Article I wrote for DFNH

ON THE FIRING LINE
THE TOWN HALL AND THE IRAQ WAR

This article on the relationship between the war in Iraq and the financial difficulties of a small town in NH was prompted by an interchange between DFNH members concerning the local effects of the war.  Our esteemed Communications Director suggested that I elaborate on some comments I had made during the discussion.

Let me start with some scene setting.  Northwood NH is a town of slightly under 4000 people (in the winter; in the summer we go to around 10,000) located on the major east-west highway between Portsmouth and Concord.  We have some small businesses, including our famed Antique Alley shops, a fairly new supermarket and drug store (we used to have to drive a fair distance for groceries and prescriptions),  seven good -sized lakes, and a topography that includes the watershed of a number of rivers.  We are at the top of the hill between Portsmouth and Concord, in other words.

I am a third year Selectman.  We have a three-person board, an elected planning board and budget committee, and we still use the old fashiioned town and school district meeting format.  The town is old, full of history and wonderful views, and I have lived here for 11 years.  I got involved in the town politics helping with a cable TV contract and fell into other committees and finally made the run for office in 2003.

I also work in financial services, and have almost 7 years of experience watching the economy, including the end of the boom in 2000-2001, and the subsequent painfully slow “recovery” (if you can even call it that).  My college education, mostly finished in my late 30s, was in economics, sociology and women’s studies.  I am an insatiable reader on politics, the economy and recent history, and am old enough to have been an adult during the VietNam war and Watergate.  I tell you this to explain that I have some tools to interpret what I see going on for small towns like mine in NH.

There is a painful tension that goes on each year as we start the dreaded “budget season.”  On one side are the people, voters and officials, for whom keeping the tax rate low is the major goal of budgeting.  On the other side are those who know what it takes to run a town today, and who want to save money in the long run by making wise investments in infrastructure, planning and personnel.  Why is there such a tension?  Because the money to run the town comes from property taxes, and property taxes are increasingly painful and very often regressive.  They hit those who can least afford them in a very vulnerable place, their home, the roof over their head.  This is why we read those letters to the editor so often about keeping taxes down to spare our elderly from losing their homes.

What we don’t ever seem to discuss is how much the tax rate in a NH town is impacted by the mandates from outside our borders.  It is almost like state and national politics, especially national, are off limits for discussion.  Often you would think, at town meeting, that the school or town are spendthrifts, throwing money around like drunken sailors.  No matter how many times we repeat that we are required to provide these services, do this paperwork, etc., we are accused of spending beyond the townspeople’s means to pay.  When we suggest setting money aside each year to pay for a purchase down the road, we are told that we can’t afford that, or that we should take it out of surplus. The much vaunted “surplus”is a favorite target of the tax cutters.  Whatever money remains on the books at the end of the town’s year is considered surplus.  This often includes a large amount of unpaid property taxes, and the state also requires a certain percentage of this be reserved for emergencies, such as law suits (for those of us into growth management ordinances, this is a real possibility).  As we spend the surplus down, to fund warrant articles or to buy down the tax rate, we begin to live as close as a town can to deficit funding.  And we know how well that works for the federal government.

Now, to the macroeconomic picture and how it affects a town in NH.  When Bill Clinton left office, we actually had a surplus at the federal level.  There was great hope that the deficit could be paid down, and the country could get back on a better financial footing than we had had since Reagan began the great Republican spend-off of the country’s assets and future economic wellbeing.  ( Also known as tax cuts for the rich.)  That did not last long, however, since Bush decided that a surplus should not be used to pay debt, but returned to the taxpayers, especially the richest taxpayers.  First this was because it was “fair.”   Then, as the economy began to droop, it was to revive the economy, because we all know that if you give rich folks lots of money they spend it and stimulate the economy.  (They have been known to spend it in other countries, though.)  Meanwhile, the deficits began to grow again.  Then came 9/11 and an excuse to become a war president. 

Wars are expensive.  And unproductive.  The money you spend on arms and soldiers disappears without producing any new growth in the economy, beyond good corporate profits in defense industries.  Investment in the future slows down (think infrastructure: is that overpass going to collapse as you drive over it?).  Combine this with a global economy that is racing to the bottom of the wage scale, and life gets pretty hard.  Even without being asked to sacrifice to keep our country “free” and “safe” we begin to suffer.  And as the costs of the tax cuts and war mount and the only real growth in the economy is in corporate profits, the stock market, and the housing bubble and associated risky financing, the middle class and the poor get more and more desperate.

So if you own a house in a small NH town, you may very well be living closer to the edge financially than you have in the past.  Meanwhile, trickle down economics is at work, but instead of goodies trickling down, costs are trickling down to the town and other local governments.  This is particularly true for the school part of the equation, since the unfunded mandates have increased with NCLB.  This is always the major part of the total tax bill.  In Northwood we have so far been faithful to our children,, and so the school budget increases each year.  I can’t remember how long it has been since they did not get what they asked for.  There is less guilt in cutting the town budget.  And the town does stuff you don’t like, code enforcement, land use restrictions, police.  Maybe they are paving someone else’s road this year instead of yours.  (I am a Selectman and my road is a mess, something wrong with me?) 

Meanwhile, state services, such as Medicaid, are cut.  If someone in your family is disabled and you lose services for them, medical and personal care costs will eat even more of your income.  Maybe you will lose your job.  You will turn to the town for help for heating costs, say, and they will put a lien on your home.  NH towns have an obligation to provide help to anyone who is physically in the town and needs it, but they have the right to a lien on your property in return.  And I know you all know the rest of the story.  Each person who cannot pay their taxes, who loses their home, who goes bankrupt, passes their costs on to the rest of us.

What people fail to see, because they are carefully taught not to see it, is that we are all interconnected.  We are a community, we are not Lone Rangers.  When we are in pain, our community should help us, and when we have abundance we should share.  When our country gets involved in a war we cannot pay for, which increases our debt to foreign nations who are not too fond of us, which bankrupts many of our citizens, and kills and maims our young people, it trickles down to the poor selectman facing “budget season” and wondering how she will talk the town into spending the money we need to keep from falling ever further behind.  Never mind planning for the future.

So far in Northwood we have kept our heads above water.  We have avoided SB2, although it is again being threatened.  SB2 is a way for people to vote against their neighbors well-being without having to do it in front of those neighbors.  (I know I am opinionated, but I watch the neighboring towns who have it, it isn’t good for small towns.)  We have an active Master Plan committee, a great planning board that works very hard to protect our open space and manage growth.  We have a vision for our town.  But if things do not turn around politically, I can see economic disaster on the horizon, and a lot of hopes and dreams will go up in flames.  We can only mortgage the future just so far.

Comments

[JS Narins]

A Chance For Peace, April 16, 1953, from President DD Eisenhower.

I learned today that Eisenhower regretted using the atom bomb. He wrote something like it was sad that we used "that thing on them."

"First: No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.

"Second: No nation's security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations.

"Third: Any nation's right to form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable.

"Fourth: Any nation's attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.

"And fifth: A nation's hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations."

...

not to mention the speeches most famous lines

...

" Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

"This world in arms is not spending money alone.

"It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

"The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

"It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

"It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

"It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

"We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.

"We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

"This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

" This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."