Monadnock School Taxpayers Association News

December 15, 2008
American Conservative

It’s official–according to the National Bureau of Economic Advisers, the United States is in recession and has been since December 2007. That puts the current downturn on pace to surpass the 16-month recessions in 1981-82 and 1973-75 as the longest since World War II. It will almost certainly be the deepest in decades.

Outside of plunging real estate prices and swooning stocks, America still feels surprisingly normal. Unemployment has ticked up over the past year, and at an accelerating pace, but remained at a modest 6.5 percent through October–though that translates into 10.1 million Americans out of work. Still, it’s a far cry from the 10.8 percent unemployment of ‘81-’82. Economic optimists insist that while the worse may be yet to come, the country is not on the edge of disaster.

But there are reasons to doubt the Pollyannas. Amity Shlaes, writing at Bloomberg.com, points to a silver lining that is actually a storm cloud: “Today, a greater share of the population works in parts of the economy that are buffered against recession–government, schools or health care.” Should we sigh in relief? The semi-nationalization of America’s financial sector led conservatives to cry socialism. But with government and the highly regulated fields of education and healthcare as the three largest service-sector employers, some 40 million Americans work for the state directly or at one remove–and that doesn’t include government contractors. Buffered against recession? You bet: government will only grow, and reach deeper into other sectors, as the private economy declines.

Right now, Americans marking down the prices of vastly inflated stocks and houses are locked in struggle with a government desperately trying to keep prices up. If the people succeed, prices will fall, which will lead to more layoffs, less consumption, and greater contraction–but savers will be rewarded and speculators punished, which is exactly what needs to happen to restore the system to solvency. If the government wins out, however, we’ll escape deflation at the price of inflation, which will vacuum the wealth right out of Americans’ pockets, rewarding debt-addicts and punishing the frugal. The difference between a prolonged recession and a full-blown catastrophe hangs in the balance.

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December 15, 2008
Patrick Buchanan

IN A DEEPENING RECESSION, what does the reasonable man do?

Seeing friends laid off, he will get rid of all but essential credit cards, dine at home more often, terminate unnecessary trips to the mall, put off buying a new car, give up the idea of borrowing on the van- ishing equity in his house. He will begin to save and start paying down debt.

A company that has reached the limits of its credit and is staring at Chapter 11 will batten down the hatches, lay off nonessential workers, cut employee hours, put off expansion plans, cancel year-end bonuses, and try to ride out the storm.

This is the natural behavior of people responsible for others in an economic storm of the magnitude of the category four hurricane heading our way. Yet to see and hear our government, folks are doing exactly the wrong thing.

For the U.S. government is set to borrow on a colossal scale, unprecedented save in World War II, and take America trillions of dollars deeper in debt to pick up the slack in the economy caused by the rational decisions of individuals and corporations.

The Fed, whose easy-money policy created the housing bubble that has exploded in our faces, is back printing money and shoveling cash into the banks. And though the Bush deficits are said to have been responsible for our troubles, a new Congress and president have advanced a deficits-be-damned, full-spending-ahead policy.

On top of Bush’s $455 billion deficit and hundreds of billions in bailouts for AIG, Bear Stearns, Fannie, Freddie, and Citigroup, Obama is talking up a new stimulus package of $500 billion to $1 trillion.

Our governors and mayors—who, facing deficits, had been cutting back— have now reversed field and are demanding to follow the federal formula.

When Obama arrived at the National Governors Association Conference in Philadelphia, they pounced. Led by Pennsylvania’s Ed Rendell, they handed Barack a bill: $138 billion. The governors want U.S. taxpayers to relieve them of what American families face: the need to cut spending, pay down debt, make sacrifices, take pain, and live within their means.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the mayors have now followed the governors’ lead, declaring they have 4,100 projects “ready to go,” which they want U.S. taxpayers to fund.

What are these projects? Under the ever-popular rubric “infrastructure,” they include roads, bridges, schools, and public buildings. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he has $28 billion worth “ready to go,” which he would like folks in the other 49 states to fund.

Now historically, bridges, highways, roads, and public buildings have been regarded as pork. In the campaign, they were “earmarks”—payoffs for powerful constituents, a form of political corruption that reformers like Obama and John McCain were going to end.

Now, it seems, earmarks are our salvation. Why are governments at every level doing this?

Because government believes that the restoration of economic health requires us to act against our natural instincts in a recession and start buying and financ- ing new homes and cars and get back to the malls, lest this Christmas season become a bummer for retailers.

After all, 70 percent of our gross domestic product is now based on consumption, though Americans in recent years have had a savings rate of zero.

The disconnect between the instincts of average citizens and the policies of government could not be greater. Governments want us to act prodigally, while natural instincts and inclinations are telling us to act conservatively.

Conservatism and capitalism are giving conflicting signals.

Average Americans are behaving as though in rehab, trying to kick a bad habit of spending more than they earn and borrowing more than they can pay back, while the U.S. government is suggesting that what we really need is to return to the auto showrooms and malls and start spending again, only in radically increased dosages.

