Featured Member Posts (535)

No sooner had the New Hampshire House on Wednesday killed the Senate-passed casino bill, the Senate turned around the next day and killed House-passed hikes to both the gasoline tax and the tobacco tax.



Quid pro quo?



“Clearly the Senate today by its own admission is retaliating to the gambling vote in the House, a bill I supported,” Nashua Democratic Rep. David Campbell…

By Paul Briand



Democratic Rep. Terie Norelli of Portsmouth, as speaker of the New Hampshire House, has a unique view of her members from her elevated perch in the chamber.



She also has a unique view of the casino gambling issue that played out in Concord on Wednesday, with lawmakers voting 199-164 to agree with a House supercommittee recommendation  to kill SB 152,…

By Susan Currie

I, personally, was affected by the onerous activity of the IRS...



In 2012, I tried to Join Jenny Beth Martin's Tea Party group to help in the fight to support then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney, but I found that I could not join the TEA PARTY PATRIOTS site.



I reached out to the site but I received no response! I was dumbfounded to discover that they were so "SILENT!" during the election year 2012!! I felt disenfranchised because…

By Ananta Gopalan

It was interesting that our governor, Hassan, had written to the Connecticut governor urging him not to accept a bill from their legislature classifying hydro-power as renewable. Such a convoluted spinning of definition can only occur in politics where night and day can be legislated to mean something else.



Hydro-power is a renewable energy regardless of what Hassan wants Connecticut to believe. It is one of the first ones that man had used…

By Doug Forbes

Real immigration reform would look like this:



Any US business that wishes to employ a foreign national (immigrant) must:

1. Pay them a living wage or twice the national minimum wage ($14.50/hour) or higher.

2. Provide health insurance.



Immigration reform is a farce if it does not require US business to pay immigrants a living wage or $14.50/hour. Anything less means that immigrants join the ranks of the working poor. Importing…

By Ananta Gopalan

The recently posted article about licensing issues with the wind farms in New Hampshire bemoans how siting delays are affecting the deployment of wind power.



It highlights aesthetics as the central issue in licensing. That may be at the level of bureaucracy deciding on approval.  However, the article failed to mention all the birds the wind farms are killing. It mentions about the California wind farm set up by those pioneers from UMass…

By Grant Bosse

After 15 years trying to take a bite out of the Internet, state tax collectors took a huge step closer this week. The U.S. Senate voted to advance legislation allowing states to force online retailers to collect sales taxes for them.



The 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision Quill Corp. v North Dakota prevented states from drafting out-of-state businesses as tax agents unless they had a significant physical presence in that…

By Paul Briand



Democrats shouldn’t get too hyped up about the fact that Republican U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte’s approval numbers dropped after her vote opposing more thorough background checks for gun buyers.



Voters in the Granite State have more than three years before the referendum on Ayotte’s first term in office. And it won’t be a single issue, especially so far down the road, that determines whether Ayotte is elected to a second term in…

By Jose Biaggi

I was asked to write a post about the Voter IDs issue based on my perspective since I come from a place where Voter IDs is the law, and without a voter ID it is not possible to vote.



Let me start with a little history here in order to get everybody in the same page.



In 1898 The U.S. Marines Corps took over Puerto Rico after Spain was defeated in the Spanish-American War; In 1917 the Jones Act sponsored by Representative William…

By Ananta Gopalan

This morning I read a story in the Union Leader about the latest 2-1 Public Utility Commission (PUC) ruling to reinstate those Public Service of New Hampshire customers that had left the regulated energy provider to a competitive energy provider but now wanting to get back to PSNH at a lower rate than the current customers of PSNH are paying. 



By the way, those higher rates of the PSNH were approved by the same PUC based on financial facts…

By Josh Elliott-Traficante

In New Hampshire, not only is spending on highways paid for entirely with user fees like gas taxes and registration fees but the user fees are often diverted to other uses. The largest recipient is the Department of Safety, ostensibly to pay for state troopers but smaller amount of money have been transferred to other departments as varied as Cultural Resources, Health & Human Resources, and the Board of Land…

By Grant Bosse

When the New Hampshire Senate voted last week to tighten its control over the franchise agreements car makers sign with local car dealers, it also expanded the law to cover farm equipment dealers. The people who make farm equipment did the only logical thing they could in the face of growing government meddling in their business. They hired a lobbyist.



Last year, the Legislature voted to repeal New Hampshire Certificate of Need Board, which…

By Josh Elliott-Traficante

In January, the New Hampshire Executive Council is taking up a contract for a study looking at bringing commuter rail to the state.There is a common misconception that the state has not studied this idea recently; however two lengthy studies have been completed in the past six years. A 43 page study was done in 2007 by the Passenger Rail Taskforce which looked at service to Manchester and another of similar length was…

By Ananta Gopalan

Last week, I posted a brief article here about the need to tie the state budget to the state GDP, not to exceed 5%.  I argued in it that the state legislature and the governor lack any fiscal discipline or integrity and that shows up at every biennium in spite of the state budget growing at a compounded rate of 14% in the last twenty years. The two parties are driven by mob mentality to hand out goodies to their favorites at the expense of the…

By Gordon Avery

I saw in the news the application for people to fill out who wanted health-care insurance, a 21-page questionnaire that most will require assistance in completing and then, once completed, it will be disbursed, of all places, to the IRS.



OK, now your life has been filleted for all to see, not even one little secret can you keep, no longer any sense of privacy, I thought everyone had the right of at least some privacy. I remember Nancy Pelosi…

By Ananta Gopalan

Every budget cycle seems to find the state of New Hampshire not having enough money. In this biennium cycle, the budget requires higher gas tax (83% increase over four years), higher cigarette tax (the perennial whipping post) and the non-existent and illegal gambling revenues.



This is all in spite of the state budget growing at a compounded rate of 14% in the last twenty years.  The pace of that growth over the CPI is like a motorist on a…

By Grant Bosse

Richard Hofstadter began his 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, “American politics have often been an arena for angry minds.” Hofstadter erred in attributing this to Barry Goldwater, missing as most people did the nascent strain of American conservatism in Goldwater’s campaign. But he did acknowledge that “the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” was not limited to one side of the political spectrum.…

By Paul Briand



As much as Granite Staters don’t like to compare themselves to Bay Staters, it’s instructive to compare the Massachusetts timeline for casino licensing and New Hampshire’s timeline for casino licensing.



Massachusetts has a big head start on the licensing of up to three casinos and it expects to issue licenses by November 2013 at the earliest, February 2014 at the latest.



New Hampshire is just now debating legislation to…

Do you know about the Free State Project?



It’s a nonprofit organization with a mission to move 20,000 people to New Hampshire.



Despite what you may have overheard at the grocery store, church or neighborhood eatery, there is no secret agenda to change the way of life in New Hampshire.



The Free State Project (FSP) simply asks supporters to commit to this Statement of Intent:…