Where I live, you’ll often hear about the “New Hampshire Advantage,” which argues that the state’s economic growth is a consequence of its lack of income and sales taxes. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy not paying extra at the store. But I also know that the sharp difference in my rent in Manchester, when I arrived, and what I was paying in Baltimore was caused by the property taxes here. When I added my Baltimore and Maryland income taxes to my rent there, it equaled what I was paying here. Voila! You’ll pay one way or another. The question is where and who bears the brunt of the cost.
The real New Hampshire Advantage is its proximity to Greater Boston and the economic powerhouses connected with the Harvard Business School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nearly half of the New Hampshire population that has a job commutes south each morning to workplaces across the border. The better-paying jobs, in fact. It’s largely a one-way flow, too. If lower taxes were a real stimulus, the entire Granite State would be booming, which is hardly the case in our economically depressed North Country or the Connecticut River’s Upper Valley. Just take a look around Berlin or Claremont and all their devastation.
Still, public services cost money, and the dynamic is that anything requiring labor is going to cost increasingly more. In economics, it’s called the Baumol effect, after a study of performing arts institutions.
New Hampshire is no exception. The real question is just where the additional state revenue will come from, and that always returns us to ill-fated proposals for an income or sales tax.
But complicating any income-tax discussion in the Granite State is the matter of reciprocity: normally, you pay a state income tax where you work rather than where you live. And normally, there are roughly equal numbers of workers commuting between two states to balance the equation. But that’s not the case in New Hampshire. So an income tax to lower property tax bills, as it’s usually framed, would mean either that the cross-border commuters would have to pay twice, both at the workplace and then at home, or that those folks who both live and work within the Granite State would have to subsidize the break given to the others.
It’s a genuine conundrum. Advantage? Beggar-thy-neighbor works only so long.
Jnana's Red Barn 
I’ve always been willing to pay my way. Our privileges in our town, state, country aren’t free. The lack of political will to work things out complicates issues that aren’t really that complicated. I do hope, however, in any policy or proposal that we not forget those in need. Regressive taxes seem to pop up too easily in such discussions.