to Invest

Every two years, the governor creates a budget and hands it off to the House. The House Finance Committee uses the governor’s budget as a sort of template, and writes a whole budget (in two parts), that includes where money needs to go, and where it’s coming from. When it passes the House, it moves on to Senate Finance, where it is further altered. One reason for this is that by the time a budget reaches Senate Finance, there are better state revenue estimates to work with. Any House bill that is amended by the Senate goes back to the House, where they vote to concur with the changes, or not concur. In the event of non-concurrence, the House can either let the bill die, or ask for a committee of conference. The budget for the next biennium is currently being worked on in two committees of conference.

Governor Sununu began threatening to veto the budget in early March, weeks before it ever reached the Senate. He was all puffed up and boasting of his extensive collection of red pens, and how he was going to veto all the “dumb ideas.” That was also two months before he suddenly announced, after months of hinting at a Senate campaign, that he was going to run for reelection. 

One of Sununu’s pet peeves is the paid family and medical leave program that is included in the budget. He and his minions have labeled it an income tax, and bray about that at every opportunity. Sununu cooked up a voluntary family leave plan with Governor Scott of Vermont, using state workers as the pool. The Vermont legislature had no interest in this plan, and created an entirely different one, just as NH did. Maine is also working on a family leave program. 

It’s the kind of benefit offered in states that are thinking ahead. In NH, we bemoan the fact that our young people don’t stay here. They don’t stay because a college education here will saddle them with the highest student loan debt in the nation, and when they leave school, they can’t find a good paying job, nor can they afford housing. NH also bemoans the fact that we can’t attract skilled workers.

I have a friend who is among the 16 percent of NH residents who works in Massachusetts. He does this because he couldn’t get a good paying job in his technical field here in the state he lives in. He’ll be eligible for the Massachusetts paid family and medical leave program that begins at the first of the year. By working out of state he gets better pay and better benefits. That is how a state attracts skilled workers. 

NH has the lowest minimum wage in New England, at $7.25. NH bemoans the fact that there aren’t enough workers to fill all the jobs that need doing, many of them being low wage service jobs, but we don’t want to pay people to do the work. The low wages combined with the cost of housing may have something to do with that lack of workers. The governor is expected to veto the bill that would increase the minimum wage to $12 an hour.

Governor Sununu, on the other hand, is the highest paid governor our state has ever had. Governors in recent decades accepted reduced pay, as a nod to the poverty of our state agencies, and as a note of humility from the wealthy. (Poor people are not elected governor in NH, or anywhere else.) Governor Hassan was paid $110,400 each of the four years she served. Governor Lynch reduced his pay by $4,000 in 2009, during the recession. Governor Craig Benson didn’t even take a salary during his term. He gave his pay as bonus money for state workers. Sununu is being paid $20,000 a year more than Governor Hassan was. He received a pay raise on his first day in office – a raise negotiated by the state employee’s union, the same union he’s refused to negotiate a contract with, because the contract includes…you guessed it, pay raises. 

I love this state, but sometimes our arrogance is stupefying. We think that people will just come here to spend copiously, without our investing in the reasons they come – like our state parks, which continue to be inadequately funded by user fees.

New Hampshire has been skating by on spending little for decades, with GOP legislatures putting off work that needed to be done because they wanted to create the illusion that The Pledge works. Meanwhile, the state is being sued again for the terrible way we fund education, and the governor is getting ready to make a big Trumpian noise and veto a budget that does something good for workers and families. Other states are investing in workers and families, and attracting skilled workers, and NH is making the same mistakes over and over again, and expecting different results. 

Published as an op-ed in the June 21 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper 

How Now Brown Cash Cow

The 2014 legislative session is coming to an end. The House passed a lot of bills that met obstruction in the Senate. A number of NH Senators have announced that they won’t be running for reelection. With luck, a few more will reach that same decision.

