The will of Maine people was upheld last month when the Maine House voted down a measure that would have resurrected the publicly rejected Taxpayer Bill of Rights, or TABOR, proposals. But is the new Augusta a place that learns from its mistakes?
Like the umpteenth sequel to the worst movie ever, it is now rumored that supporters of LD 849 may want to try yet another end-run around Maine voters, schools, the middle class and municipal officials. Like a moth to the flame, the new Augusta seems driven to future tax breaks taking credit now and leaving the real decisions to others later.
With no plan to pay for it, LD 849 would ratchet down the income tax to a flat 4 percent for all taxpayers — cutting state income tax revenue almost in half. In today’s dollars, the losses to our schools, roads, bridges and towns would total over $1.2 billion per biennium. By triggering losses to federally matched programs such as MaineCare, long-term costs could eventually top one-third or even half of the entire state budget.
As amended without a public hearing, LD 849 is not just irresponsible but also astoundingly unfair. It gives tax cuts of $21,638 to those making an average of $750,000 per year, and just $1 to the bottom 20 percent of income earners. Yet already, these lower-income households — seniors on fixed incomes, single parents working full time at minimum-wage jobs — pay the highest overall state and local tax rates.
While supporters say the bill uses only “surplus funds,” that claim is smoke and mirrors. In fact, the bill pays for only the first year of each new automatic rate cut. Yet the reduced rate continues — cutting future funding for schools, roads, bridges and the quality of life we value here in Maine. By drawing down our savings, it could also put the state’s credit rating in jeopardy.
This automatic “ratcheting effect” is the key feature of both TABORs past and TABOR present. It is like buying a car on a $100 scratch ticket with no plan or income to make more than the first monthly payment.
Even LD 849’s first and only payment on the tax cut comes at a huge cost. To pay, the bill would raid each end-of-year surplus normally used to insure against a rainy day to pay down the actuarial liabilities of the state pension system and keep the state’s credit rating strong.
Taxes are the commitment we make to one another, to a society that offers opportunities to all and shared human and physical infrastructure. They are our shared bond — our way to give back for systems of education, roads and public safety that help all of us survive and some of us prosper. Taxes are literally the income by which we pay our teachers, our plow drivers, our doctors and nurses, our police officers and firefighters. If we choose to cut that income in half, we should also be ready to say how we will reduce our spending.
Maine families and businesses don’t choose to cut their incomes in half without a plan to make ends meet. Nor do they buy what they cannot afford. Yet this is exactly the “buy now, pay later” mentality behind LD 849.
Sadly, LD 849 is just one example of the MO of this governor and Legislature.
As this Legislature nears its final adjournment, we are still trying to pay for the first $150 million worth of tax cuts in this budget. Most of these costs have simply been shifted to local taxpayers in the form of cuts to revenue sharing with towns. And two of every three dollars in tax cuts have gone to the wealthiest 20 percent of Mainers.
Next January, the unfunded costs of these giveaways will balloon to $400 million. Further kicking the can down the road, the governor’s newest tax proposal, related to pensions, will in just seven years mean a new unpaid bill of $210 million per biennium.
Rather than another partisan end-run around Maine voters, schools, the middle class and municipal officials, the Legislature should work together to fund K-12 education at 55 percent and Clean Elections — two measures Maine voters overwhelmingly approved.
Rep. Seth Berry of Bowdoinham is the lead House Democrat on the Legislature’s Taxation Committee.
Allowing people to keep their own money is not a “giveaway”. The “giveaway” part happens when the citizen sends his money to Augusta.
Berry thinks a “state surplus” is whatever you have left after they take the rest in taxes, and that the state owns all of it.
Do the Democrats want any tax cut besides “the next one?”
Phantom tax cuts in the left’s indefinite future are similar to their viro energy policy: They only condone production of energy that is impractical or impossible on an industrial scale.
Taxes are exactions taken from us by the raw force of government power, mostly for collectivist forced redistribution. Despite Berry’s Orwellian double speak, taxes are not a “commitment we make to one another” and “to a society”. They are not “our shared bond — our way to give back”.
These leftists pushing raw statism and collectivism to rule all of us by brute force in their denial of the rights and freedom of individuals don’t dare state in plain English what they are doing, hence the nonsensical stream of euphemisms trying to appeal to their collectivist premises without daring to state them explicitly.
