I know firsthand that many Mainers are feeling an economic squeeze. Several factors are involved. Key costs – such as housing, healthcare, and fuel – are skyrocketing. Families are even paying a lot just to have their children participate in school athletics! I know of many local families that do not have an extravagant lifestyle, yet are falling deeper and deeper into debt. We also have to admit that there are a lot of cultural and advertising pressures that cause us to feel unsatisfied with our lives, such that we must get out and buy something else to make our lives better.
We have turned away from the values that unite us: connection with and investment in our communities, and fairness and opportunity for everyone. This has simultaneously led us to accept policies that further squeeze our friends and neighbors, and to turn to materialism as an empty substitute for what really matters.
Due to conscious governmental policies, entry-to-mid-level salaries have not kept up with the increasing costs, as the Maine Center for Economic Policy’s recent “State of Working Maine 2005” report shows (www.mecep.org). While we enact economic policies that squeeze families and shred the social safety net, a new law makes it harder for families in financial trouble to find relief in the bankruptcy courts. This law was “paid for” by the financial services industry that is now beginning to tighten the screws on their customers by increasing the required minimum monthly payments. We are living with a time bomb!
Lane Hiltunen points his finger at “run-away spending of government at all levels in Maine” as the culprit, and his friends are already pushing for a referendum to put spending caps on the Maine budget. However, in Colorado, the so-called “Taxpayer Bill of Rights” that was enacted in 1992 so devastated the state’s economy that the voters suspended TABOR this year. Go to www.ncsl.org/programs/fiscal/taborpts.htm for details. In fact, many of the ultra-conservative officials who initially fought for TABOR, including Governor Bill Owens and former State Senator Brad Young, led the 2005 charge to suspend it. TABOR will devastate Maine just as it devastated Colorado.
You can meet Brad Young here in Maine! He will report on Colorado’s TABOR experience on Jan. 13, 2006, at the Augusta Civic Center. Young will be on a panel at “Maine’s Business Climate: What Really Matters?”, a conference organized by the Maine Center for Economic Policy (www.mecep.org).
The “trickle-down” effect of the President’s agenda is the main culprit in squeezing Maine’s families We must stop the devastation being visited on citizens and on the States by irresponsible and unfair federal tax cuts for the wealthy, unfunded federal mandates such as “No Child Left Behind”, and attacks on the federal support systems that protect our community. These immoral policies leave the burden on the States and put pressure on local taxes.
Perhaps the best illustration of the right-wing establishment’s rejection of our values is the ongoing drive to repeal the Federal Estate Tax. Already the exemption is so high that less than 2 percent of all estates pay any estate tax. Drastic revenue cutshave resulted from the changes already enacted, but the right wing wants to go further, slashing services for the poor and middle class and running up the deficit to line the pockets of the super-wealthy. You can see similar patterns in cuts to income, dividend, and capital gains taxes. How will we pay for the Katrina disaster relief, or for restoration of services and infrastructure in Iraq? In both cases, we see that abandoning our values costs us more in the end.
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