For the towns and businesses along the I-93 corridor, the state’s unfinished major road expansion project means more time in limbo. The town of Windham has been enduring major construction delays and changes for several years. Several roads in town are supposed to be moved and the new I-93 exit is only half finished.
The state of New Hampshire needs $365 million to finish its ambitious plan to widen Interstate 93 in the southern part of the state, just as lawmakers in Congress vow to cut state transportation funding, which could reduce the state’s road project funding by $40 million a year.
The New Hampshire Department of Transportation says much of what has already been started on I-93 is now on hold because of the uncertainty over funding.
Find out more on which NH counties are challengers--and which are contenders--after the jump
One of our most popular drop-in series at StateImpact has been our county-by-county glimpses at migration rates. Our work is based on a map generated by Jon Bruner of Forbes. (We still recommend you check it out.) Using IRS data, Bruner traced where people in every county in the country were moving to–and from–between 2005 and 2009.
Although New Hampshire’s economy is doing very well now, given the circumstances, there are questions about whether the state will be on sound footing in the coming decades. New England in general is experiencing a shortage of young people. And the young people we have aren’t having a lot of kids. In the past, New Hampshire’s been able to depend, to some extent, on people moving in from elsewhere. But as we’ve seen in previous posts, that in-migration is concentrated in certain pockets throughout the state. And while Bruner’s map doesn’t list migration patterns by age, we can fill in some gaps in key places based on what we know from New Hampshire economist- and demographer-types.
We’ve already looked at the North Country, White Mountains, Dartmouth-Sunapee, Monadnock Region, and Lakes Region. (You can read those posts here and here.)
You could say personal income growth in Q3 was less about the Benjamins than about the Jacksons...
Lately, the US Bureau of Economic Analysis has been crunching numbers looking at so called “personal income” growth. That figure includes all pre-tax income: wages, salaries, dividends, annuities, Social Security checks…everything.
And for the third quarter of 2011, the growth was rather modest. In its media release, the Bureau of Economic Analysis noted:
“State personal income growth slowed to 0.1 percent, on average, in the third quarter of 2011. Growth rates ranged from -0.4 percent in West Virginia to 0.6 percent in Washington State. Personal income fell or was unchanged in twenty states and grew 0.2 percent in the other thirty.” Continue Reading →
P2P file sharing--whether illegally downloading music and movies or offering alternative lending--is a controversy magnet
First of all, if you haven’t checked-in with NHPR’s Word of Mouth…you need to. StateImpact listens in frequently. And it just so happens that we found a cool interview host Virginia Prescott did with reporter MacGregor Campbell about the resurrection of peer-to-peer lending in lieu of banks. As the segment intro explains:
“Back in the mid-2000’s, peer to peer lending web sites like Prosper and Lending Club bet that ordinary people could take the place of banks. The business model was both daring and consistent with the hyper-connected internet culture. The idea was that people who needed loans could connect with investors willing to bet on getting paid back with a little interest. Prosper’s faith in crowd-sourcing replacing traditional risk-assessment tools used by banks turned out to be a mistake. Within two years, the SEC shut it down for not holding insurance to repay jilted lenders…it turns out that up to twenty percent of the borrowing crowd defaulted on their loans. Today’s tighter loan policies have paved the way for a new wave of P2P banks to again experiment with connecting people through lending.” Continue Reading →
Arthur Laffer says exchanging a carbon tax for the federal income tax is smart economic policy
If there is a patron saint of modern Republican tax policy, it is economist Arthur Laffer. Laffer is best known for the Laffer Curve – a graph of the theory that under the right circumstances, a cut in tax rates produces higher tax revenues. The Laffer Curve was the keystone of so-called “Reaganomics.”
He was in Manchester recently to present a very different idea – one that so far Republicans have been slow to embrace.
Arthur Laffer sees all taxes as essentially bad but some are worse than others. With that in mind, he would like to swap a tax on carbon for our current tax on income.
“What you do by having an income tax rate reduction across the board, you really provide great incentives for people to work, produce, and increase output,” Laffer said.
“So I would support a carbon tax in replacement for a progressive income tax. I think that would be very good for the economy and as an adjunct, it would reduce also carbon emissions into the environment. It would have that effect as well.”
Needless to say, we found this stance more than a little surprising. NHPR’s Jon Greenberg recently spoke in-depth with Laffer about his unorthodox position on carbon taxation. Continue Reading →
It's time for our weekly roundup of the StateImpact posts you thought--pound for pound--were the most intriguing.
It’s late on a Friday afternoon…which means it’s time for us to pass along the StateImpact posts that drew the most clicks. So if your computer caught fire, your iPhone broke, or life otherwise happened and you missed one of our “talker” pieces…you’re in luck!
Colonial Theatre project in downtown Laconia snagged the biggest grant
Twenty-three conservation and historic preservation projects will be sharing just north of $1 million in state grants courtesy of New Hampshire’s Land and Community Heritage Investment Program (LCHIP). Fourteen historic structures and more than 2,800 acres of land ultimately qualified for funding.
Grant awards ranged from $150,000 toward the $5 million project to buy and restore the Colonial Theatre in Laconia to $4,000 to renovate the Stack Room in the Silsby Library in Acworth. In a media release, the LCHIP Board of Directors estimated:
“These projects will support more than 120 jobs and contribute over $3.7 million to the employment economy of the state…
The [most recent round of] LCHIP grants of $1,158,308 have attracted about $13.5 million in total project value.” Continue Reading →
President Obama is pushing for a change to federal labor rules covering payment and overtime for home health workers. We've cobbled together White House data on which states do--and don't--offer minimum wage and overtime for home health workers. Continue reading →
And while it’s not dismal, it’s also not the best.
“Total employment compensation in New Hampshire increased by 1.8 percent in 2010, but it didn’t increase in all of the state’s 10 counties, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. Continue Reading →
Is a structural deficit a real concern for NH...or just a boogeyman cooked up by economists? We've got more after the jump.
Yesterday, StateImpact liveblogged the Joint Economic Session. Members of the House and Senate Finance and Ways and Means Committees gathered for hours to hear economists offer projections on where the global, national, and state economies are headed in 2012.
Admittedly, it was pretty dry stuff. And we were ready to do what we’ve done with our other economic forecast liveblogs–just wait until an interesting trend or factoid pops up, and highlight it for you.
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