The Property Tax & A Fair Funding System

My dad spent years complaining to me about property taxes. As a nuclear engineer, he saw the unfairness built into the math: wealthier towns paid a smaller share of their income for schools than poorer towns. I didn’t fully grasp the implications until I bought my building in Newmarket.

In the early 2000s, our town faced a perfect storm. The old school was crumbling, filled with asbestos, the feds said we had to replace it. At around the same time, the EPA demanded a new water treatment plant. The state and federal governments offered little help. The bill landed squarely on us, the local taxpayers.

I supported the new school and the clean water. But forcing our little town to shoulder these massive costs alone felt like being punished for needing the basics. When my first tax bill arrived I owed over $6,000 for my 1,400-square-foot building! A decade earlier, I’d owned a 2,200-square-foot house just over the border in Maine. The taxes there were only $2,500.

That’s when I understood my dad’s criticism of the tax system. In New Hampshire, we attempt to fund the dream of equal opportunity with the most unequal tax imaginable, a tax that falls most heavily on the very communities that education is meant to uplift. New Hampshire has one of the highest property tax burdens in the country. Property taxes are about 5% of personal income, compared with 3.1% nationally.

But this is about more than fairness. It’s about the pursuit of happiness. A tax system that demands a crippling share of a family’s income for housing, threatens security, stability, and peace of mind, the essential precursors to a meaningful life. It taxes the foundation of community itself.

The Regressive Machine: A Tax on Stability

A “regressive” tax sounds like economic jargon. Here’s what it means in human terms: it's a tax that takes a bigger slice from the income pie of the poor and middle class than from the rich.

Property taxes are regressive by nature; they aren’t based on your income or your ability to pay. They’re based on the assessed value of your home or business. A retired couple on a fixed pension in a modest home they’ve owned for 40 years can face the same crippling bill as a wealthy newcomer in a similar house. The tax doesn’t care that one family’s income is $40,000 and the other’s is $400,000.

In New Hampshire, the poorest 20% of households pay about 6% of their income in property taxes, while the richest 1% pay about 2%. This creates a brutal irony. The very tax that funds our schools, the supposed engine of equal opportunity and future growth, guarantees that opportunity is distributed by zip code. It actively undermines the intergenerational promise that hard work and thrift will lead to security. Instead, it can turn a paid-off home, the embodiment of that promise, into a financial millstone for seniors.

Several years ago, I had a conversation with one of the customers at my restaurant who had bought his house in town in the 80s. He said, “I supported the new school. My kids went there, but I paid off my house several years ago and now my monthly property tax bill is the same as my mortgage payment used to be.”

Schools Funded by Zip Code: The Geography of Opportunity

Here’s the brutal math of New Hampshire’s education funding, the system that shapes our children’s futures:

• Roughly 70% comes from local property taxes.

• About 20% comes from the state.

• A mere 8-10% comes from the federal government.

New Hampshire has the lowest state share of education funding in America. This isn’t a minor detail, it’s the core of the crisis.

It means a town with a corporate park or luxurious lakefront homes can raise millions for its schools with a relatively low tax rate. A working-class town with modest homes must set a punishingly high tax rate just to afford the basics: new textbooks, a functioning heating system, a living wage for teachers.

The result is two separate worlds of childhood. In one, children have small classes, new technology, art programs, and well-supported teachers. In the other, they have leaking roofs, outdated books, constant budget cuts, and overcrowded classrooms. A child’s educational foundation, and thus their capacity to learn, grow, and pursue their potential, is determined not by their innate talent or effort, but by their parents’ property value. We have created a caste system based on real estate.

One of my friends is an art teacher in a town near the restaurant. One Friday night, she came in, sat at the bar, and ordered a margarita. I asked her how things were going at school. “It’s hard,” she said. “The school board keeps cutting funding to the arts department. I have to work on the weekends to pay my rent. I’m just exhausted. I love the kids, but I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing this.” My friend hadn’t yet turned thirty, yet she was already burned out by the system.