Beyond the present recession, questions arise as to whether the U.S. model is sustainable. If government spending were the remedy to recession, why, after Bush’s deficits, are we in recession? And if the easy money of Ben Bernanke’s Fed is the cure for what ails us, how did we get sick when Alan Greenspan’s Fed was conducting a never-ending policy of easy money?

How does it stimulate the private economy to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into consumer checking and credit card accounts, when more and more of what we consume—from computers to cars to clothes—isn’t even produced in America anymore?

What do conservatives, few of whom have opposed the Obama plans and fewer of whom have called for repeal of Bush’s big-spending social programs, believe is the alternative approach to ending the recession and creating a sustainable economy?

For the economy we have seems to be condemned to an ever-deepening and widening cycle of crises, each brought on by the cure for the previous crisis, which is always the same: more government.

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December 15, 2008
Patrick Buchanan

BARACK OBAMA and George W. Bush seem to have come away from their study of the Great Depression with similar conclusions.

To wit: after the Crash of 1929, the Federal Reserve did not move fast enough to save the banks and inject cash into the economy. Second, the New Deal, far from being wastrel deficit spending, was not bold enough. So it was that America wallowed in depression for a decade until the unbridled spending and mammoth deficits of World War II pulled us out.

Bush and Obama seem determined not to make the same mistake. We are all Keynesians now.

Thus we have the $700 billion Bush bank bailout, the $700 billion “stimulus package” Obama wants by inauguration to “jolt this economy back into shape,” and the $800 billion fund Hank Paulson created to get consumers borrowing and buying again.

These come on top of Bush’s $455 billion deficit, the $29 billion bailout of Bear Stearns, the $105 billion in pork to grease the $700 billion bailout, the $100 to $200 billion to keep Fannie and Freddie afloat, the $140 billion and counting for AIG, the $25 billion for the greening of GM, Ford, and Chrysler, the $25 billion more to save the Big Three, and the $20 billion for CitiGroup.

Now much of this overlaps and some will be retrieved. But we are still staring at a deficit that could approach $2 trillion. How would this stack up historically?

A deficit of $1.4 trillion would be 10 percent of gross domestic product, dwarfing the postwar record 6 percent run by Ronald Reagan in the Jimmy Carter recession.

Bewailing the “Reagan deficits” has been a staple of Democratic oratory. This will stop. But the politics is not the point, the policy is.

Consider what we are about to do. Bush in 2008 spent 21 percent of GDP. States, counties, and cities spent another 12 percent. One third of GDP is therefore spent by government at all levels. Obama and Co. propose to raise that by another 10 percent of GDP. We may soon be north of 40 percent of gross domestic product controlled and spent by government.

That is Eurosocialism. And where exactly are we going to get the money?

Americans save nothing. We spend more than we earn: thus the levels of consumer debt, credit-card debt, auto debt, and mortgage debt. U.S. foreign-exchange reserves amount to a piddling $73 billion.

The only nation with the kind of cash on hand we need now—if we don’t print the money and invite another gigantic bubble—is China, with its $2 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves.

Will Beijing lend back the dollars it has piled up? China certainly has an incentive to keep Americans spending. For our purchases of Chinese-made goods have often been responsible for 100 percent of China’s growth. China does not want to kill the American goose that lays those golden eggs—until the goose can’t lay any more eggs. Then they won’t need the goose.

But should China decide to lend us the money, what will Beijing demand in interest rates and assurances that we will not default? After all, the U.S. debt is 70 percent of GDP, our savings rate is near zero, and our merchandise trade deficit is still running at 5 percent to 6 percent of GDP.

Unlike the 1950s, we are today dependent on foreigners for two-thirds of our oil and for much of our manufactured goods—toys, TVs, radios, cameras, cars, shoes, clothes, bikes, motorcycles—and for the $700 billion to $800 billion we borrow each year to pay for these imports.

With U.S. homeowners, consumers, companies, and banks now going bust, why must the nation borrow trillions more to bail them out? So we can maintain our status and standard of living as the last superpower.

Bush and Obama are competing to shovel out trillions of dollars, so we can return to the good times of yesterday.

But wasn’t yesterday the root cause of today? Didn’t saving nothing and spending more than we earn, purchasing what we cannot afford in cars, consumer goods, and houses, buying far more from abroad than we sell abroad—didn’t that cause this crisis and crash?

A family man in America’s condition, awash in debt, spending more than he makes, would cut back consumption, find a second job, and get out of debt. Or declare bankruptcy, accept the shame and humiliation, change his ways, and start anew. Is it different for a nation?

Yet we seem to believe we can borrow and spend our way out of a swamp of unpayable debt into which borrowing and spending have plunged us.

We are headed either for default on our debts and bankruptcy as a nation or something less honorable: a quiet cheapening of the debts we have incurred by inflating and destroying the dollar, robbing our creditors of what we owe them and robbing our own people of the value of what they have earned. And so it has come to this.

What would the Founding Fathers think of us now?

