Rep. Bruce Poliquin’s fear of government was “shaped” when his 54-year-old brother died in 2006 from drugs and alcohol. Poliquin has said he believes government contributed to his brother’s death because his brother “found a way not to work and take advantage of welfare programs” just before he died from his lifelong addiction and disease. “If there was a personal event that shaped me in any way, that was it.”
Poliquin’s frustrations morphed into a passion for the tea party creed shared by Donald Trump and Poliquin’s “good friend” Gov. Paul LePage, that America’s greatness depends on cutting government services to fund tax breaks for the job-creating rich. Here are the results of that passion:
Poliquin fears welfare and publicly advocates for welfare cuts, even though cuts to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families contributed to 3,700 more children going hungry in 2012 and the number of children living in extreme poverty in Maine increased by 6,000 between 2010 and 2014, a 35 percent increase.
Poliquin said in 2012 that he shares the same policy beliefs as LePage. We have different personalities, “ but the policy part? We’re the same,” he said. Both fear taxes. Poliquin, doubling as LePage’s surrogate when he was state treasurer, proudly supported LePage’s tax cuts in 2011. Unfortunately they created budget shortages and led to higher property taxes. Four of the five states that made similar reductions, including Maine, ended up with slower job growth than the nation as a whole. Both men seem unaware that Kansas and Wisconsin have been implementing trickle-down economic for more than five years and their economies have lagged in growth.
Poliquin fears universal health care. He ignores research concluding that universal health care is good for U.S. businesses because, unlike the rest of the world, U.S. businesses have to pay employee health insurance fees. It doesn’t seem to matter to Poliquin that Americans pay more for health care than the rest of the world and factors like patients per physician and life expectancy are actually worse than the world average.
Poliquin fears national parks. Even though a 2015 poll revealed 67 percent of voters in the 2nd District are supported the creation of a national park in the Katahdin region, Poliquin thinks the donation of more than 87,000 acres to create a national monument in the region that creates jobs is somehow bad. He thinks one of his top priorities should be to eliminate the president’s authority to declare national monuments.
Poliquin should remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s words when the great president was pulling us out of the Great Depression: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Poliquin’s fear blinds him to the facts: Income taxes are much lower than they were from 1935-1980. No one wants to raise taxes on the lower and middle classes. Last year, the federal budget deficit was the lowest it has been since 2007 as national revenues rise, which is truly remarkable considering the recovery from the Great Recession just ended.
That was the recession that the U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission determined was avoidable and was caused by “widespread failures in financial regulation.” Ignoring this, Poliquin, continues to fear and attack better government financial regulation.
Now is not the time to fear our largest business. The average consumer uses it more than 30 times per day, often without knowing or appreciating it, for things such as transportation, education and safety. Many of us, including LePage and Poliquin, have jobs in it. It’s called a government of the people, and our taxes pay for its products.
When Poliquin shirks his patriotic duty to pay his taxes on time, like he did 31 times over the last decade, he is really telling our tax-paid teachers, policemen, firemen and contractors and crews who built our roads and infrastructure, the hungry children from whom he took food and our parents who built the government we have now that they are what is wrong with America.
In reality, our tax-funded national parks, such as Acadia, our local schools and state colleges, roads, libraries, government research programs and all of us working together in business and in government, independent of race, gender or religion, are what make our country great.
Perhaps Poliquin and LePage will feel safer if they stay off our roads and out of our parks and avoid using our government-founded internet. And more importantly, perhaps, they will feel safer if they quit their government jobs. I know we will.
David Labrecque is an engineering physicist at the University of Maine. He lives in Orono.