Issue Position: Jobs

Issue Position

New Hampshire is losing their young professional base to Massachusetts and other areas of the country like; North Carolina and South Carolina, where many businesses moved or have started, due to the business friendly atmosphere of those states. I know it has been very difficult to find a job in this economic environment. I had been searching for a job since I was laid off from my recruiting position in January 2009, I have been able to find limited part time contract recruiting positions since taking office in 2010, but I still feel one of the most important issues is increasing jobs by bringing good high tech businesses to New Hampshire. Currently small businesses are the largest employers in the state of New Hampshire and we need to do everything we can to encourage entrepreneurs to start and keep their businesses in New Hampshire. In addition, we must attract large and small businesses to New Hampshire with a more business friendly tax environment.

The 2011 and 2012 Legislature made tremendous inroads in balancing our budget and starting to make New Hampshire "Open for Business" again, but we have quite a bit more work to do. We made some distinctive changes in how we budget for the state. Instead of looking at what we wanted to spend and then increasing revenue by increasing fees and taxes to support the spending as they did in the two prior legislatures, we actually estimated what revenue the state had coming in and worked our budget around the estimated revenue, much like our own families do. If you remember, the state budget had steadily increased over the last 10 years. Of utmost concern, were the steep increases the budgets had taken increasing 17% during the 2007-2009 and increasing between 6- 10% of the 2009-2011 budget.

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