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December 15, 2008
The American Conservative

American Omen – Garet Garrett knew where FDR’s policies—and Bush’s—would lead.
By Justin Raimondo

In an America in which a Republican administration has nationalized the financial sector and both Left and Right call on the government to save them, the authentic conservative is a stranger in his own country. The old signposts are missing, and he travels on roads he’s never seen.

Conservatives looking for direction, for some clue as to how to get out of their present conundrum had best look to where they’ve been. One who has traveled that way before can tell them what lies ahead and how best to face it. In the case of the road we are now traveling, there was a wayfarer who knew this trail by heart: his name was Garet Garrett.

One of the first financial journalists in the country, a writer of nonfiction and sometime novelist, a polemicist and prose stylist without equal, Garrett was born on a farm in the Midwest in 1878, the year Edison patented the gramophone. Apprenticed at 16 to a printer, he fell into the business of journalism and made his way to the big cities, winding up in New York. There he joined the staff of Adolph Ochs’s New York Times, where he served on the editorial board. He specialized in business and became the chronicler of the Roaring Twenties. In the heyday of untrammeled individualism and capitalism untamed, he was the chief celebrant of the New Era of prosperity and seemingly unlimited economic ascent. Later he became the historian of its betrayal and decline at the hands of its own defenders.

The stock market Crash of 1929 augured the end of the world he had known and the beginning of something new in American history: what Garrett called “a revolution within the form.” Reading of his agony at the victory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a chill of déjà vu crawls up the spine of today’s conservative: “Our fighting base is gone. Formerly we could say the people had voted for the New Deal. Now they have voted for it in a positive, overwhelming manner. Then what? … Where is the new base? I don’t see it. Where is the fighting position? I haven’t any. No one else seems to have one. Hearst and [Al] Smith and Rockefeller embrace it. The Republicans are saying they must reorganize the party on a liberal platform.”

Garrett, then at the height of his journalistic prominence and influence as chief editorial writer for the Saturday Evening Post—America’s premier weekly magazine—reached the nadir of despair. The Republicans had come to him for advice, but as Garrett said of the hapless Alf Landon, “it is like dropping it down a well. There is no splash.”

Recalling “a dreary weekend with Hoover,” Garrett advised the president to rein in spending, adjust to the new price structure, and refrain from keeping wages high. Hoover acted instead on his belief that high wages, rather than greater productivity, create prosperity. Confusing cause and effect, Hoover sought to cajole and intimidate business into maintaining the bubble rather than liquidating malinvestment and redirecting capital to productive uses.

The response of the Bush administration to the economic meltdown is eerily similar to Hoover’s, which was not a program of laissez faire as popularly misconceived but a program of reflation. Hoover not only instituted public works, but also introduced measures to prop up real estate prices and give subsidies, in the form of “loans,” to failing businesses.

Some were adjusting to the new reality in spite of the New Deal’s best efforts, and Garrett publicized their lonely struggle in a series on entrepreneurs bucking the tide: “In nearly every community,” he reported, “no matter how deeply it may be sunk in depression, you will find a plant working night and day to fill orders.” Giving us new perspective on the phrase “too big to fail,” Garrett wrote that the owners were mostly small businessmen, the sort “whose attack upon adversity has carried [them] into some new ground of opportunity.”

As the Depression swept away the illusion of prosperity, Garrett could feel the craving for a savior blowing like an ill wind, a premonition of the collectivism that filled the streets of Europe’s cities with men in colored shirts—black, red, and brown. As Obama-worship sweeps the land and the media swoons over his every utterance, it seems like Garrett caught a glimpse of our world torn out of time. He saw “People wishing for some power to descend upon them from above and make everything right by edict … the right thing must be done. How can people themselves think what the right magic is? How could they perform it if they could think of it? Therefore, let the Government think of it and do it.”

This wasn’t what the people had voted for. Roosevelt campaigned against deficits, vowed to cut spending and gut bureaucracy. He criticized the Republicans for being spendthrifts. When he got into office, however, he unleashed the infamous “Hundred Days,” which was Hooverism on steroids. At the end of it, Garrett and the Post brought out the heavy artillery and commenced firing: “The country,” he declared, had “embraced a dictatorship, with no conscious intention, no serious debate about it, by implied consent.”

The candidate who had campaigned for a “sound dollar” seized the nation’s gold in the name of national emergency and repudiated the pledge printed on every dollar until that fateful moment: “Redeemable in gold on demand.” Thus was government freed from all constraints, as the phrase “we owe it to ourselves” lilted through the airwaves and into the popular consciousness. The government printing presses went into overdrive, yet they still couldn’t match the pace of the economic collapse. Dr. New Deal’s medicine was making the economy sicker, as it sank further after a fitful burst of contrived vitality. The pain would not end until Dr. New Deal morphed into Dr. Win the War—and then we graduated into a different level of pain.