Claremont: A Fight for the Future

In the 1990s, several New Hampshire towns, led by Claremont, had enough. They sued the state, arguing that this system violated the constitution. How could education be a fundamental right if its quality depended on a town’s wealth?

The New Hampshire Supreme Court agreed. In a series of landmark rulings, it declared that the state has a constitutional duty to provide an “adequate” education for every child, and that relying on unequal local property taxes was illegal. The state, not individual towns, was responsible for fair funding. For a moment, there was hope. The state created the Statewide Education Property Tax (SWEPT) to pool money and redistribute it equitably.

But almost immediately, politics gutted the policy. Wealthy towns fought to keep “their” money, labeling themselves “donor towns” and arguing it was unfair to “donate” property tax revenue to less affluent communities. The legislature caved, allowing these towns to offset local revenue with their SWEPT contributions. Redistribution died.

The core flaw in the “donor town” argument is this: any statewide tax will inevitably redistribute revenue from wealthier areas to those with greater need. If we relied on an income tax, higher-earning cities would contribute more. If we turned to a sales tax, cities with more retail activity would contribute more into the system. That isn’t unfair, it’s the foundation of shared responsibility in a functioning society.

In New Hampshire, per pupil spending varies enormously across districts. In the latest statewide district data (FY 2023–2024), the gap between the lowest and highest district cost per pupil is roughly $19,000 per student. We won in court and lost in the statehouse. The promise of equal educational opportunity was deferred, again.

The Shell Game: “Low Taxes” as a Myth

Politicians boast about New Hampshire’s “low taxes.” But this is a shell game. We do not have a broad based sales tax or a broad based personal income tax, so we rely heavily on property taxes to pay for public services. New Hampshire is the most reliant state in the country on property taxes as a share of state and local revenue, which makes the burden especially heavy for many working and middle class households. We call it “local control,” but every year more and more “locals” get priced out.

We’ve created a system where the wealthiest can live here, derive income from global investments, and pay almost nothing to the state that protects their assets and quality of life. At the same time a nurse or a factory worker pay a fortune just for the privilege of owning a modest home. That’s not freedom. That’s a rigged system. 

The costs of this inequality are measured in more than dollars, they are measured in lost human potential and stolen futures: Lost Potential: Study after study shows that students in well-funded schools are more likely to graduate, attend college, earn higher wages, and stay out of the criminal justice system. A 10% increase in per-pupil spending leads to 7% higher earnings in adulthood. Underfunding schools isn’t saving money; it’s stealing our future, depriving our state of innovators, caregivers, and informed citizens. It is a guarantee of future poverty, poor health, and overcrowded prisons.

The Senior Squeeze: Fixed-income seniors are literally taxed out of homes they’ve owned for a lifetime, breaking their ties to community, family, and the roots of their identity. We force a cruel choice between financial survival and belonging.

The Business Burden: As a small business owner, my property tax is a direct hit to my bottom line, it’s a penalty for investing in a downtown building. It stifles the very local entrepreneurship and vibrant main streets that create communities worth living in.

By relying on the property tax as the backbone of local and school funding, we have turned the American Dream of homeownership into a financial trap. We encourage families to buy a home, the cornerstone of stability, then we tax them for it at rates that make it harder to save for their kids’ education or their own retirement. We punish them for achieving the very security we claim to be “the American Dream”.

Many years ago, I was listening to a call-in show on New Hampshire Public Radio. They were discussing property taxes. An older woman called in and said, “If it were up to me, we wouldn’t let anyone move into our town who is under the age of 50. We just can’t afford to keep paying for the kids’ schools.”

That really broke my heart.

What kind of state are we living in? We force communities to choose between funding decent education for young people or allowing elderly people on fixed incomes to stay in their homes. This is a Faustian bargain that is tearing our communities apart.

