Of all the legislative maneuvers perfected by Republicans in Concord, the most accomplished is one we like to call the Reverse Robin Hood, in which financial benefits are lavished on the wealthy at the expense of everybody else.

For example, in recent years they have enacted a series of business tax cuts while phasing out the interest and dividends tax, 90% of which, according to an analysis by the Fiscal Policy Institute, was paid by the top 20% of earners. In the 2024 fiscal year, the last for which it was collected, the tax brought in on the order of $180 million, roughly comparable to the annual budget of the Department of Corrections or the Division for Children, Youth and Families.

Having starved the government beast, Concord is now issuing urgent warnings that — surprise, surprise — state revenues are lagging and painful budget decisions are in the offing. (You are invited to guess along with us for whom those cuts will be most painful.)

Meanwhile, Republicans in the Legislature are pushing to remove the income cap on their school voucher program, the potential effect of which could be to divert another $100 million annually from public education funds on top of the $28 million already sucked up by the so-called Education Freedom Accounts.

The program, which serves about 5,300 students this year, allows any family under the current income thresholds to collect the state’s per pupil adequacy grant, which generally runs between $4,000 and $8,000 per student, and apply it to private school tuition or homeschooling expenses.

As we have noted several times previously, the program operates without accountability or transparency requirements, so no one actually knows whether the money is being spent for the purposes allowed. The organization that runs the program refuses to make available the data needed for a mandated legislative performance audit.

The family income limits for participation in the program were last raised in 2023, up to 350% of the poverty limit or $112,525 for a family of four this year. The current proposal would eliminate the limits entirely, so even the wealthiest families — those that once paid the interest and dividends tax, for example — would qualify for the state subsidy.

At a recent legislative hearing on the proposal, a Manchester mother of three who sends two of her children to a private Catholic school lamented that her and her husband’s income puts them over the current income threshold for a family of five — $132,775 — by less than $10,000. Paying the private school expenses is not easy, she testified, although they make it work. “Every single month, my husband and I are budgeting to (understand) where can we cut things, because the education is expensive.”

We are not entirely unsympathetic, but many middle class families over the years have chosen to sacrifice financially in order to access private education without expecting the state to subsidize their decision.

Not to mention that many lower-income families face much tougher budgeting decisions every month. In fact, at its inception, the EFA program was promoted as a way for low-income families to escape under-performing schools, although it was never quite clear how a $5,000 annual grant in state money was going to allow them to afford private school tuitions of $20,000 or more. But as the program has grown, it looks more and more like a giveaway to families with the means to bear the costs on their own.

According to an analysis by Reaching Higher NH, a public education advocacy group, 75% of participants were not enrolled in public schools when they joined the program, so those costs were being borne by their families up until then.

It’s also interesting to note that nine of the top 10 recipients of public tax dollars in New Hampshire are religious schools. Thus is the public forced to underwrite religious views with which they may disagree, in direct contradiction to the state constitution, which provides that “no person shall ever be compelled to pay towards the support of schools of any sect or denomination.”

A collaborative reporting effort by ProPublica and The New Yorker magazine recently detailed how a years-long effort by politicians and religious leaders to prop up declining enrollments in Catholic schools in Ohio culminated in a state program of universal vouchers that costs taxpayers nearly a billion dollars a year, the vast majority of which goes to Catholic and evangelical schools.

New Hampshire appears to be on the verge of emulating this experience, enriching the rich and soaking everybody else, while continuing to shun its constitutional obligation to fund an adequate education for all public school students.