In his State of the State address last week, Gov. Chris Sununu proclaimed 2019 “a banner year for the New Hampshire economy,” while President Donald Trump declared in the State of the Union speech that the American economy is the “best it’s ever been,” and that the country is experiencing a “blue-collar boom.”
Governor Sununu, President Trump — meet Coos County, the remote area of New Hampshire that stretches from the White Mountains to the Canadian border. The story there is much different, as can be gleaned from a new study by the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute.
The think tank used Census data averaged over the five-year period from 2014 through 2018 to gain insight into the economic conditions of New Hampshire residents. It tells the tale of two states.
Median household income in Coos County during the period was $45,700, lowest in the state, compared with $90,400 for Rockingham County, the highest. The estimated poverty rate in Coos was 12.8%, compared with Rockingham’s 4.7%. Nearly 1 in 5 children were living in poverty in Coos County, compared with 1 in 15 in Rockingham. In general, the institute said, median household income decreased and poverty increased the farther away a county is located from the more urban, southeastern portions of New Hampshire that lie closer to the Boston metropolitan area.
The Concord Monitor also reported Sunday that by the gold-standard measure, New Hampshire had the fourth-lowest amount of income inequality in the nation in 2010. But by 2018, it had risen to 14th lowest — a sharp increase in inequality.
The Washington Post recently put a human face on this disparity when a reporter visited Berlin, Coos County’s only city, which now has a population of about 10,000, but in 1960 was home to nearly 18,000 people.
The Post found that despite an unemployment rate of 3%, rising property values as newcomers arrive and plenty of help-wanted ads in the newspaper, Berlin remains devastated after the collapse of its paper mills.
Residents told The Post that only low-wage jobs without benefits are available even as the cost of health care surges. With its vacant store fronts and fire-damaged properties, the once-thriving downtown looks, according to the city’s mayor, “like a bomb was dropped in the middle of it.” An exodus of young people continues, and the graduating class at Berlin High School, which numbered 400 in 1973, mustered only 98 last year. Employment in the paper industry, which at its peak afforded its 4,000 workers a stable middle-class life, is now down to a few dozen workers.
In place of the mills, the city has a couple of prisons, one state and one federal. “A prison is probably not your first choice of a place to work, or even your second or third,” said Eddy Deblois, who worked in a paper mill for 40 years. “But we’re very happy to have them. Without those jobs, what would this area look like?”
The story of Berlin and Coos County is replicated across the country. Between 2016 and 2018, poverty fell nationally but ticked upward in about a third of the nation’s counties, most rural and sparsely populated, The Post reported. A Brookings Institution study concluded that 44% of jobs nationally pay so little that workers live in a constant state of insecurity, from paycheck to paycheck, dreading illness or a car breakdown that would wreck their precarious financial situation.
Yes, the times are good for many people, but a booming economy that leaves so many people and places behind does not make for a prosperous nation or the social cohesion required to address the many important issues the country faces. We look forward to hearing Sununu’s and Trump’s plans to make the economy work for everybody.