Yea, you don’t need roads, or the police or educated workers to work for you or a military to keep us safe from invasion. You think you could make a single $ without any of those things? We don’t live in a bubble and we are only successful when we work together. In short your fundamental beliefs are bad for America and society in general.
Stop pretending that “roads” and a “military” are the equivalent of the redistributionist, live for the collective, punish “the rich” mentality dragging us all down to a lowest common denominator. The roads and the cost of the military, despite all the waste in those, is not the source of the outrageous taxation levels or the taxes and controls destroying the economy. The failing government government school monopoly, however, is one major source of the problem both in cost and adverse impact on education, typically accounting for about 70% of the discriminatory property tax and additional state spending.
Collectivist “working together” is not the source of prosperity. Individualism, which includes voluntary association with others and peaceful trade, was the foundation of this country, not “bad for America”.
Taxes on the rich are the lowest they have ever been…
That is not true, it’s a leftist slogan ignoring history, total taxes and the impact of regulations imposing costs and restricting what one can do to arrange one’s finances to partially avoid the highest marginal rates — and the alternatives in other states (or countries) — but what if it were true? So what? They are an unjustified burden that is highly unpopular, an existing tax rate is not a reason to raise it, and neither are past rates or burdens. None of it is a justification for collectivism
Thank you Rep. Berry for this very informative article and for being in the trenches trying to combat this kind of outrageous affront to all but the few elite of Maine. As you said so well:
Like the umpteenth sequel to the worst movie ever
Reducing the amount of money you seize from others for redistribution is not an “affront” to you. It does not belong to you. Smearing your victims for daring to fight back against your impositions as “the worst movie ever” is not an excuse for your power-seeking.
“seize from others”–isn’t that a contradiction to your whole argument? The pompous elite own this –“it belongs to them”??? Where do you think the money to feed your ego is coming from? The irony is this is how you and “your power-seeking” group react to the rest of us “daring to fight back” –in your arrogance did you not notice this reverse robin hood concept has been turned down more than once and as recently as a month ago?
Your post is incoherent and non-responsive. The taxes we do not pay are not a cost or expense to you. The money does not belong to you or to the state. You are taking it by the raw, physical coercive power of the state to redistribute to others it does not belong to. You are the power-seeker. You know very well how unpopular your taxes and your demands for more are. To agitate for more and to block reform of the existing outrageous levels of taxes driving people out of the state you have to resort to smears and misrepresentation.
yes “Massa”, we are all your slaves. To speak the truth would be “agitating” you and bring more punishment………
Rejection of your statist tax and control entitlement mentality does not make you a “slave”.
I’d have a little more patience with the tax-away crowd if they would just state their case honestly without manipulating the statistics so disingenuously. I don’t suppose they’d get so much support if they didn’t make it seem like those greedy rich folks are getting all the breaks at the expense of hard-working families.
So, I will state facts again. Under the LePage tax cuts, couples making under 37,000 will have no income tax liability. The under 37,000 crowd include the bottom 40% of the population. There just is no way to give them an income tax cut when they don’t pay any income tax.
The other points in this piece are just ridiculous. Of course, families don’t cut their income in half–but the state is not a family. The state does not earn money. It collects taxes–and when it has collected more than it needs for its budget, that extra money ought to go to tax relief.
The left is constantly railing against “the rich” with their ugly class warfare smearing and fanning envy and resentment against those who are the most successful regardless of how they achieved what they have. Then in the name of soaking the rich they impose their outrageous taxes on all of us, destroying the middle class.
The left has never been able to tolerate an independent middle class, they are power seekers who want everyone dependent on themselves through government authority. They also know that if they took everything that “the rich” have it would not pay for what they are doing, let alone the massive increases in taxes and controls they want. Their mentality can only drag all of us down to a lowest common denominator.
Your comment is ridiculous and borders on paranoia.
fwteagle’s smear is non-responsive. Taxing “the rich” and the supposed “1%” has become a mantra of the left. The progressive imposition of more and more taxes and controls over decades has driven people, investment and business out of the state, and there is obviously a revolt against it. “Middle class” does not mean working for the state.
A viable middle class means it is harder to put people in a them vs. us conflict.
