Trump's New Hampshire
With the inauguration of our 45th president, many Americans are wondering what the presidency of a billionaire businessman will mean for the country. Donald Trump’s campaign has made some ambitious promises, but many are still wondering what he means by “making America great again,” and how his policies will affect New Hampshire, and especially Derryfield’s home city of Manchester.
One of the things Trump emphasized over the course of his presidential bid is the importance of bringing manufacturing jobs back to America. As he says, part of making America great again is “making things in America again.” He has stated again and again how he plans to fix NAFTA, “the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere”, and renegotiate it to get higher duties and a dramatically lower tax on American corporations, encouraging companies to move their manufacturing back to the States. In a campaign speech in Manchester, he cited the closing of the Osram Sylvania lighting plant in 2014 and made it clear he intended to make “factories come rushing back onto our shores” in his first one hundred days as president. This points to the possibility of the Queen City returning to its roots as the factory capital of New Hampshire. However, in the past few years, we’ve seen Manchester move towards a more technology-driven economy, with the founding of several software companies such as Dyn and Silvertech in the city. According to the city’s official website, more than eighty percent of the workforce is employed in non-manufacturing jobs. And with a 2.8% unemployment rate, the lowest in the nation according to the New Hampshire Employment Security, Economic & Labor Market Information Bureau, New Hampshire employers are struggling to find workers for the manufacturing jobs that exist already, which could mean that bringing plants like Osram Sylvania back to the Granite State might be neither necessary nor beneficial to our economy.
Trump’s economic initiative also includes what he calls “the penny plan,” in which the federal budget would be decreased by one percent each year. However, at the same time, he also wants to fix the country’s “crumbling” infrastructure, which the American Society of Civil Engineers says will cost $3.6 trillion to patch up by the year 2020. Trump hopes to “transform America’s crumbling infrastructure into a golden opportunity for accelerated economic growth,” and plans to do this by taking funds out of United Nations environmental initiatives and putting them into rebuilding American infrastructure, as well as incentivizing construction companies to do the work with huge tax credits. New Hampshire, which has consistently earned “C”s on the ASCE’s Report Card for Infrastructure, has a need for better dams, roads, and mass transit. In a phone interview, Manchester’s Mayor, Ted Gatsas, who put a bond together to spend three million dollars annually on the city’s roads and bridges, said he believes Trump’s plan will “create more jobs and improve the infrastructure in the city.”
Trump has also mentioned in several speeches and presidential debates that part of his incentive for building a wall on America’s border with Mexico is to “keep out the drugs and heroin poisoning our youth.” With rates of drug overdoses increasing nearly two-and-a-half-fold in the last five years in New Hampshire, there’s no doubt that the opioid crisis is one of our state’s most pressing issues. In addition to building the wall and tripling the number of border patrol officers to stop the flow of opioids across the border, Trump promotes the increase of minimum sentences for drug offenders. Bernadette Gleeson, the Director of Recovery Development at Hope for New Hampshire Recovery, a Manchester-based non-profit working to fix New Hampshire’s addiction crisis, says that might not be the best way to approach the problem. The organization does not endorse the criminalization of addiction, which it characterizes as a medical disease. Gleeson thinks of the importance of treatment over punishment in terms of heart disease: “If a person with heart disease continues to eat cheeseburgers every day, and they have a heart attack, you wouldn’t deny them the treatment they need.” She hopes that Trump will allow the recovery community to educate him on the importance of treatment for anyone battling addiction, so that we can “sustain long-term recovery” for all.
Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education, is a strong advocate for school-choice, in which entrepreneurs will privatize the public education system. She was one of the architects of the Detroit charter school system, which within a few years had the lowest reading and mathematics test scores in the state, according to a Washington Post article on DeVos’s school record. Senator Maggie Hassan has criticized her for saying that states should be allowed to choose whether or not they would enforce the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and also stated after meeting with DeVos that she has “concerns about her support for diverting taxpayer dollars to private schools without accountability requirements, which would weaken investments in public education.” DeVos’ promotion of school vouchers in states like Louisiana has lowered those students’ test scores by eight to sixteen percentile points, so in a state with the fourth best public school system and with the second highest average test scores in the nation, there are questions about whether more school choice could be the best option for New Hampshire.
Donald Trump has laid forward plans for policies that could affect New Hampshire’s economic climate, infrastructure, addiction recovery system, and public education, but only time will tell as to what extent our new Commander in Chief will change in our home state.
Livi Burdette is a Junior at DS and the Human Interests Editor for Lamplighter.