Bad things forecast

Give the staff at the State Planning Office credit for turning what could be an extremely dull document – the annual year-end review of the Maine economy – into a readable and even entertaining work that contains its own top 10 list and plenty of easy-to-understand charts. Give them credit and then question their judgment.

The SPO’s economic assessment of Maine in 2000 is fairly standard stuff – a cooling economy in the second half of the year, the effect of the stock-market dive, oil prices a factor, etc. – until it hits unemployment and offers the following sentences. “Maine employment and personal income growth rates over the past few years have not kept pace with national rates due largely to much slower population growth. Yet, Maine’s unemployment rate has been below the national rate for the past year and a half, so Maine has actually outperformed the nation when it comes to providing jobs for its citizens.”

Maine has done no such thing. Its economic performance and policies have, instead, driven its young people out of their hometowns, often out of state, to look for meaningful work elsewhere. Its unemployment rates are unusually low in some regions and its birth rate is rock bottom because young adults (of childbearing age) are leaving the state in larger numbers than their counterparts are leaving other states. That’s not providing for citizens, it is abandoning them.

The SPO’s comment on this is that “slow population growth is not in itself a bad thing. It allows us to absorb the growth within the limits of our environment and infrastructure.” Maine’s rate of growth in the 1990s ranked it 46th in the nation. If there is a problem, it’s not the growth, it’s the infrastructure. And while state officials think about bad things, they should consider the effects of absorbing a lack of growth: new industries that are reluctant to come to parts of Maine because not enough people capable of doing the work are still there; home valuations that drop because no one wants to move to a town without nearby jobs; schools, roads and municipal services that cannot be supported on a stagnant or shrinking tax base. Maine is about to consider whether to bond for fixing up its roads because it is having trouble generating enough revenue through traditional means – that, in part, is a lack of growth problem.

Certainly Maine benefited from the national economic boom that now appears at its end; some parts of the state did quite well. But Maine overall did well only compared with itself from 10 years ago and with a few other bottom-dwelling states. The results can be seen, as the SPO observes, in personal income, which remains among the lowest in the nation, and in the lack of population growth. Concluding that this is not a “bad thing” in itself allows the agency and all of Maine to ignore the very real bad things that surround these numbers, which is a deception the state no longer can afford, if it ever could.