Struggling to survive, while fearing the government authorities on which one depends, then also makes an internal “us vs. them” unnecessary. “The enemy” in the “us vs. them” mentality fostered through propaganda become other societies, countries or races to keep people afraid of giving up ‘protection’ from their controllers. The left has never been able to tolerate an independent middle class. They want one statist leash for one collectivized neck, with everyone dependent on government and everyone always potentially “guilty” of some infraction of arbitrary, unpredictable interpretations of rules so that they can be controlled. Innocent people with independent means of survival are harder to control. The minority of the relatively wealthy who are left in such a statist society collaborate with government or they don’t survive, and become part of the rulers either directly or through a fascistic kind of collaboration between private interests and government power.
It’s TABOR all over again. The cost will be passed to towns and , that , is all of us. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Returning a state surplus to taxpayers in not “passing on costs”, and neither is “Tabor”.
We are fighting one and a half wars, and in a massive revenue crisis. On top of that taxes are the lowest they have been in a few decades and people want to cut them more? It is prof we are a selfish society willing to stuff our head in the sand and yell “MINE MINE MINE” instead of facing reality and making small personal sacrifices.
Just curious which 1 1/2 wars?
That is second most disturbing thing about many of your comments, “Well Maine isn’t fighting the wars.” I am so disturbed by theses comments we send young women and men of to die while pretending we have no responsibility to stand up and fund their protection or care afterward. This is as much a states issue as federal. These solders that fought need strong support and if the fed won’t do it the state should.
State government has no responsibility for wars or your demands for entitlements. People who don’t want to be in the military (or the police or any other career) for any reason should not do it. We no longer have a draft.
So, you don’t exactly thing things through do you? More federal spending on wars less for the States. No direct responsibility but the money ends up coming from somewhere. Secondly the only reason there is not a draft is these men and women volunteer. Without them there would be.
Your posts are non-responsive, and so is your gratuitous opening smear claiming that anyone else “doesn’t’ think”. Your arbitrary assertions and contradictions illustrate well enough who is or is not thinking and how.
Federal taxes do not belong to “the States”. The money is taken from taxpayers. There is no “State” entitlement to whatever may be left over after Federal spending, which is higher than taxes anyway, leading ever increasing debt. You have no claim on taxpayer money not spent for defense.
The volunteer army is a professional paid army. Without enough volunteers they would have to be paid more. This has been the case for decades. There is no authority for a draft, despite attempts by mostly leftists to re-impose one. If you want to donate more for your alleged debt to those who are no longer in the military you are free to do so. You have no business imposing your claimed “debts” on others through higher state taxes. State government is legally and Constitutionally separate from the US military.
Your diversion has nothing to do with the topic, which is lowering state taxes.
We owe them a debt when they return and should not abandon them as many federal budget proposals advocate. If the fed wont we owe them a debt.
You can donate anything you like of your own money to anyone you decide you “owe a debt”. “We” do not “owe” what you demand in higher state taxes, nor is the state responsible for the US military.
Listen Tom. I made no mention about Maine in my post. Again I wanted to know what you call 1.5 wars… We are no longer in Iraq…. So again which 1.5 wars are you talking about?
Afghanistan and the rest of our continuing action in the middle east including the ramp up to Iran.
Well that wasn’t so hard was it?
Stay focused. The state of Maine is not fighting any war, and our taxes are not the lowest they have ever been. And I resent you saying we are not willing to make small personal sacrifices. Taxpayers make those small sacrifices every day.
I don’t know what America you see out of your jaundiced eyes, but I see an America that is generous, and I see an America that is full of opportunity for those willing to work hard, think creatively, and make the best of the opportunities offered to them. And I don’t think it is selfish to say you want your tax dollars spent wisely.
On the national level, entitlements such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are expected to consume the entire revenue collected through taxes by 2052. (CBO projection) We need to have a serious discussion about reigning in spending before we even consider tax increases. Most Americans are willing to pay reasonable taxes. But from the founding of our nation, we have taken punitive taxation as reason to protest strenuously–even to the point of rebellion.
After a “serious discussion about reigning in spending” it would be ok to raise taxes again?
It isn’t in our self interest to not want to see our taxes squandered? Of course it is. So what? The left is trying to make us feel guilty for pursuing our own interests in our own lives instead of being submissive to the collective.
There is no “revenue crisis”. There a massive spending crisis imposed by statists, who are responsible for it, not their victims. Government impositions are not “small” “personal” sacrifices. Whatever their level and impact on different people, human sacrifice under your collectivist premises of moral cannibalism is unethical. If you want to sacrifice yourself go an do it. The rest of us have reason or duty to follow you. This country was founded on individualism and the right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness in one’s own life, not subservience and sacrifice to the collective under statist mandates.