In the meantime, in their frenzy to stop prices from falling and “stabilize” the economy, the New Dealers promoted a state of “equilibrium” as the ideal. This meant stasis, a state naturally reached only in death, but a perfect goal for those who had eagerly exchanged liberty for security. They tried to establish minimum prices and cartelize the economy—that was the purpose of the National Recovery Administration with its Blue Eagle banners and militaristic parades, meant to signal a show of force and beat business into submission.

The Supreme Court turned back the NRA’s army, led by a general, appropriately enough, one Hugh Johnston, who drafted the Selective Service Act instituting conscription and ran Woodrow Wilson’s War Industries Board. Yet the court capitulated in the end, paving the way for the rest of the Rooseveltian program, which worsened economic conditions in precisely the fashion Garrett expected: stultifying innovation, raising gigantism to sacred principle, and paying farmers to dump their crops and accept “resettlement,” like the Tartars under Stalin.

In 1936, Garrett took a trip to Detroit, where the automakers, led by Ford, were making a recovery. What was the source of their success? They were competitive, making new models with all sorts of new features, and prices had dropped since 1929. Ford rejected the NRA, defied the government, and soared ahead as his profit margins swam against the tide of national trends. Today, his epigones go hat in hand to Washington to beg for a bailout.

In the mythology of modern liberalism, the New Deal is Olympus and Roosevelt is Zeus, yet not a single one of his thunderbolts hit its mark, as Garrett reminds us in The American Story. The New Deal “never did restore employment. It never did restore the national income,” and it took the “miraculous timeliness” of a military build-up before the Depression was banished from our shores. Peacetime work projects were in short supply because local governments didn’t want the maintenance costs of more schools, stadiums, and airports. But a huge national defense program was all right with conservatives and delighted liberals, who were agitating for war with Germany and Japan. The money spigot was opened, as all welcomed a boondoggle with a patriotic gloss that provided jobs and maintained an inflationary “equilibrium.” As Obama’s New Deal crashes and burns on these same peaks, one can’t help but think that military Keynesianism might well be his last resort, on the grounds that anything—including war—is preferable to deflation.

In the end, Garrett had to conclude that the Rooseveltian program wasn’t about economic recovery. The New Deal was a grand experiment carried out for its own sake as much as for impoverished Americans, and the Brain Trusters exuded an improvisational enthusiasm that masked the purpose of the revolutionaries in power: “Like a hagfish,” Garrett wrote, “the New Deal entered the old form and devoured its meaning from within. The revolutionaries were inside: the defenders were outside. A government that had been supported by the people and so controlled by the people became one that supported the people and so controlled them.”

Garrett concluded, “much of it was irreversible” because “once the government … has assumed the power to provide people with buying power when they are in want of it.” The political culture, he dourly observed, “will never be the same again.”

He was correct, and now, after being forgotten lo these many years, Garrett is making a comeback: he’s the subject of a new biography by Bruce Ramsey, Unsanctioned Voice: Journalist of the Old Right, and his books are being reprinted. Rather than heeding the counsel of Republican moderates, those modern day Hoovers and Landons, conservatives must recover their wits—and rediscover the lost legacy of Garet Garrett’s America.

Justin Raimondo is editorial director of Antiwar.com

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December 08, 2008Keene Sentinel

At the Monadnock Regional School Board meeting on December 2, nearly two hours went by before the following topics came up: math, reading and science. The occasion was a report about student test results in the 2,000-student district.

Most school boards handle a lot of things that don’t directly involve curriculum and academic achievement — the condition of school buildings, strategies for teacher retention and allowances for extracurricular activity, among other matters.

But for close to four hours in the high school library last week, the members of the Monadnock board spent little time discussing the merits of any of such subjects. In a performance possibly acceptable in a new school district that’s just learning the ropes, the board of Monadnock (founded in 1961) went back and forth about how votes ought to be weighted in the multi-town district, how budgets ought to be organized on paper, how meeting minutes should be distributed, whether and how voters should be summoned to the polls to act on school issues, whether there’s a policy for school board members applying for paid school jobs and how people should behave at public meetings.

The session, which was conducted without a single break, was remarkable for how little it involved the actual substance of academics and school governance.

To be sure, some constructive things occurred. Shaken by an apparently insulting performance by a participant at a prior meeting, the chairman of the board, Eugene M. White 3rd, laid down new rules of order and promised to keep things in line.

Earlier in the evening, Kristen Goodenough of Swanzey, who recently quit in frustration eight months into a three-year school board term, complained of some board members snickering among themselves as others spoke. “Act more professional,” she insisted.

Other members of the public urged the board to observe its own schools’ anti-bullying policies. Late into the meeting there were signs that that expectation might be too high.

For the sake of its young people, Monadnock’s school board needs to change its ways.

At a minimum that means getting process off the table so substance can be debated in responsible and productive ways. That may require clarifying board policies and procedures — a step that’s under way in a limited fashion. It will require a tone of cooperation instead of confrontation. Ideally, it might also entail putting board members in a goldfish bowl by televising their meetings — an admittedly limited prospect given the disjointed geography of the seven-town district.