The Moral Case: Taxing Wealth, Not Work

Taxation is not theft. It is the membership dues we agree to pay to live in a functioning, prosperous, and just society. Every economy answers a simple, moral question: Who pays for civilization, and who benefits from it? Our roads, bridges, schools, courts, clean water, and safety nets are built and maintained with public resources, the pooled contributions of our shared enterprise.

The moral principle is simple: if you derive the greatest benefit from the system, you should pay the most to sustain it. This is about equity and reciprocity.

Community First Economics insists that fairness and sustainability must be the iron principles of taxation. A fair tax system doesn’t punish success, but it ensures that those who have benefited most from our society contribute proportionally to its upkeep. It is the only way to lift the crushing, regressive burden off the middle and fund the shared foundations of community we all require.

The Community First Blueprint: Funding Fairness

Our goal is not to raise taxes for the sake of it. Our goal is to lower the overall tax burden on working and middle-class families by finally asking concentrated, often passive wealth to pay its way. The Claremont courts were right. Education is a right, not a privilege of geography. Community First Economics demands we finish the work they started.

Here is a practical, New Hampshire-focused blueprint to fund our communities fairly: Fulfill Education Funding Promises with Sustainable Revenue & Bring Down Property Taxes: The core injustice is using a regressive property tax to fund the equal right to education. The state must meet its constitutional duty by creating a sustainable, fair revenue stream to fully fund the Education Trust Fund. The explicit goal must be to use this state money to dramatically bring down local property tax rates, providing direct, substantial relief to homeowners and renters. 

Tax Speculation, Not Homes: Implement fees on non-owner-occupied, short-term rental properties that reduce the year-round housing stock, and dedicate the revenue to affordable housing trusts.

Reinstate and Modernize the Interest & Dividends Tax: From 1923 until 2021, New Hampshire had a 5% tax on interest and dividend income over a modest threshold. Its repeal was a massive gift to the wealthiest households, who derive the majority of their income from investments, not wages. The New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute found that about 92% of the dollars from eliminating this tax stay with households in the top 20% of incomes, and slightly more than 58% of the benefit flows to the top 1%. We should not only reinstate this tax but modernize it to better target passive, unearned income. This is the most straightforward, historically precedented way to ensure that wealth generated by capital assets contributes to the foundations it relies on.

Close Corporate Loopholes & Establish a Minimum Corporate Tax: Profitable corporations doing business in New Hampshire should pay a minimum effective tax rate. If you benefit from our market, our workforce, and our infrastructure, you must pay to maintain them.

Consider Walmart and Amazon, two of the largest retailers operating in our state. Walmart runs more than 25 stores and a major distribution center here. Amazon operates fulfillment centers, delivery stations, and Whole Foods locations. Both generate billions in sales to New Hampshire residents and depend on our roads, utilities, public safety, and educated workforce. Yet through legal loopholes, interstate profit-shifting, and strategic deductions, these corporate giants often pay far less in state business taxes than a Main Street shop with a fraction of their revenue.

We can fix this without imposing a sales tax on consumers. Here’s how: Enact a Corporate Minimum Tax Based on New Hampshire Sales: If a corporation’s standard Business Profits Tax or Business Enterprise Tax liability falls below a threshold tied to its in-state sales, they pay a minimum tax based on those sales instead. For example, a 0.5% minimum tax on in-state gross receipts over $100 million would ensure that large, profitable corporations contribute meaningfully; even if deductions zero out their reported profits.

Expand the Business Enterprise Tax with a Large Retailer Surcharge: Amend the BET to include a small additional percentage on the gross receipts of corporations with New Hampshire sales exceeding $100 million. This would apply only to the largest players and not local businesses. This would function as a fee for the privilege of accessing our market at scale.

Apply a Marketplace Facilitator Fee on Digital Sales: For companies like Amazon that act as platforms for third-party sales, impose a small fee on gross sales facilitated in New Hampshire. This recognizes the value these corporations extract from our economy and ensures they help maintain the infrastructure that makes their business model possible.