Last week’s Senate vote on the creation of and increase to the state minimum wage is an example of why the Senate needs the application of a big broom. During the O’Brien years, the state minimum wage was struck down, leaving NH to march in lockstep with the federal minimum wage. Even the ability to set our own minimum was too frighteningly permissive for the O’Brien crowd. (Ironic when one considers that the gummint haters turned over the NH option to the federal gummint.) The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. If a minimum wage worker worked 40 hours a week, they’d earn $290 before taxes. The cheapest apartment advertised in the local classifieds was $600 a month, without utilities. Even if they could pay the rent, they’d be unable to afford utilities, food, transportation, clothing, and health care.

Most employers that pay minimum wage don’t offer full time jobs, because then they’d have to offer benefits. These same companies (big box stores in particular) also provide fluctuating hours, so a worker never has a regular schedule they can count on. That makes juggling other jobs difficult at best. When companies don’t pay workers enough to live on, the rest of us help subsidize their company profits, by picking up the tab for public assistance programs.

Legislators and business owners love to pretend that the minimum wage is a sort of training wage for teenagers entering the job market. In NH, 72% of minimum wage workers are over the age of 20. They’re breadwinners. In our brave new economy, where we manufacture nothing, the bulk of the jobs being created are low wage service jobs. Adults with families to support are competing with teens for low wage jobs.

The NH Senate voted to kill the establishment of a state minimum wage, and a two-step increase that would result in a state min. wage of $9 an hour by 2016. Senator John Reagan was quoted in the Laconia Citizen as saying he “thinks it’s silly to say someone couldn’t be supported on minimum wage, as they can take on multiple jobs.” Our local Senator, multimillionaire Jeb Bradley said that raising the minimum wage would harm teenagers and entry-level workers. It sure would suck for entry level workers to be able to afford food and shelter. Senator Andy Sanborn, who owns a bar/restaurant, drove up in his Mercedes to claim that an increase in minimum wage would hurt restaurants. Sanborn should have declared conflict of interest and abstained from voting. He pays some of his employees minimum wage. Former Senate President Peter Bragdon (who just signed a contract for a job paying $185,000 a year) called the bill “feel good” legislation. He’s right. It would feel good for workers to be slightly more able to feed their children and put a roof over their heads.

A couple of Senators took the minimum wage challenge, where they lived for a week on the minimum wage. Senator David Watters said that it quickly became clear that on that wage he wouldn’t be able to continue to live in Dover without food and housing assistance. Senator David Pierce said that the challenge produced such anxiety for him that he was shaken by the experience.

The cost of higher education has skyrocketed. The kinds of jobs being created offer low wages and no possibility of advancement. The creation and perpetuation of a permanent, poor underclass in our country will have dire consequences.

In other news, Scott Brown was in North Conway last week. Many of our local politicians were on hand to meet, greet, endorse, and toady up to the recent émigré who wants to be NH’s next US Senator. From Lloyd Jones’ excellent news story, we learned that even though Scott Brown moved to NH in February some of our local state representatives and wannabes think Scott’s the guy who represents NH values.

Let us be clear about what kind of value our GOP friends see in Scott Brown. It’s green and has a funny pyramid on it. This senate election is reportedly going to be one of the most expensive in our nation’s history. Thanks to the Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions by the Supreme Court, the amount of money shoveled into our state will be breathtaking. Our local solons understand that of all the candidates running against Senator Shaheen, the one who is going to have the big bucks behind him is Brown. Politicians are pragmatic folk, and they’re going to get behind the money candidate, and wait for the trickle down effect. The state GOP is desperate for cash. Mr. Brown is the cow they’re pinning their hopes on.

The Supreme Court has ruled yet again that money is speech. No longer do we have “free” speech, thanks to SCOTUS the kind of speech we have is very expensive. Those who give the most get the loudest speech. With no limits and no accountability. It’s called dark money, because there is no transparency. We the voters won’t know where all this money to manipulate us comes from. The only one who will know is the candidate. Big money comes with marching orders. We are about to be bombarded with negative ads, the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

Negative ads work in two ways and both are intentional. They discourage people from voting and they plant lies that become truths. When Scott Brown was here last week, he repeated one of them. The Koch funded group Americans for Prosperity NH has been pushing a particular message for months: “Jeanne Shaheen Cast the Deciding Vote for Obamacare.” Scott Brown repeated that, and embellished it, by saying he was there and he saw her do it.

