Wealth & Money Quote by Craig Benson

Benson is doing a familiar political magic trick: he frames a tax policy fight as a fairness problem, not a revenue grab. By repeating “in-state” and “out-of-state,” he turns an abstract instrument - the Business Profits Tax - into a simple moral ledger. Locals are paying; outsiders should, too. The sentence is engineered to make opposition sound like favoritism toward people who don’t live here.

The specific intent is to justify expanding New Hampshire’s tax reach (or tightening enforcement) in a way that plays well with voters who prize the state’s low-tax identity. He’s not pitching “new taxes”; he’s pitching symmetry. That’s why he leans on the mechanics: the tax is “highly dependent” on sales and profits “generated in-state.” Translation: if the economic activity happens here, the tax claim is legitimate, regardless of where a company’s headquarters or mailing address sits.

The subtext is competitive anxiety. When a state taxes local firms but can’t effectively touch remote sellers or multistate corporations, it creates a quiet subsidy for scale and mobility. Benson is speaking for in-state businesses who feel like they’re financing the commons while out-of-state competitors harvest the market.

Context matters: this is the pre-Amazon-normal era of interstate commerce fights, when states were already bumping into the limits of taxing companies without a strong physical presence. Benson’s phrasing anticipates the coming battles over nexus, apportionment formulas, and the political backlash to “exporting” taxes. He’s staking out a populist-sounding position that is, at bottom, a technical argument about who gets to count the sale.