At the end of May, convenience store clerk Jackie Whiton took a public stand against the unrestricted use of public assistance cash-benefits by refusing to sell cigarettes to a customer using an EBT card. Last week, House Speaker William O’Brien took up the cause. We want to know – how big a problem is this?
Right now, needy Granite Staters can receive both cash assistance and food stamps on a debit-like EBT card. Food stamps, however, are much more widely received than cash assistance: 56,962 New Hampshire households receive food stamps from the federal government, while only 13,950 households also receive cash benefits. That’s 2.7 percent of the state’s households receiving cash assistance, about 60 percent of which comes from state funds. Continue Reading →
Citizens for Tax Justice has just released an interactive tool that calculates what you would pay in taxes should Obama’s tax cut extension pass, should the GOP’s tax cut extension pass, or should the Bush tax cuts simply expire.
Try it out!
Use the Basic Calculator if you are an employee, your income comes entirely from your wages or salary, and you take the standard deduction.
Use the Detailed Calculator if you have other types of income or if your situation is more complicated
“We’re in an industry that is not entirely recession-proof,” says Adimab co-founder and CEO Tillman Gerngross. “But the drug industry is a lot less volatile and subject to discretionary spending, because people get sick and they need drugs. Fortunately, we’ve been able to establish a sort of leadership position in the discovery of antibody-based therapies, and [the pharmaceutical industry] is very interested in accessing that capability.”
Unlike some Upper Valley start-ups, Gerngross says he’s had no trouble recruiting new employees for Adimab. “This is a very technology-driven company. And people that are really good at what they do, they want to play with other people that are really good at what they do. So the attraction is not necessarily geographic location. We have hired a lot of people from out-of-state.”
“Dartmouth is certainly a source of talent for us. But I would suggest, in general, most of our employees are at least college-educated. I would say probably more than half of them have advanced degrees, Ph.D’s, Master’s,” Gengross says. “And so those people, they’re done with grad school, and thinking about what they’re going to do next. And at that point in time, they are, in fact, quite mobile.”
“We just believe in, if you help us build a great company, you’re going to get rewarded disproportionately,” Gerngross says. “And that has helped us a lot to create a culture here that is very loyal. We’ve had very, very few people leave. And we’ve not had issues with people leaving to go to competing companies. None, in fact.”
“What has really helped is my previous company [GlycoFi]. A lot of people worked for that company. That company had been acquired [by Merck]. It’s now a Merck research site here. So not only do they have fairly stable jobs here,” Gerngross says, “but they made out very well financially, and word has gotten out that we treat people fairly, we want them to be part of something exciting and something that creates real value.”
As part of our weekly “Getting By, Getting Ahead” series, StateImpact is traveling across New Hampshire, gathering personal stories from the people behind the economy. In our third installment, we visit a biotech start-up in the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee region.
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Deep inside a nondescript business park in Lebanon, a blocky, industrial building is getting a facelift. The inside has already been revamped, with big, glass-walled hallways and bright orange accent walls. Every so often, the staccato of hammers, whirring of drills and hiss of nail guns disrupt the quiet.
But those are just the sounds you want to hear when you’re running a young business you want to grow.
And that’s just what’s happening at the drug discovery company Adimab in Lebanon. Continue Reading →
Upper Valley bioengineering start-up Adimab uses yeast to discover antibody-based drugs
Tomorrow morning on NHPR, we’ll hear from Tillman Gerngross, abioengineering entrepreneur in the Upper Valley. Tillman’s story is Part Three of our series “Getting By, Getting Ahead,” examining how people across New Hampshire’s seven regions are navigating a recovering economy.
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The economy of New Hampshire’s Upper Valley has two really big things going for it. One of them is Dartmouth College in Hanover. The other is Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon. Thanks to these two research engines, this part of the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee region sees new start-up companies launch each year in engineering, information technology and biotechnology.
But once those companies are born, the Upper Valley has something really big working against it: Cambridge, Massachusetts. Just over two hours away, and home to Harvard University and MIT, Cambridge has more of everything these companies need — venture capital, office space, a large workforce of Ph.D.s. and proximity to Boston. For many Upper Valley tech start-ups, moving to Cambridge is a natural and inevitable step toward sustaining themselves.
Friday morning House Speaker William O’Brien held a private press conference in his office vowing to put forward legislation that will prevent the misuse of public assistance funds distributed on EBT (electronic benefit transfer) cards. At his side sat Jackie Whiton, former clerk of Big Apple Convenience Store in Peterborough, who gained media attention when she refused to sell cigarettes to a customer paying with EBT.
