Election season features a lot of blowhards who emit little other than hot air. (Insert your own joke here about my column.) Let me shorten some of it for you and suggest a few constructive things.

Each economic report that comes out will be an opportunity for those in power to explain how their ideas, although crafted for the long term, are even now helping to create jobs. Sweetness and light are being spread to the masses in desperate need, they will say, not just because our policies took effect, but because our very presence is a signal to create jobs.

Those out of power will say the opposite: the economic destruction caused by the incumbents is suppressing job creation, and it is only going to get worse.

No matter your political philosophy, you can take this as a criticism of the other guys: In New Hampshire we have the fortune of living under the authority of a left-leaning Democratic governor and a right-leaning Republican Legislature. Clearly the success we enjoy is because one of those two is doing the right thing and countering the bad bits of the other.

Political windbags aside, all of this focus on jobs and the economy is a good thing. Whether you want to expand social programs to cover more people or cut the programs' funding and make them more efficient, a growing economy in New Hampshire benefits everyone.

The budget difficulties of the last few years were a direct result of the collapse of state revenue. Revenues go up when there are more jobs and down when there are fewer. Fewer jobs mean more people on state services. Regardless of your level of support for a social safety net, everyone's ultimate goal is — or should be — to have more people working. Almost no one prefers being a ward of the state to having an actual job.

So the task for those men and women who would be governor or legislators is to identify changes they can make to bring more and better jobs to the state.

We need to take this opportunity to redirect the conversation from what the politicians don't like to what they propose doing. As voters, we can thank candidates for telling us what was right and wrong with the last session, but ask that they please tell us what they would do instead.

Every economic development professional will tell you that the first thing people ask about when considering locating to New Hampshire is taxes. New Hampshire is very attractive to most business on some taxes and less attractive on others. In general, the lack of a sales or income tax is a huge benefit and a big signal to most businesses to move here. However, coupled with that is our Achilles heel: direct business taxation.

New Hampshire's business tax is a business profits tax and a linked business enterprise tax. The combined tax makes up about one quarter of the state's general-and-education-fund revenue (the state operating budget) and is more than twice as large as the next-largest tax.

The difficulty is that the rate over the last two decades has climbed to 8.5 percent (the creditable BET is 0.75 percent of a different base). According to the Tax Foundation, an arbiter of these things used by people on both ends of the spectrum, that gives us the highest business taxes in the country. Our competitiveness in the foundation's rankings improves in other areas, but on that subcategory, very important to sectors like manufacturing for site location, we are at a serious disadvantage.

The last Legislature needed to balance the budget, which was in a very bad spot. Deficit estimates ranged from $600 million to $900 million. Cutting spending first was important to put us in a position to be able to reduce taxes as an incentive to businesses to create jobs here.

I think legislators made a mistake cutting tobacco taxes first. Although tobacco taxes rose in four of the previous five years and are extraordinarily regressive (poor people smoke in much greater proportion that wealthy people), lowering them creates little economic incentive. The first tax we should lower is the business profits tax.

Taxes are fundamentally a price on economic activity. Lowering the price of specific activities creates more of that activity. The incentives are stronger in some areas than in others, but business taxation is among the most responsive areas.

A candidate should tell us what he or she wants to do about the budget, and also why. As voters, we should demand that. Let's get our candidates thinking and talking about job creation, not just political wind.

Charles M. Arlinghaus is president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank in Concord. His email address is arlinghaus@jbartlett.org.