The Manchester (NH) Union Leader, our state’s comically Republican newspaper, is on a mission. Fix the economy. Fix it while there’s still time before the Granite state becomes a New England economic afterthought. Bring back the heady days of the 1980s and 1990s when we were a leader among our neighbors.

That’s the clarion call, urged in a front-page editorial by the newspaper’s publisher in support of an interesting Republican/Libertarian column written by Charles Arlinghaus, who is identified as associated with a free-market (surprise!) think tank in Concord. His column contrasts the days of yore when the state’s economy surged to the last 10 years when it has lagged. Let’s see now — does that reflect economic trends at any other state in the Union? Well, generally speaking, about 38 of them, nearly all outside the South and Southwest.

The column by a no doubt well-intentioned and intelligent man — and the publisher’s declaration — pinpoint New Hampshire’s high business tax rate as the prime mover in the state’s “disintegrating” business economy. And the solution, they write in phrases that could easily have come from any chamber of commerce manifesto — is to lower the tax rates so more businesses will come here, more jobs will be created, high energy costs will evaporate and everyone will be happier. It’s a win-=win proposition if you don’t involve the people of New Hampshire who aren’t well-off Republicans (or like-minded) like the newspaper publisher and his columnist.

How will cutting the tax rates for business help maintain the expanded Medicaid program that provides at least some health coverage for 50,000 or so Granite Staters? How will be pay for getting our roads and bridges — indeed, our entire infrastructure — repaired and maintained? And where’s the evidence that the number of these new high-paying jobs to be created will amount to anything meaningful for the unemployed, minimally employed or elderly population? Wouldn’t it be more helpful to talk about minimum wage increases to help New Hampshire’s most needy get by a little easier?

Actually, no, not in the plans espoused in the Union Leader. Theirs is a simple Republican agenda that hasn’t worked in the past: help those so-called “job creators” make work for others. There’s been precious little work as a result of these efforts, and no one in the white, well-off, entitled community of Republicans and their sympathizers has shown that these job creators do anything other than improve their own situations.

Wouldn’t it be nice to read a front-page editorial that called for anything — anything — that would actually help the profound majority of Granite Staters and not just the privileged few? It won’t be coming anytime soon from the editorial pages of the Union Leader.