To Serve District 03 - Cheshire County, NH

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Issues and Positions


Spending, and Fiscal Responsibility

State government spending has increased significantly faster than the rate of inflation over the last two years. While working families are struggling to make ends meat with rising housing, food, and energy costs, the government is spending at an even faster rate. That spending is causing a state budget crisis at the worst possible time.

Increased spending must be funded somehow. The state can either borrow more or increase taxes to cover the increase in spending. In the last two years, it has done both, resulting in higher taxes now and the promise of higher taxes later. All this has happened at a time when families have less to spare.

I support returning to a more fiscally responsible budget. If our families have to be frugal, so should our government. If elected, I will advocate reduced spending as much as is responsible and feasible. 

Taxes

We have enough taxes already.  I do not support adding new types of taxes, replacing existing taxes with different types of taxes (most notably, a sales, income, or other broad based tax), nor appreciably raising the rates of taxation for existing taxes.  I also do not support increasing government funding with additional borrowing.  In the previous section, I explain what I believe to be the best method for ensuring long-term funding of state services: frugal and responsible state spending.

Education

I want the best quality education that can be legitimately obtained for all children in New Hampshire. I believe the best quality education can be obtained at the most appropriate price by maximizing parental responsibility for educational decisions and funding. When education funding becomes a primarily political process, every other aspect of education becomes political. The result is our irreconcilable conflict between politics and a good quality education.

To increase quality and parental satisfaction in education, I propose making the following changes at the state level:

  • Significantly deregulate homeschooling to encourage parents who are able to personally educate their children to do so.
  • Return the state to a system of local education funding by legislatively correcting the Claremont series of decisions and returning New Hampshire to its former town-level education funding system.
  • Amend state law to provide towns the opportunity to explore alternative education funding and regulating systems including vouchers, tax credits, charter schools, partial or fully tuition-based public schools, or even complete privatization of existing public education systems.  
These changes would open the door to significantly reducing the fiscal burden on New Hampshire's public education system by encouraging parents to take more fiscal responsibility for their own children through homeschooling, private schooling, or direct funding of public schooling.  It would also allow for competition between systems and within systems which has proven effective at increasing quality and decreasing cost in virtually every other industry.

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© Copyright 2008 Varrin Swearingen for House of Representatives
Fiscal Agent Varrin Swearingen, Keene, NH 03431
This page was last modified on: December 28, 2013.