Finally, the board needs to get its priorities straight. At the December 2 meeting, the members spent far less time examining the ramifications on high school renovations of nixing a warrant article for a new middle school than they did debating a $620 per week cleaning contract for mops, floor mats and custodian uniforms for the district’s nine schools.

Under ordinary circumstances, school oversight is complicated stuff. Not everybody values education the same way, and schools are often bound by requirements drafted by policymakers far away from local classrooms. The situation is particularly nettlesome in multi-town districts such as Monadnock, where a cockeyed school funding system can pit communities against each other, where cross-border jealousies can go way back, and where, if given a chance, suspicions of skullduggery and pocket-lining can become destructive distractions.

So, Monadnock’s school board faces particular hurdles in serving the district’s current and future adults. First among its ambitions should be to create and sustain an environment where respect, tolerance, imagination and the purposes of education are valued as much as fiscal discipline. Based on the recent record at Monadnock, such an environment is the exception, not the norm. Either the board acknowledges that it must change the situation, or it runs the risk of letting its dysfunction leach out of the boardroom and into the classroom, where learning is supposed to take place.

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December 6, 2006
Wall Street Journal

The U.S. lost half a million jobs in November, the largest one-month drop since 1974, as employers brace for a recession that’s expected to stretch through much of 2009.

Nonfarm payrolls declined 533,000 for the month, while revisions to earlier figures showed employers shedding almost 1.3 million jobs since September. The tally of 1.9 million jobs pared thus far in 2008 surpasses the losses of the past two recessions, signaling that the current downturn could be the worst since the years immediately following World War II.

The unemployment rate ticked up to 6.7% from 6.5%, a separate Labor Department survey showed, the highest rate in 15 years. But the jobless rate — which is based on figures of people looking for work — was contained by the ranks of discouraged job-seekers giving up their searches. A broader government measure of unemployment, which includes those who want to work but are no longer actively seeking positions, jumped to 12.5% in November from 11.8% a month earlier.

The economic woes step up pressure on President-elect Barack Obama to initiate an economic stimulus plan, one perhaps more sweeping than the $700 billion package some private-sector economists have recommended.

On Friday, Mr. Obama called for government investment in infrastructure, schools and clean-energy projects. “There are no quick or easy fixes to this crisis, which has been many years in the making, and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better,” he said.

The report also turned up the heat on lawmakers to offer federal aid to auto makers. Executives of Detroit’s Big Three manufacturers pleaded their case before Congress for a second time this week, saying hundreds of thousands of additional jobs could be at risk across the industry.

The jobs report sent stocks lower early Friday. But a late-session surge put the Dow Jones Industrial Average in positive territory at the end of the day, up 259 points, or 3.1%, to 8635.42. It was down 2.2% for the week.

Also on Friday, the Labor Department revised downward prior months of job data, reflecting a deterioration in the economy in late summer, before the worst of the credit freeze. September’s jobs decline was revised down to 403,000 jobs, from 284,000. Figures for November are also likely to be pulled down when the department releases its final numbers. The final figure could rival the 602,000 jobs lost in December 1974. But the overall labor market is about 75% larger today, so the job cuts now represent a smaller share of the work force.

The November declines showed how economic turmoil has swept from housing to almost every sector. The retail, restaurant and professional-services industries all posted substantial job losses, as did construction and manufacturing. The few offsetting gains came in the health and education sectors.

“Businesses are responding to declining product demand and uncertainty by slashing employment,” said Bank of America chief economist Mickey Levy. He projects a 3.8% annualized decline in gross domestic product in the first quarter of 2009, after a 4.2% decline in the final quarter of 2008.

Mr. Levy, who expects payroll declines to continue through mid-2009, notes that in the past five recessions, the total number of U.S. jobs declined from its peak by about 2%. In this downturn, a loss of that scale would translate into a decline of 2.8 million jobs in all — or about 900,000 additional jobs.

As consumers cut back, retailers are feeling the pinch, with some stores faltering through the holiday season while others close. On Thursday, U.S. retailers reported their worst same-store sales declines for November since at least 1969.

Laura Griffith, 49, lost her job at Mervyn’s LLC when the 177-store chain announced it was going out of business in October. “A year ago, if you went on the Web and did a search for jobs in retail, you might find 10 to 15 postings. Now you see maybe one.”

Ms. Griffith, who worked in product design and development at the retailer for 13 years, says she is willing to move from her home in San Francisco but hasn’t been able to find a position. She says she has cut back on spending and plans to give fewer gifts this holiday season due to her lost income and diminished retirement savings.

December’s jobs report could sting even more. Employers are rushing to cut costs before closing their books for the year, with major businesses disclosing tens of thousands of job cuts in recent days. On Friday, engine-maker Cummins Inc. said it would eliminate 500 white-collar jobs, or about 3.5% of its work force.

The economy is contracting sharply in the current quarter, and the latest jobs report indicates the decline in output could be worse than the annualized 4% drop now expected.

