Emily Corwin reported on economics for the StateImpact New Hampshire blog until the project merged with the New Hampshire Public Radio site in July 2013. She is now NHPR’s Seacoast Reporter. You can follow her on Twitter at @emilycorwin, and find her stories on NHPR.org.
NHPR intern Tina Forbes, also a crew-member at Nashua’s brand-new Trader Joe’s, brought one of those quintessential tubs of Trader Joe’s miniature chocolate chip cookies to the office today, creating a noticeable boost to newsroom morale. Continue Reading
How much does the value of your parents’ home predict where you go to college? More than one might think, economist Michael Lovenheim argues in a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economics.
Until recently, mainstream assumptions gave a lot of credence to the notion that students need a lifetime of resources to be prepared for college: high expectations from family and teachers, extra-curricular activities, engaging dinner conversations, you know the drill. It turns out that while those issues may play a part in the very big picture, a family’s short-term liquid assets have a lot more influence on college choices than economists once believed.
Specifically, economist Michael Lovenheim has found that the value of a student’s family home during her high school years directly correlates to the quality of the institution she attends in the following years. Continue Reading
Paul Downey
On Wednesday, Employment Security Commissioner Tara Reardon resigned amid allegations that she hired her daughter as an intern, then had her layed off in order to receive unemployment benefits. The Telegraph, Monitor, Union Leader, and of course, NHPR, have all the details. We want to know: how could this happen?
Nepotism
There is a law regarding nepotism and executive officials in New Hampshire. However, it leaves quite a bit up for interpretation. As the Nashua Telegraph reports, the law “prohibits any executive branch official from ‘directly’ taking part in hiring, firing, setting the pay or supervising a spouse, child, parent, sibling or close relation by marriage.” Continue Reading
Daquella Manera
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
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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
Emily Corwin
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
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].
Who’s right? You decide.
An Education Update!
D. Sharon Pruitt
Today, the House passed a bill preventing a doubling of interest rates on new student loans, which was scheduled to go into effect Sunday.
In New Hampshire, Gov. Lynch’s veto on a education tax credit for businesses was overidden — a “keystone” of the Republican agenda, as Sam Evans-Brown reported for NHPR on Wednesday.
And the New Hampshire Business Review has a story about Stay Work Play, an organization trying to solve two of New Hampshire’s biggest problems at once: New Hampshire students’ enormous student-debt burden, and employers’ skilled worker shortage. Recent graduates of N.H. colleges team up with local employers, who contribute $8000 over four years directly to their loan provider. In return, businesses “remain competitive by recruiting young, educated workers.”
A couple of weeks ago, Arthur Laffer — an economist made famous for his work in the Reagan administration — co-wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal warning that the expiration of federal tax cuts in January puts the country on the verge of a “Taxmageddon.”
Laffer’s “supply side” or “trickle down” economic ideas are at the root of what business boosters here call the “New Hampshire Advantage” — the Granite State’s lack of an income tax is what Laffer considers ideal. Laffer has been pushing this idea in state capitals of late.
As the Pew Center On The States’ Stateline reported in March, Laffer has been “staging a comeback,” working with politicians and organizations in Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma to abolish the personal income tax. While Laffer was trying to dissolve the income tax in the Midwest, New Hampshire legislators were working to make an income-tax ban part of the New Hampshire constitution — a measure on which voters will get the final say in November.
Meanwhile, a senior analyst at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy was looking at the same question Laffer had — the impact of a personal income tax on states. In a study that is getting a lot of attention this week, Carl Davis came to drastically different conclusions. Continue Reading
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