“When we see Shaw’s supermarket in Milford put out signs that say ‘use Your EBT Card to buy lobsters today,’ then we know there’s an attitude out there… breaking faith with taxpayers of New Hampshire,” O’Brien said. Continue Reading →
Immigrants take the Oath of Allegiance, becoming US citizens.
In this age of economic insecurity and an uncertain future, newly naturalized Americans may be the nation’s most optimistic citizens. After taking the Oath of Allegiance on the 4th of July outside the Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, many of the 101 new American citizens shared their stories for a NHPR audio postcard. Almost everyone spoke of the United States as a land of educational and economic opportunities — despite the down economy, high unemployment, and skyrocketing college tuition. Continue Reading →
At 34 years old, Tracie Smith runs one of the larger farms in the Monadnock Region using the community supported agriculture model. “I started on a small scale, and over the last 15 years, I built it up each year,” she says. “But all of it was with the aim to follow my passion and grow good food. I’ve always been an idealist at heart.”
“We’re aiming every year to be able to keep our employees and pay them more and look into health insurance,” Smith says. “You can’t have a sustainable business if you’re losing people because you can’t offer them enough.”
“By the time I pay for all the overhead, supplies, and just the pay that I’m paying them–which isn’t even enough, in my opinion–insurance is a tough thing,” Smith says. “It would make it almost not profitable for me. That’s my goal, to get to the point so they can justify coming back every year.”
“Everyone was talking about universal health care, and it would be helpful to small businesses, I think, because it’s a huge cost,” Smith says. “But it doesn’t look like that’s happening, so I’m bound and determined to figure it out.”
Since I spoke with Smith, she’s figured out how to pay for about half of her returning employees’ insurance premiums. “Whether we have to grow the business, which I keep doing, in the aim to make it more sustainable, financially, that’s what I’ll do,” Smith says.
As part of our weekly “Getting By, Getting Ahead” series, StateImpact is traveling across New Hampshire, gathering personal stories from the people behind the economy. In our second installment, we visit a small farm in the Monadnock Region.
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Tracie Smith has been selling mixed vegetables and herbs at farmers’ markets since she went to college. At UNH, she studied environmental horticulture. Today, at age 34, she still looks the part of a college hippie farmer, with her long curly hair and grubby jeans.
But as she inspects the crops at her farm near Jaffrey, it’s clear her casual looks shouldn’t fool you. Smith is a determined businesswoman. For the past 15 years, she has run a farm that uses a model called “Community Supported Agriculture,” or CSA for short. It’s a kind of subscription program where customers buy a bulk “share” of Smith’s vegetable harvest during the spring, summer or fall. And business is booming. Continue Reading →
The Monadnock region's seen big growth in the number of small farms selling produce direct to consumers.
Tomorrow morning, NHPR will air the second part of our series “Getting By, Getting Ahead,” which tells the personal stories behind New Hampshire’s economy. The upcoming piece will profile a small-scale farmer from the Monadnock region, and the challenge she faces in trying to get her employees health insurance.
If you’d like to find out more about the growth of small-scale agriculture in the area, and the economic challenges facing farmers, check out our regional snapshot. You can also find our first installment of “Getting By, Getting Ahead,” the story of a White Mountains innkeeper, here.
This week StateImpact New Hampshire introduces part two of our series “Getting By, Getting Ahead.” As you may have seen, reporter Amanda Loder has a blog post about the hurdles facing farmers in New Hampshire, despite the local food movement. With that in mind, we thought we’d point to two other stories in the news media today. One, from the New York Times, says the slow food movement has created a slow money movement, which actually as the potential to innovate and grow not just local agriculture, but local economies:
“A looming shortage of migrant workers, with fewer Mexicans coming north in recent years, could create a kind of rural-urban divide if it continues, with mass-production farms that depend on cheap labor losing some of their price advantages over locally grown food, which tends to be more expensive.”
However, the blog Grist has a post today featuring an economist and a geography professor, whose book Locavore’s Dilemma claims that widespread adoption of locavorism “can only result in higher costs and increased poverty, greater food insecurity, less food safety and much more significant environmental damage than is presently the case” [emphasis theirs].
The local food movement is gaining popularity, especially in the Monadnock region. But that doesn't necessarily mean big money for small farmers.
Tomorrow morning on NHPR, we’ll introduce you to Tracie Smith, afarmer in the Monadnock Region. Tracie’s story is Part Two of our series “Getting By, Getting Ahead,” examining how people across New Hampshire’s seven regions are navigating a recovering economy.
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Farming has long been crucial to New Hampshire’s Monadnock region, where rows of vegetable and fruit crops pock a hilly landscape of hearty green forests. But lately, there’s a new economic opportunity for area farmers: The growing popularity of something called “community supported agriculture.” Continue Reading →
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