In the final gubernatorial debate last week, Gov. Paul LePage said you’re “ not that rich” if you earn $100,000 a year. His opponents quickly seized on the remark to highlight that the governor was out of touch with average Mainers.
He doubled down the next day: “I don’t think it’s wealthy. I really don’t. I will say $50,000 is half as much as $100,000. I defy anyone to tell me that if you make $100,000 and you have two kids going to college, and you’re trying to get them a good start in life, that it’s a lot of money.”
LePage, in his usual convoluted way, was trying to make a valid point: People in Maine don’t make a lot of money — and they should make more.
Maine’s median household income in 2013 was $46,974, according to Census figures, below the national median of $52,250. The median income in Maine for married couples with children was $69,415. For a single mother, it was $27,177. Incomes nationally and in Maine have dropped in real terms since 2005.
Only 16 percent of Maine households make more than $100,000 a year, so naturally that amount of income seems huge to most families. The simple answer is that wages in Maine need to rise.
The difficulty is in accomplishing this. Earnings largely correlate with education, and Mainers are, generally, undereducated. Only 28 percent of the state’s population has a bachelor’s degree, significantly below the Northeast average of 34 percent, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Fortunately, people moving to Maine have higher education levels than natives. “About 40 percent of adults now living in Maine but born elsewhere have a college degree, about twice the rate of state natives,” The New York Times wrote in August.
With a loss of industry and heavy reliance on small businesses, Maine doesn’t have many jobs that pay more than $100,000 a year. Who makes that much? Doctors, lawyers, executives, financiers, and people with a lot of wealth who can simply watch it compound. But not the governor. By law, his salary is capped at $70,000 a year, the lowest in the country. The average gubernatorial salary in 2013 was $133,348.
Other high-level professionals in Maine are paid far less than their counterparts in other states. University presidents and coaches in this state, for example, collect what most Mainers would consider exorbitant salaries, but they are often paid half as much or less than their counterparts at other universities.
At the other end of the spectrum, LePage has demonized and, through policy changes, hurt the state’s lowest-income earners. By refusing to expand Medicaid, tens of thousands of low-income Mainers have been denied health insurance at little cost to the state. By cutting state support for General Assistance and trying to deny it to immigrants, more people will struggle to pay for life’s necessities. By cutting municipal revenue sharing, homeowners have had to pay more in property tax to fund municipal services. The property tax is among those that hit the poor the hardest.
Rather than trying to set an arbitrary line for who is rich and who is not, the focus should be on creating the conditions for entrepreneurs to start and grow businesses that pay high wages, helping existing businesses grow and attracting others from outside the state. An important part of this work is ensuring more Mainers enroll in and complete college so they can start these businesses and work for them.