THIN FILM OF HELP

One obvious but compelling lesson Maine may conclude from the latest batch of Census numbers measuring income is that a rising tide does not lift all boats. Southern Maine is wealthier than a decade ago and much of the northern two-thirds of the state is in much deeper trouble, according to the numbers released this week. This suggests that the normal, evenhanded attention to statewide development traditionally practiced essentially guarantees a majority of the state will fail economically.

A development specialist at the University of Maine once referred to the state’s funding practices as the thin-film approach, a spreading out of scarce resources for economic growth to the extent that no one is left out and no one especially helped. The result can be seen at the end of the nation’s longest economic expansion: off the coast and north of the Kennebec are a few wealthy suburbs and income losses almost everywhere else.

Incomes particularly in Aroostook, Piscataquis and Washington counties fell farther behind the national average and counties such as York and Cumberland. Where household income in the Cumberland commonly reaches $50,000 a year, it is half that in places like Calais and Steuben and comes in at $20,000 or so in Van Buren and Lubec. Worse, the rate of income loss in many of those places was especially harmful. Residents of Cherryfield are, on average, 18 percent poorer now than they were in 1990, adjusted for inflation. In East Millinocket, incomes are off 17 percent and are 25 percent lower in Calais. Bangor is down 8 percent over the decade and Millinocket dropped by a depressing 31 percent.

Growth isn’t everything, and some communities with higher incomes didn’t see a lot of improvement or had a loss after inflation. But the trend in Maine clearly was that less-affluent communities not only didn’t grow at the same rate as others but lost income, with Calais and Millinocket having lower incomes even if inflation wasn’t included. Is there a solution to this punishing disparity? A King administration economic analyst seems to doubt it: Galen Rose said in a recent story, “This is a problem that every governor for decades has fought against, but nobody knows what the solutions are, if there are any.”

Certainly, the strategies leading to the current results have not worked; if anything can, it likely will require a much larger investment of both money and attention over anything yet attempted. It will require, at the very least, the state to make a distinction between fulfilling the demands of the comfortable and those of the desperate.