05/08/2026
⚠️ Stop scrolling. Sit down. This one is going to make you angry — and it should.
Every spring, property tax bills arrive in New Hampshire mailboxes and the same scene plays out in school gymnasiums and town halls across the state. Residents demand answers from school board members, selectmen, and budget committee volunteers. Why does it keep going up? Why can't you do more with less?
Here's what almost nobody in that room knows: those local officials didn't cause this. The people who caused it are in Concord — and they've spent two decades making sure your anger lands on your neighbors instead of on them.
Our latest piece for The Quiet Cost traces the full architecture of what we're calling The Perfect Crime. It starts with a single number that should be on the front page of every newspaper in New Hampshire: over the past decade, the state has shifted an estimated $3 billion in costs onto local municipalities, school districts, and counties. And here's the conclusion from the county treasurer who documented it — without that downshift, your property tax levy today would actually be lower than it was ten years ago. Every single dollar of property tax increase over the past decade is attributable to the state stopping its payments — not to local overspending.
We follow that money all the way through: the gutting of education aid, the $92 million shortfall in federal special education funding, the school voucher program that now costs $51 million a year while 96.7 percent of recipients were already in private school, the childcare funding tabled over a DEI objection that a federal court had already ruled was legally required under disability law, and the budget cap bills that failed when voters rejected them — so the Free State-GOP majority tried to impose them by law anyway.
And we name what this actually is: a plan published openly in 2001, executed patiently over twenty-five years, designed to make slashing government feel like your idea.
The crime is perfect only as long as the victims don't know who committed it.
Read it. Share it. Send it to the person in your life who is furious about their property tax bill but doesn't know why it keeps going up. That's exactly who this was written for.
Please click on the illustration below to read the entire backgrounder.
The Facebook intro uses the closing line of the piece as its emotional anchor — "The crime is perfect only as long as the victims don't know who committed it" — which should stop anyone who read the piece cold, and intrigue anyone who hasn't yet. Ready to move on to illustration prompts for this piece whenever you are.Sonnet 4.6