These approaches are not sales taxes. 

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. States like Massachusetts, Oregon, and California already use gross receipts thresholds or corporate minimum taxes to ensure large corporations can’t shift profits and avoid paying into the systems they rely on. It’s time New Hampshire did the same.

A fair tax system doesn’t punish success, it rewards responsibility. And it ensures that our schools, roads, and communities are funded by those who use them most.

The Choice: Investment vs. Extraction

The revenue from this fairer system is not an end in itself. It is an investment with a massive public return in security, opportunity, and community vitality. More importantly, it secures our fiscal future against the coming waves of economic change.

Why a wealth focus is future-proof: The AI and automation revolution will mean fewer people earning traditional wages. Relying on income and sales taxes will mean a collapsing revenue base just as we need more resources for transition, retraining, and social support. Taxes on investment income, capital gains, and corporate profits ensure that the wealth generated by technology and capital assets contributes to the society that makes them possible. New Hampshire’s old Interest and Dividends tax was a start. We need to finish the job and build a system worthy of a 21st-century economy.

This is the choice before us. We can cling to the myths of the past and to a tax system built for a 20th-century economy of factories and wages. Or we can be bold and build a 21st-century tax system for a Community First future: one that taxes the idle wealth of the past to build the shared prosperity and security of the future.

A fair tax system is our community’s scorecard. It shows that we value broad-based growth, opportunity, and long-term renewal over concentrated wealth, exclusion or short-term extraction. 

We are not a poor state or a poor country. We have the resources.

We can choose differently. We can choose to fund our common future fairly, so that every child in New Hampshire, from Colebrook to Conway to Claremont, has the same solid education foundation to build upon.

Property Taxes: Limiting Economic Growth

When I first opened Jonny Boston’s International in Newmarket, the building’s antique charm was obvious. A granite stone building built in 1835, it stood long before anyone imagined a world of cars. The locals were skeptical. “It’s never gonna work out,” they’d say. “That spot’s got no parking.”

In the beginning, we made it work. Customers found spots where they could, walked a little farther, and made it part of the routine. When I finally bought the building in 2016, I thought maybe I could help fix the problem for everyone downtown. I got involved, joined the Zoning Board, and later, on the Town Council, I helped start a parking committee. We had plans. We had studies. The need was clear.

What we didn’t have was the money.

That’s when I ran headlong into the math of New Hampshire. Our town was pouring everything it had into our schools, funded almost entirely by our local property taxes. There was nothing left. No two million dollars for a simple parking garage, the kind of thing that would help my business and every other shop on Main Street, was out of reach. The growth of my business wasn’t limited by my ideas or our customers. It was limited by the tax system.

I’d have a good year at the restaurant. We’d be busy, the community showed up, the numbers looked good. Then the property tax bill would land. Over six thousand dollars for our small space. That feeling of momentum, of getting ahead, would just drain away. It was like shoveling water. No matter how hard we worked, a huge piece of whatever we earned went right back out the door. Not to a supplier, not to an employee, but to a tax bill. 

That’s when it stopped being a policy debate and started being my life. The issues in this book, such as property taxes, school funding, and why our towns feel stuck, weren’t ideas I read about in the news. They were the wall I kept hitting. I realized I couldn’t just be a business owner who grumbled about taxes. If I wanted to build a future here, for myself and for this town, I had to try to change the system.

That’s why I first ran for Governor in 2024. I saw that the future in New Hampshire would continue to get worse for people like me and for working families, small business owners and retirees. We had to tackle one big, tangled mess. We had to fix housing. We had to fund our schools in a way that made sense. And we had to stop crushing people with property taxes. You can’t solve one without solving the others.

This book is my attempt to map a way out. It’s about how we build the parking, fund the school, and keep the businesses’ doors open as one shared project. It’s about remembering that our economy is just the management of our home, and doing it in a way that lets everyone in the house survive.