In Louisiana, Americans for Prosperity’s ads inform voters “Mary Landrieu Cast the Deciding Vote for Obamacare.” In Florida, Bill Nelson cast that vote. In Arkansas it was Mark Pryor. In Ohio, “Sherrod Brown Cast the Deciding Vote for Obamacare.” In Minnesota it was Al Franken. And in Virginia, Mark Warner “Cast the Tie-Breaking Vote for Obamacare.”

So, when Scott Brown says he was there and he saw her do it, he’s counting on the fact that a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth. It’s both craven and cynical - and that’s what life is going to look like in NH from now till November.

© sbruce 2014 

Published in the May 16, 2014 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper. 

Our Citizen Legislature

Our state’s august legislative body finally wrapped up the voting on 2013 bills about 2 weeks ago. They should have been done much sooner, but the liberty crowd did their very best to obstruct and needlessly bog down the process. There were endless roll call votes on issues that didn’t merit such attention. They didn’t win anything; they just wasted taxpayer dollars and the time of their colleagues. Their war cry is “gummint is broken” and so they’re doing their level best to break it so they can say neener neener. The lesson? Do not elect people who hate government to be the government.

All the delay and obstruction means that the 2014 bills are behind, and the weather has conspired to put the legislature even more behind. After next week, legislators can count on two session days each week for most of March. It’s unfortunate that leadership (minority or majority) can’t seem to do anything about the obstructionist cabal.

The committee process is where one can still find representatives actually working together and listening to new information. At a recent executive session on HB 1170, the bill to repeal NH’s death penalty, 4 legislators came forward and said that because of all they had learned, they’d changed their minds about the death penalty. They’d come into the process as supporters. They cast their committee votes to recommend that the full House repeal the death penalty. This is what we always hope we will see: our citizen legislature working together for the good of our state.

We don’t always. At a hearing of SB 319, a bill to establish a 25-foot buffer zone around women’s health clinics, Senator Sam Cataldo was far more interested in airing a grievance about a union work site that he’s been nursing since 1966. He brought it up at least half a dozen times to women who testified in support of the bill. It was so disrespectful. One of the men who came to testify in opposition to the bill is affiliated with a terrorist group, the Army of God. Remember them? Eric Robert Rudolph, Clayton Waagner, and James Kopp are some of the more famous bombers and murderers. In no other aspect of our society would protestors and self-styled “sidewalk counselors” be allowed to harass people.

Just imagine the outcome if a group of earnest sober people started counseling patrons at our highway liquor stores. Or if a group committed to nonviolence began counseling about anger management in front of a gun shop. This harassment is allowed to continue because after all, this only affects women. We turn a blind eye to enabling terrorists because after all, it’s only women. If we were attempting to legislate MALE reproductive systems, all protests in front of all medical facilities would end forthwith. Fortunately, the Senate voted to pass the bill, so now it moves on to the House.

The Senate also voted to pass SB 318, a bill to establish the crime of domestic violence. It’s always been prosecuted under other statutes. At the hearing for this bill, Senator Boutin suggested strengthening the bill by adding stalking to the statute, a suggestion everyone applauded. It was added to the bill as an amendment.

As always, there are endless gun bills, and other bills aimed at eliminating revenue streams from our state government. Meanwhile, NH has the 11^th worst infrastructure in the United States. We have over 300 bridges on the red list for structural impairment. We cannot finish work begun on highways because there is no money – and still we are told that NH has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. We do have a spending problem: we’re averse to raising enough money to spend on fixing our decaying infrastructure. We will firmly bury our heads and pretend that it’s some other guy’s problem for as long as we can. When a dam fails, or a bridge collapses – well then maybe we’ll start thinking about the future.

