That SOB William Loeb is Back.

Beware, big vote on April 15th to make the Pledge part of the NH Constitution.

You can hear the chains a rattlin’.

The ghost of tax pledge creator William Loeb will be wandering the halls of the NH State House on Wednesday April 15^th for a hearing at 3p on a Constitutional Amendment designed to make it impossible for NH to have any semblance of fair tax policy. The amendment makes William Loeb’s anti-tax pledge the law of the land for NH. It would be a huge mistake to tie the hands of all future leaders in this way, and that’s probably why the Jason Osborne Free State crowd supports the amendment.

I urge you to attend the hearing or go online to register your opposition. You can do so by clicking here. After entering your identifying information, the committee you want is House Ways and Means. The “bill” is CACR 12. You can then upload testimony or type it in. You want to OPPOSE CACR 12. Do it today.

CACR 12 is co-sponsored by every Republican in the NH Senate. A similar amendment that originated in the House failed a few weeks ago but Speaker Packard is awarding the Free Staters a do-over. The Senate’s amendment resolution changes the NH Constitution to require a super-majority of two-thirds in the House and Senate to pass any “new tax on personal income, earned or unearned, sales or use, capital gains, inheritance, estate, or death, or any similar broad-based tax scheme….” I am surprised the amendment doesn’t also require the governor to sign any new tax bill twice, once while standing at the top of the capitol dome.

If we are being honest, the statewide education property tax (“SWEPT”) is a “broad-based tax scheme.” Would this amendment outlaw the SWEPT? Without SWEPT, you can bet that virtually the entire burden of funding public education will fall back on local property taxpayers as it did before the Claremont case was decided. If you don’t live in New Castle or Moultonborough, this will make a big problem even worse for you. Also don’t be surprised if some business doesn’t claim that it passes on its tax costs to consumers broadly and that business taxes should be subject to the two thirds voting requirement.

William Loeb invented NH’s Tax Pledge.

Let’s remember the origin of NH’s tax pledge before we talk about enshrining it in the NH Constitution. William Loeb invented the Pledge. Loeb was the publisher of the Manchester Union Leader from 1946 until his death in 1981. But he was so much, much more. Adjectives like misogynist, philanderer, racist, alleged child abuser, pre-Trump MAGA all appear to fit. Loeb failed as a publisher in Vermont and Massachusetts before landing at the Union Leader. Nackey Loeb, William’s third wife, was an heir to the Scripps newspaper publishing empire. Nackey became the publisher of the Union Leader after Loeb’s death. The Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications in Manchester is named for her.

William and Nackey Loeb were favorites of the Mississippi White Citizens Council that organized economic boycotts to terrorize businesses even thinking about desegregation. Historian Clive Webb called the Council the “Klu Klux Klan without the hoods and masks.” The White Citizens Council honored the Loebs in life and posthumously. Former Concord Monitor reporter, and now Northeastern University professor, Meg Heckman wrote about the Loebs’ racist connections in her book, Political Godmother: Nacky Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper that Shook the Republican Party (Potomac Books, 2020).

Among other despicable things, William Loeb helped organize a reverse freedom ride to New Hampshire. This involved buying bus tickets for unsuspecting poor folk to travel to Concord from Mississippi. They were promised better housing and jobs. The promises were lies. North Country businessman and realtor Peter Powell remembers the bus that was sent to the statehouse in Concord while his father Wesley Powell was governor. William Loeb helped organize the ride. For more on the despicable reverse freedom rides, go here. Governors Abbott of Texas and DeSantis of Florida arranged modern day reverse freedom rides for migrant workers in their state. Just as cruel, but less original.

This paragraph written by Loeb as part of a front page editorial in the Union Leader was emblematic of his approach to race relations. He was writing about a murder in Roxbury, MA:

…typical of the savagery of some of the blacks in this country. They hate whites…They have no more feeling…than jungle savages from the darkest parts of Africa. It is because this newspaper wants to avoid this kind of thing happening in New Hampshire that we are hopeful that the Black population will never increase from its present minimal level.

The Last Bake Sale at 52. He wrote many more editorials just like it.

Loeb invented NH’s tax pledge in 1972 as part of the Republican gubernatorial primary between incumbent Walter Peterson and two time loser Mel Thomson. Thomson won the primary and fought off his Democratic challenger by two points. He won by the same margin in the following election in 1974.

Lots of Dems take the wrong lesson from Peterson’s primary loss to Thomson. They think Peterson lost because he actively considered an income tax to help NH out of dire financial straits. It is more likely that incessant angry, negative editorials and questionable news stories on the front page of the state’s only statewide paper did the trick.

Here’s a graphic from the Institute for Tax and Economic Policy’s 7^th annual Who Pays? report. Passing the proposed amendment locks in the advantage of the top income earners in our state, likely forever.

ITEP Tax Inequality Index Ranking

According to ITEP’s Tax Inequality Index, New Hampshire has the 18th most regressive state and local tax system in the country.

State and Local Taxes as Share of Family Income

The top one percent of income earners in NH (with incomes over $721,000) pay state and local taxes at less than one third the rate of NH’s poorest working families (with incomes less than $35,000/year).

Our Response to the State’s Defense of Justices Who Appear Biased

As I wrote last week, we moved to recuse four of the five sitting NH justices because they either previously represented the state in school funding cases that the state now seeks to reverse or they appear to have been appointed with the thought of reversing Claremont. The state’s response was to say generally judges are allowed to have prior opinions and there’s nothing unique about the Rand appeal.

I just want to share one paragraph from our Reply motion written by my colleague Alice Tsier:

The State Is Responsible for the Unique Circumstances It Now Seeks to Minimize.

The impartiality concerns here are the direct result of choices made by the State. From the public’s perspective, the only meaningful change that justified the State’s dramatic reversal in litigation strategy was the composition of the Court — specifically, the confirmations of Associate Justice Gould (September 17, 2025) and Associate Justice Will (February 11, 2026). The State filed its Notice of Appeal seeking to overturn Claremont on February 24, 2026 — thirteen days after Justice Will’s confirmation. The timing of this notice would lead the public to make the obvious inference that the new makeup of the Court drove the State’s decision to seek to overturn Claremont and its progeny

More to follow.