Commentary: New Hampshire’s kitchen-table issues carry the weight of the world

At any kitchen table in any small New Hampshire town, the challenges are immense and layered.

In the most panoramic view, our kitchen-table family can see ancient and ever-present existential threats come into focus: war, famine and pestilence. Each looming catastrophe, however dormant or remote, holds the potential to dismantle not only a household but entire societies, rapidly and irrevocably. 

In the 20th century, two new world-enders emerged — nuclear proliferation and climate change. And now comes the rise of artificial intelligence.

Every nation on the planet must contend with these threats, all while navigating challenges unique to their geography, politics, economy and levels of wealth inequality. So along with these various avenues for apocalypse, the United States faces internal threats to its existence. Chief among them is the influence of money in politics, which compromises the nation’s ability to place public servants in a position to serve the public good.

The greed of special interests leaves the people of New Hampshire and the nation vulnerable not only to the global existential threats outlined above but a host of issues of enormous national concern: the cost of healthcare, childcare, college, electricity, housing, groceries, gasoline, etc.; a system of taxation that is inequitable in both design and enforcement; disinvestment from social safety net programs that punishes not only poor people but seniors, children, veterans and people with disabilities; and, at the heart of all of it, rampant and unchecked political corruption at the highest levels of government. 

The weight of these global threats and national dysfunction presses down on every state and at every moment, as if New Hampshire didn’t have enough structural challenges of its own.

The property-tax burden on communities and families here has long since reached its crisis point. A consequence of that pressure was made clear on Election Day, when voters in dozens of school districts adopted new tax caps with hopes of reducing the squeeze. One way to read those results is that people believe their school boards and administrations need to do a better job of managing taxpayer money, and that tax caps are a guaranteed method of applying fiscal discipline. Another way to read the votes, however, is that the people were left with no choice.

No state invests less state funding in public education than New Hampshire, and that means no state relies more heavily on local property taxes than New Hampshire. That gives the lie to the idea that school districts are solely or even primarily to blame for this statewide predicament.

In just about every public system, business, organization and household, there are always going to be efficiencies to be found. And often finding and executing new efficiencies will mean the difference between sinking or swimming. But the tax caps aren’t simply a cry for efficiency or restraint; they are a cry for mercy — and the state is the one doing the twisting.

Back at our table in a small New Hampshire town, the struggle is immense and it is growing. It would almost be a luxury for our family to focus just on what they can do to help fend off the universal existential threats — the malignant tentacles of climate change, nuclear weapons, war, disease, extreme poverty, AI. Even a collective dedication to meaningful campaign finance reform would signal a type of luxury most Americans don’t have — time and energy to both pursue urgent systemic correction and fight for their own financial survival.

But here in the kitchen, the household budget numbers demand the lion’s share of every family’s effort and attention. Property taxes, rents, healthcare premiums, gasoline, heating oil, electricity, car repairs, groceries, college, internet and phone service, the countless day-to-day expenses of modern life — these rising costs reliably erase any wage growth a New Hampshire worker might experience from year to year. They push families backward, if not under. And when the bottom-line number turns from black to red, and our kitchen-table family is forced to drain their savings and retirement funds before finally and desperately adding to their high-interest credit card debt, a singular fact takes hold: It is punishingly expensive to have nothing.

That is the moment where we find ourselves, and it’s the impetus for what happened on Nov. 3. For most, the American dream has become the American plight.

Now, new Democratic majorities in Congress and the State House are being asked by a vocal and frustrated majority to do everything they can to relieve the pressure, to make life more manageable by degrees.

It is a monumental task, and there is only one way for our new lawmakers to take it on: Layer, by layer, by layer — and all at once.