Meanwhile, companies will continue to relocate to states that have the kind of transportation and telecommunications infrastructure that will support their business needs.

A bill to increase the minimum wage will be coming up soon for a vote. Already Americans for Prosperity and other similar minded special interest groups are howling with outrage about how this will kill jobs. NH has the lowest minimum wage in New England. Massachusetts and Vermont have the highest. Both states are faring far better than NH in adding new jobs. Most people who are paid minimum wage are adults. Most are women, trying to support children. No one works harder than low wage workers.

At the same time, NH has some of the highest housing costs in the nation, and there is great resistance to building multi-unit housing, because THOSE PEOPLE will move to town. We heard it for years in Conway. Welfare recipients from Massachusetts were just waiting to move to affordable housing. All the public transportation and safety net programs we offer here were a veritable beacon to the impoverished.

A new study from the Economic Policy Institute finds that 83% of the income growth in NH between 2009-2011 went to the top 1%. Meanwhile, the jobs that have been created since the recession are mostly low paying service jobs. This is not unique to NH. This is what’s happening all over the country. 

At some point we (the societal we) will have to make some decisions about work, pay, poverty, and the future. If not, we’re likely to hear the sounds of tumbrels rumbling in the distance.

Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind. ~ Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

© sbruce 2014

Published in the Conway Daily Sun Newspaper. 

Oh, Romeo, Romeo - Another Lamentable Tragedy

It's been nearly a year since Rep. Romeo Danais made a big fool of himself on the NH House internal email system.  Last April he distinguished himself by giving his fellow legislators what he called "a lesson in irony," by posting a conservative spam e-mail that compared food stamp recipients to wild animals. Rep. Danais found this "lesson" so amusing that he posted it to the House internal list-serve TWICE in the same day. 

We humorless lefties were the bad guys. Apparently we were supposed to see the humor in a multimillionaire mocking the poor. 

But now - a year later, he's giving us another chance, this time to enjoy his sense of humor on the topic of the minimum wage: 

Reply-To:	Romeo Danais
To:	~All Representatives

The real answer to this situation is not 'increase the minimum wage', its get the minimum wage worker into an area where s/he is not delivering minimum results for their labor! In other words get the minimum wage worker educated so they can deliver higher value labor, thus they will earn a higher wage.

OK, how do we do that? Well, for one, we need to get the young person into a situation where they can learn quickly that if they want to be stupid and not work on their education, then they can live the rest of their lives on minimum income and suffer the consequences. How? I think we should have mandatory, two-year, military service for every one in the 18 - 20 year age category.

Whoa, before you all get Up in Arms (no pun intended), everybody doesn't have to be infantrymen, there are every job category in civilian life in military life Plus more. And, you get a dose of reality while your in the military! Which most juveniles have no idea about reality one bit, because its not taught in schools.

Once out of the military, veterans will have a very different outlook on life and an education to boot (once again no pun intended) and a better outlook on what it takes to succeed. They will almost automatically get higher paying and better jobs than those of today who have not had military training.

No, its not a one-shot solves all answer, but, its a very good start to solving the problem of minimum wage living standards.

Rep. Danais

Rep. Danais seems to believe that those who earn minimum wage are lazy and stupid. If they were to go into the military, they'd come out and be better educated and get higher paying jobs. 

It's clear that Rep. Danais knows as much about the NH workforce as he does about grammar. Employers do not pay minimum wage because they have lazy/stupid employees. They pay minimum wage because they can. The rate of unemployment and underemployment are so high that people will take those jobs, because they are trying desperately to get by. Minimum wage is an employer's way of saying, "I'd pay you less if I could." 

Is the military a solution?

6.4% of NH veterans are unemployed. 

8% of the NH homeless population is comprised of veterans. 

5,000 NH veterans rely on food stamps. 

 A solution is for NH employers to pay NH workers fair and just wages. 

A  solution is to invest in NH and put people to work at decent paying jobs. 

Another solution is to stop sending dunderheads to the legislature. What do you think you're odds of that are? 

h/t to anonymous source