During the depths of the downturns of the early 1970s and early 1980s, employers pared work forces so drastically that job growth was robust within a year of the largest cuts. Today, however, the economy faces intense pressure from turmoil in credit and housing sectors.

Businesses hamstrung by tight credit are expected to slash capital spending plans further. Debt loads now weigh on swaths of the economy: The Mortgage Bankers Association said Friday that one in ten homeowners with mortgages is either in foreclosure or delinquent on mortgage payments.

Overall, consumers are beleaguered by the loss in home values, retirement savings and household wealth over the past year. Tightening credit also is leading to lower consumption. The Federal Reserve said Friday that consumer credit outstanding contracted at a 1.6% annual rate in October, or about $3.6 billion. That marked the second decline in three months.

Two steps are critical to an economic recovery: stabilization in the housing sector and an unclogging of the credit system, to allow the Fed’s low interest rates to spur demand. Economists say that planned moves by the Fed and Treasury Department, along with fiscal stimulus early next year, could get the economy back on track by as early as mid-2009.

The unemployment rate is expected to hit 8% over the next year as job losses continue and, as the economy recovers, more potential workers re-enter the work force. That could make job searches tougher after a particularly challenging period for job-seekers.

In Port Charlotte, Fla., Sharon Byberg has been looking for a job for 15 months, after being laid off by a surveying company where she made $17 an hour making blueprints for architects and builders.

Ms. Byberg has had few responses to her job applications at national retailers, fast-food chains and grocery stores. A local gas station got more than 1,000 applications for two jobs paying about $8 an hour, Ms. Byberg said.

“Jobs are like diamonds,” she said. “You got to know somebody to get one and they’re extremely rare. … Employers can pick and choose who they want.”

Ms. Byberg, 48, said she has $50 in a bank account and faces about $300 in bills for car insurance and a mobile phone. She hasn’t had any income since her unemployment insurance benefits ran out this September, so she and her 15-year-old daughter now live with her retired mother, whose Social Security checks cover essential costs.

She doesn’t plan to buy anything for the holiday. “I don’t see a Christmas,” she said.

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December 6, 2008
Keene Sentinel

FITZWILLIAM — Despite a dip in the town government portion of the tax rate, hikes for the Monadnock Regional School District, Cheshire County and state education tax swelled Fitzwilliam property tax bills this year.

The N.H. Department of Revenue Administration set Fitzwilliam’s tax rate at $23.87 per $1,000 of assessed valuation. This is up $3.12, or 15 percent, from last year’s rate of $20.75.

The largest rate increase reflected in Fitzwilliam’s tax bill was for Cheshire County, which rose 30.5 percent.

In October, Cheshire County Finance Director Sheryl A. Trombly told The Sentinel the county needed to raise about $5 million more in taxes this year.

Much of that increase, she said, is for the county’s new jail, which is being built off Route 101 in Keene.

Fitzwilliam taxpayers are also seeing a higher bill for the Monadnock Regional School District — rising from $3,319,534 to $4,129,114.

Earl H. Wammack, business manager for N.H. School Administrative Unit 38 — which includes the Monadnock district — said every town in the district saw an increase in their local education tax rates this year, most of them by a fairly significant amount.

Among the reasons Wammack cited was the passage of such big-ticket warrant articles as a contract for support staff in March and a teachers contract in September.

To a lesser degree, Wammack said the district’s towns — Fitzwilliam, Gilsum, Richmond, Roxbury, Sullivan, Swanzey and Troy — are seeing hikes because of Surry’s withdrawal from the district in July.

Meanwhile, Fitzwilliam’s overall rate increase is being softened slightly by a drop in the town portion of the tax rate of 1.3 percent.

Carmen M. Yon, chairman of the board of selectmen, said selectmen tried to keep the budget — a 6.1 percent increase from last year — as much in line as possible. In the meantime, Fitzwilliam taxpayers have benefited from the increase in Fitzwilliam’s property tax base, thanks to the ongoing construction of a substation for Public Service of New Hampshire on Route 12.

Susan E. Blothenburg, community relations manager for the company, said the substation will use 9 acres of land.

“It will allow us to (bring) more reliable electric service to the region,” according to Blothenburg, who said the company hopes to have the substation completely in service by late spring.

According to Town Administrator Paula W. Thompson, Fitzwilliam taxpayers also benefited from selectmen’s use of $100,000 of unreserved fund balance to offset taxes.

But despite this spending, Yon said, anticipated budget savings and increased revenue are keeping the amount left over in the unreserved fund balance level with last year.

Fitzwilliam’s ratio of assessment is 96.2 percent, according to Thompson. This means that a property with a market value of $200,000 would likely be assessed at $192,400 and would pay taxes on that amount.

Of every $23.87, Fitzwilliam collects in taxes:

u $4.43 will go to town government, down 6 cents , or 1.3 percent from last year’s rate of $4.49. This tax will raise a total of $1,251,494.

u $14.61 will go to the Monadnock Regional School District, up $2.48, or 20.4 percent from last year’s $12.13. This tax will raise $4,129,114.

u $2.26 will go to the state education tax, up 10 cents, or 4.6 percent, from last year’s $2.16. This tax will raise $601,767.

u $2.57 will go to Cheshire County government, up 60 cents, or 30.5 percent, from last year’s $1.97. This tax — which will raise $726,266 — will support county expenses such as Maplewood Nursing Home and the county jail.

