You probably have heard that there has been a great deal of chatter about doing away with the state’s income tax.
Gov. Paul LePage wasted a good deal of time — and political capital — this session trying to force the issue onto the ballot. The Legislature’s Taxation Committee heard hours of testimony for and against. The issue was hotly debated on the House and Senate floors and, having failed to muster the two-thirds needed in both chambers, the governor soon will trot out a squeaky new citizens’ initiative that is sure to keep the issue on the front burner for the next 14 months.
As one of two Republicans in the entire Legislature who broke ranks and voted against wiping out the income tax, I am not exactly “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” here. Or, to use a more modern-day reference, putting a tax referendum before the electorate is so 2010. Mind you, back then, the very day Maine Republicans selected then-Waterville Mayor LePage as the party’s nominee for governor, Maine voters, at the urging of many of my GOP colleagues including me, resoundingly voted in favor of the following ballot question: Do you want to reject the new law that lowers Maine’s income tax and replaces that revenue by making changes to the sales tax? In Washington County alone, voters repudiated a sales tax hike by a 61-39 margin — numbers that look a lot like the statewide 60-40 split.
In the two-year budget we lowered income taxes while holding the sales tax steady — over the objections of people such as Rep. Larry Lockman on the right and Rep. Gina Melaragno on the left, but, nonetheless, we did it.
Had we eliminated the income tax or gone headlong down that road, you can bet your last bottle of Moxie that sales taxes on anything and everything from firewood to fingernail polish would skyrocket just in time for Maine’s 200th birthday. Mind you, taxing tourists sounds great if you’re not a tourist, but there is no (constitutional) way to do it without whacking year-round residents, too — yup, I’m talking about the elderly or disabled Mainers who can’t plow themselves out every time we get a 2-footer; the hand-to-mouth businessperson who makes the lion’s share of his or her income during the summer months; or anyone who takes a shower, brushes his or her teeth, eats breakfast, goes to work, has an evening out with friends and family, has a little work done at his or her home or is even just trying to save enough money up to put down roots somewhere.
Yes, wiping out income taxes for all is great, but when you’re nickel and diming people to do it — not so much.
True, these are the points everybody opposed to eliminating income tax makes. But there are other, more insidious ones that aren’t getting the attention they deserve. Take, for example, the fact that LePage has begun a quiet push to consolidate schools into 26 super-sized, centralized, homogenized districts that can be more easily manipulated by the Department of Education and which will shift and cost local property taxpayers gobs of money they’ll have little or no say in.
If that sounds like 2007 all over again, it should. Back then, Gov. John Baldacci tried the same thing, igniting the wrath of rural conservatives and liberals alike. Having chronicled the school consolidation saga since its inception, I can tell you it didn’t end well for Baldacci and is even less likely to endear LePage, already bereft of allies, to many of us who wanted someone a little more friendly to rural Maine.
The real shame of this whole hullabaloo about wiping out the income tax is that it, along with an equally audacious effort to nix revenue sharing, pushed legitimate issues — welfare reform, substance abuse, broadband Internet expansion, aging in place and economic development, to name a few — to the side while we wasted a good deal of time fighting a war that already had been fought at the ballot box five years ago.
Don’t get me wrong, reducing taxes is a good thing. But this isn’t about reducing taxes. Taxes on sales will go up, sales will go underground and power will shift from voters and communities to bureaucrats bent on building “Too Big to Fail” ideas.
This is the crux of why I didn’t vote for an income tax referendum then, why I won’t be scribbling my atrocious William R. Tuell on any petitions this fall or voting in favor of an income tax referendum this coming session or in November 2016.
Let’s move on.
Rep. Will Tuell, R-East Machias, is serving his first term in the Maine House. He represents District 139.