Congratulation, New Hampshire taxpayers. You’re getting the best deal in the nation!
That’s according to a new study released by WalletHub ranking states on whether their taxpayers “get the most or least bang for their buck.” Their analysts break down government services into five categories: education, health, safety, economy, and infrastructure & pollution.
Their findings: Nowhere else in the country will taxpayers get more for their money than the Granite State. They also found the percentage of the state’s residents in poverty is the lowest in the nation.
“New Hampshire has the best taxpayer ROI because its residents pay the second-lowest taxes per capita, and benefit from quality government services,” WalletHub analyst Jill Gonzalez told NHJournal. “More specifically, the state’s school system is among the best, and there is a low share of idle youth — just 8 percent.”
“Other states have a lot to learn from New Hampshire, which also has a low poverty rate, and ranks high in terms of water and air quality,” Gonzalez added.
According to Andrew Cline, executive director of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, New Hampshire’s ranking should not come as a surprise.
“In most of the country, politicians tell the people to be more generous. In New Hampshire, the people tell politicians to be more thrifty,” Cline said, “old-fashioned Yankee frugality survives here, if nowhere else.”
Though New Hampshire may be where taxpayers get the most for their money, New England fared poorly overall. Maine ranked number 15, Rhode Island 21, Massachusetts 38, Connecticut 40 and Vermont 41.
New Hampshire is the only Northeast state ranked in the top 10.
“New Hampshire has always run a tight ship, fiscally. That is both a byproduct of having lower taxes than our neighbors — which forces us to run more efficiently — as well as our constitutional system of checks and balances, which keeps agencies from veering too far off course,” said Greg Moore of Americans for Prosperity New Hampshire.
“Because we don’t have a sales or income tax, we just don’t have mechanisms to pull in large amounts of money at the state level. That means that state agencies have been working to make dimes out of nickels for years. Since department heads know that you can’t get blood out of a stone, they know they have to do more with less.”
Despite the fact that other New Englanders might not be getting the most for their money, the study concluded that New England is still a good place to live.
Massachusetts has the best school system in the country and Vermont has the best hospitals, according to the study. Additionally, the top three safest states in the union are Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the people of Hawaii ranked the worst when it came to getting a return on their investment. The study found that the Aloha State had the worst roads and bridges as well as the nation’s worst hospital system.
The study concluded that, on average, taxpayers in red states received more of a return on their investment than taxpayers in blue states. Interestingly, New Hampshire was considered a blue state in this study.
Many Granite Staters, particularly supporters of Gov. Chris Sununu, might disagree.