Homes in the Fitzwilliam Village Water District will pay an additional 44 cents per $1,000 of assessed value.. This is up 9 cents, or 25.7 percent, from last year’s additional rate of 35 cents per $1,000 of assessed value.

Fitzwilliam tax bills were mailed on Nov. 21 and are due Dec. 22, Thompson said.

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December 4, 2008
Keene Sentinel

GILSUM — The town portion of the property tax rate dropped this year, but any savings residents might have seen was obliterated by hefty spikes in county and education taxes.

Gilsum residents are seeing a 20.6 percent increase in their town’s overall property tax rate compared with last year’s rate, and a nearly 50 percent increase in the local school rate takes most of the blame.

The N.H. Department of Revenue Administration set the 2008 rate at $26.28 per $1,000 of assessed property value, an increase of $4.49 over last year’s rate of $21.79.

The town rate was the only portion of the tax bill that decreased this year. The rate fell from $7.36 to $6.17, a decrease of 16.2 percent.

“I think the decrease is because last year we had a one-time increase that had to do with leftover funds from the floods of ’05,” said Selectman William G. Hasbrouck. “We run a very, very tight and conservative budget anyway, so this year it’s going to be even tighter.”

New teacher contracts, a decline in revenues and an array of other factors caused the Monadnock Regional School District’s budget to rise by $3 million. Gilsum raised $799,998 for the district last year, but will have to hand over $833,478 this year — a 4.2 percent increase.

“We know that the school rate increases periodically,” Hasbrouck said. “This year the increase is so huge there was nothing we could do about it.”

Cheshire County will take 30 percent more from Gilsum, which is on par with the average county rate in other Monadnock Region towns. County government requires $5 million more this year, mainly to support the new jail being built in Keene off Route 101 near the Marlborough town line.

Gilsum’s ratio of assessment is about 82.2 percent, which means a house that could sell for $200,000 would be assessed at $164,400, and the owner would pay taxes on that amount.

The owner of a house assessed at $200,000 will have to pay $5,256 in property taxes. The same homeowner’s bill was $898 less last year.

Despite higher rates and widespread economic woes, Gilsum residents have been handing over their property tax payments as the Dec. 18 deadline approaches without much of a fuss, Hasbrouck said.

“The money has been coming in fairly regular,” he said. “There are very few complaints because most people see where the increases are.”

Of every $26.28 Gilsum collects in taxes:

- $6.17 will go to town government, down $1.19, or 16.2 percent, from last year’s $7.36. This tax will raise $361,467 for the town.

- $14.23 will go to the Monadnock school district, up $4.59, or 47.6 percent, over last year’s $9.64. This tax will raise $833,478.

- $2.73 will go to the statewide school tax, up 36 cents, or 15.2 percent, over last year’s $2.37. This tax will raise $156,030.

- $3.15 will go to the county government, up 73 cents, or 30.2 percent, over last year’s $2.42. This tax will raise $184,687.

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December 3, 2008
Keene Sentinel

A new middle school plan in Monadnock falls victim to economic worries

SWANZEY CENTER — The bad economy claimed another victim Tuesday night, as the Monadnock Regional School Board voted to remove a plan for up to $18.7 million for a new middle school from March’s school-district warrant.

“It’s just the economy. It’s just not the time,” said facilities committee Chairman Robert J. Smith of Swanzey, who said committee members had voted unanimously at a recent meeting to recommend tossing the warrant article.

The school board’s vote Tuesday night is a reversal of its action in August, when members voted to bring the proposal for a new middle school for 7th- and 8th-graders before the district’s residents.

At that same August meeting, the board also approved putting on the warrant another article for up to $12 million for renovations to the high school.

Both articles were billed by supporters as a way to address the range of facilities concerns threatening the high school’s accreditation status with the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.

In 2007, a public high school commission of the group voted to downgrade the high school’s accreditation status from “warning” to “probation.”

In an April 2007 letter, the commission called the 46-year-old middle/high school building on Route 32 “crowded, over-extended and tired” and cited facility problems among numerous reasons for commission members’ decision.

Before the board voted to get rid of the middle school warrant article Tuesday, former facilities chairman Karen A. Cota of Roxbury — who had been a strong advocate of building a new middle school but recently resigned from the school board — spoke against delaying action.

“The economy has hit all of us pretty hard,” she said, but added, “We cannot wait until it gets better to fix our school. Renovations are only getting more expensive.”

Still, multiple school board members spoke in favor of getting rid of the article.

“You can’t do this. Not today, not in this economy,” said Troy school board representative Douglas Lyman, who said it would be difficult for the board to explain to voters both middle school and high school building proposals, along with the need for other projects in the district.

