The governor has bravely thrown tax reform flat into the political fire in Augusta, and one can almost hear the sizzle all the way down here on “The Front Porch.”
It surely is the most comprehensive and daring tax reform proposal to come out of a governor’s office in decades. Former governors have avoided it like the plague because it is so politically charged and such a complex issue to resolve. My hat is off to the governor for having the courage to advance a plan.
The conversation on the Front Porch is guarded about the proposal. We have not seen the detail, and we are sure that some of the devil in the proposal will reside there. The fact that there is no indication as to how the considerable shortfall in the biennial budget will be addressed worries some of us. We are nearing the bone in state service budgets, and to cut much deeper will arguably put significant numbers of the most vulnerable among us at risk.
We cannot do that.
Nevertheless, Gov. John Baldacci seems to have crafted a starting point that captures the middle of Maine politics. He thereby reaffirms his decision to govern from the middle. It must come in part from those years in Washington when he watched up close how well President Clinton did by governing in that fashion. I will come back to this notion about governing from the moderate middle, but first some top of the head reactions to the tax proposal.
I am trying hard to learn to like spending caps. It is difficult for me, and it is not because I am a tax-and-spend liberal. I am not. I just think that the economy of the future will require greater flexibility than it did in the past. Its global nature requires that, and I am concerned about arbitrary fiscal straitjackets.
Businesses do not set such arbitrary investment caps. When an opportunity comes along for a significant investment with strong return, they need to be in a position to take advantage of it. Likewise, I think governments need to be flexible and have the capacity to invest significantly in infrastructure enhancement in order to improve the economic position of citizens.
But, I will swallow hard and accept the caps as long as the Legislature can override them. I hope the Republicans will abandon their efforts to write such caps into the Constitution. That will be a deal breaker, I think. If they chose to do that, the failure of tax reform will be on their heads. They should ask themselves where Ireland would be had the country operated on a spending cap that would have precluded the robust investment that they made in infrastructure? The answer is that they would likely still be at the bottom of the economic ladder in the European Union, rather than at the top where they are today.
I am also not sure about this plan to cap property taxes at 6 percent of income. I simply do not know how those numbers will play out on the street. My hunch tells me I might be happier with a scale of percents attached to income levels. Six percent is harder for a person with an income of $60,000 than it is for a person with an income of $600,000. The number of zeros makes a difference. That is the basis on which progressive taxation rests, and I think I would be happier with a more graduated approach. People should look at a graduated scale.
I have a few unformed concerns about the way in which the Essential Programs and Services are being used in the proposal. EPS is a program designed to ensure that all kids have the resources to achieve the Learning Results. In short, it sets minimum standards for the allocation of state and local resources to make certain the kid in Lubec has the same chance of achieving the Learning Results as does the kid in Falmouth. It sets minimums to ensure a basic equity for all kids. In the proposal, those minimums are turned into caps for educational spending unless the locality overrides them by referendum. We know that in Massachusetts the wealthy towns routinely override the caps on educational spending, but we do not know what will happen here. There need to be limits, I would agree, on what we spend on education, but I am not sure this is the best way to get there. It might be, but I hope we will all look hard at that component of the governor’s proposal.
Notwithstanding all of this, I return to where I started. This is a very good beginning, and it deserves to be taken very seriously by legislators. I hope they will work in a bipartisan way to advance and refine what the governor has presented.
One of the reasons I think it has a good chance is that it was crafted from the middle. As I have said before, Mainers like the middle. Look at our U.S. senators – representatives of a dying breed of moderate Republicans. I think I know why Maine people like the middle road of politics. It is more pragmatic, less ideological than the right or the left. It provides space for independence and Yankee pragmatism. That is where most Maine folks are comfortable.
So, I think the governor’s proposal has a chance. It certainly deserves to be taken seriously, and I am confident it will be.
Jim Carignan is a retired educator who lives in Harpswell. His e-mail address is carignans@suscom-maine.net.
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