Swanzey representative Jane Fortson said she was similarly on board with removing the article. But she made an unsuccessful attempt to table the issue because she said she wanted to hear more of a rationale for nixing the plan. And, she said, the board should be discussing options for both the potential new middle school and current middle/high school building at once.

“We considered them as a package. But we separated that package,” she said. The $12 million in facility improvements still on the warrant was originally pegged for renovations on the building if it only housed grades 9-12, she said. However, fixing overcrowding if the school continues to hold all five grades would be a bigger project.

The $12 million slated to appear on March’s warrant is less than architects’ $28.7 million cost estimates for renovating the middle/high school to house grades 9-12. Renovating the building for grades 7-12, according to the firm, would cost $40.1 million.

Troy representative Susan Oerman said she agreed with Fortson.

“You’re talking about a lot of money. It’s going to affect a lot of people and I would like to have the opportunity to look at it as a whole,” said Oerman, adding that she needed more information before moving forward.

But board member James I. Carnie of Richmond said, “I think in this case we need to do this, and take it one step at a time.”

Smith said the facilities committee still needs to discuss future of the $12 million warrant article — whether, for example, that figure should be increased or the same amount of proposed money stretched.

Meanwhile, with the new building proposal off the table, the school board has also yet to come to consensus about a long-range plan for the middle school — another reason Fortson said she disagreed with turning down the middle school proposal Tuesday night.

After the school board’s vote, middle school Principal Linda Sutton said she was disappointed about the new middle school plan being axed from the warrant.

“I thought that it would be better to table it,” said Sutton. She has said splitting the middle school and high school would benefit her students by giving them more room and removing some of the social pressures that come from sharing the space with much older teenagers.

And even if voter approval of the new middle school proposal was a longshot, she explained, bringing it before residents on the warrant would have helped educate them about the need and cost of such an undertaking.

Keeping 7th- through 12th-grades in the same building, she said, “will affect (student) achievement in the long run.”

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December 1, 2008
Keene Sentinel

TROY — Rising bills for both the Monadnock Regional School District and Cheshire County hiked Troy’s tax rate this year.

The N.H. Department of Revenue Administration has set Troy’s tax rate at $29.03 per $1,000 of assessed value. This rate is $4.56, or 18.6 percent higher, than last year’s rate of $24.47.

Troy’s ratio of assessment is 76.1 percent, according to town Administrative Assistant Cynthia N. Satas. This means that a property with a market value of $200,000 would likely be assessed at $152,200 and owners would pay taxes on this amount.

The total amount Troy taxpayers will pay to the Monadnock Regional School District will rise about 31.8 percent, from $1,192,094 to $1,570,874.

Earl Wammack, the district’s business manager, has been unavailable for comment on the increases affecting the district’s seven towns, Fitzwilliam, Gilsum, Richmond, Roxbury, Sullivan, Swanzey and Troy. But the high percentage increase reflects the fact that every town in the district — with the exception of Roxbury — saw a dip last year in their local education taxes.

Katherine E.L. Chambers, the business manager at the time, attributed this, in part, to hundreds of thousands of dollars in unanticipated revenue, which helped to offset taxes.

While Monadnock district voters shot down the proposed 2008-09 operating budget in March, the default budget of $31,115,261 was $179,436 more than the default budget for the year before. Voters also approved several warrant articles — including a contract for support staff workers — and later approved a new teachers contract at a September special meeting.

Meanwhile, the total amount Troy taxpayers will contribute to Cheshire County rose 48.1 percent, from $242,465 to $359,198.

In October, Cheshire County Finance Director Sheryl A. Trombly told The Sentinel the county needed to raise about $5 million more in taxes this year.

Much of the increase, she said, is for the county’s new jail, which is being built off Route 101 in Keene.

Trombly told The Sentinel that this year Troy also saw an increase in its equalized valuation, which is a measure of the fair market value of commercial and residential properties.

The result?

Troy taxpayers are paying a bigger piece of an increasingly expensive county pie.

Troy also saw a more modest rise in the town portion of its tax rate.

This, board of selectmen Chairman Aaron K. Patt said, was due, in part, to two factors — bond payments for water and sewer upgrades and a $75,000 road repavement project voters approved at March’s town meeting.

Of every $29.03 Troy collects in taxes:

- $9.22 will go to the town government, up 46 cents, or about 5.3 percent, from last year’s rate of $8.76. This tax will raise $1,033,131.

- $14.02 will go to the Monadnock Regional School District, up $3.33, or 31.2 percent, from last year’s rate of $10.69. This tax will raise $1,570,874.

- $2.58 will go to the state education tax, down 27 cents, or about 9.5 percent, from last year’s rate of $2.85. This tax will raise $273,680.

- $3.21 will go to support Cheshire County government, up $1.04, or about 48 percent from last year’s rate of $2.17. This tax — which will raise $359,198 — will support county facilities such as Maplewood Nursing Home and the Cheshire County jail.

Troy tax bills were sent out Nov. 7 and are due Dec. 9, according to Satas.

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