Just say no to Maine’s big spenders

It should come as no surprise to Mainers that even before our leaders in Augusta attempt to deal with the looming budget catastrophe, they are already playing the blame game. This time though, rather than blame each other, they’ve united in pointing the finger at a conveniently defenseless target, the tax code. Indeed, the accursed code, it has been revealed, turns out to have been the source of our problems all along, leading now to the creation of yet another blue ribbon panel to oversee its renovation. How handy, in an election year, to have a pile of paper to blame our woes on.

Don’t be fooled. It is not tax collection, or the lack thereof, that is to blame for the mess we’re in. Rather it is the explosion in state spending that has brought us to the nearly incomprehensible position of facing not just an immediate $200 million shortfall, but a looming budget deficit over the next biennium of as much as a billion dollars. How in the world did we get here? It is not simply because of deficiencies in the tax code, which are plentiful. We simply allowed our state leadership to increase spending beyond what we are able to pay.

There was an age when governments deliberated over the proper course of policy, argued the merits, then worked out the needed revenue afterward. Now, however, policy is driven by the amount of money available to pay for it. In lean times, budgets are tightened, hiring is frozen, and retirees go without replacement. In fat times, though, all things become possible. Staff thought unnecessary only months earlier suddenly become indispensable. Programs previously deemed unworthy of funding are enacted and bragged about in campaign literature.

When the money is rolling in, as it was in the ’90s, legislators find all their election-promise dreams possible, and without a tight budget to put a brake on spending, wishes get fulfilled and money gets spent.

And so it was here in Maine. The state budget leapt from $3.4 billion in 1996 to nearly $5.5 billion today. Taxes to pay for it shot up, leaving Maine, as of the fall of 2000, with the highest tax burden in America.

So wearisome to our leaders did the task of continually raising taxes become, in fact, that last year the legislature voted to index the gas tax to inflation so it went up automatically, without the burdensome as well as politically messy job of actually voting for the increases. In such ways the money poured in, and every dollar of it was spent.

Spent on what? Well, a lot to schools and Medicare for sure, but for the most part they bought government. More programs, more studies of this and that, more bureaucracy. Maine today has only 3 percent more population than neighboring New Hampshire, but employs 32 percent more state employees, which amounts to nearly 3,600 people. To do what? Hard to say, but one thing is for sure. At $50,000 each in pay and benefits, these people, whether “essential” or not, cost us some serious money.

The most infuriating part is how needless it all is. A recent column in the Wall Street Journal puts our current plight in some perspective. In investigating why it was that some states, like Maine, face crippling budget gaps, while others do not, the Journal reviewed the spending habits of several states and came to focus specifically on the work of the wise citizens of Colorado. Having lived through the same boom and bust of the late eighties and early nineties as the rest of us, Coloradans made the decision to reign in their government and not make the same mistakes again. They passed a Taxpayers Bill of Rights that made tax increases subject to state referendum and mandated that spending increases could never exceed inflation plus population growth. As a consequence, reports the Journal, “per capita general fund expenditures have grown only 8% in the last four years. And Colorado has returned to taxpayers more than $3 billion in surplus revenue in rebates and tax cuts since 1997.”

What happened in Maine? State and local government expenditures have been going up a combined 10 percent a year over the last 10 years. And I, for one, don’t recall getting any refund checks.

Has Colorado, as the tax-and-spenders would argue, suffered for its frugality? Hardly. The Journal article goes on to make reference to a new CATO institute report that shows that “during the 1990s the 10 states with the highest tax burden grew at half the rate of the 10 with the lowest taxes. Personal income grew 40 percent in the low tax states, but only 25 percent in the high tax states.”

It goes without saying which of those two groups we are in.

It does constitute more evidence, though, if any were needed, that our brutally high level of taxes is the primary factor slowing the growth of our incomes and the growth of the state’s economy in general. What we need most desperately is not tax revisions or tax reforms, but tax cuts. It is the only way to give the economy a needed boost, free up capital for small business and help ordinary people begin to build their own economic futures.

We’re not going to get tax cuts from our friends in Augusta though. And while it is easy to lay the blame on them entirely, they are doing what many folks want them to do. Everyone has their own tax exemption or government programs that they don’t want touched. Add them all up and it becomes easy to see how we get into these messes.

I’ve learned a little something about how this happens since becoming a candidate for the Maine House of Representatives. Every day I find in my mailbox a questionnaire from one of the myriad PACs and special interest groups that infest the back halls of the State House. Almost all of these organizations, aside from wanting to know my position on their specific issues, also want to know whether I would continue to spend taxpayer money on them if elected. The gun owners want us to build them gun ranges, the motorcyclists want more driver training, the environmentalists want us to buy more land and the industrial and business interests want a continuation of whatever tax break or regulatory loophole they’ve won from the legislature in the past. And whether these expenditures of your money are prudent or not, everyone, it seems, has his or her hand in the till, and that is what is killing us.

And there also lies the problem of budget cutting. The state now has its hands in so many aspects of our lives that we all become connected to it someplace. And like the war on drugs, as long as the demand for services keeps up, the state will have to keep coming around asking for a supply of more money.

What can we do? Enact a Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights like Colorado’s for one thing. While it would not get us out of the mess we’re in now, it would at least put into law some automatic restraint on growth in spending for the future. Add an unfunded mandate-blocking amendment and we might one day end up with a fast-growing 21st-century economy and a leaner and meaner state government around to pave the roads and such.

Also though, we’ve got to kick the big government habit. Demand needs to drop in order for the supply of our cash to stay under the mattress where it belongs. Therefore, we should refocus ourselves on working within our own communities, support local businesses at every opportunity and all commit ourselves to do as Nancy Reagan encouraged years ago with regard to drugs. When the state comes around with the latest program aimed at fixing another problem you didn’t know needed fixing, just say no.

Stephen Bowen lives in Rockport and teaches in Camden. He is a candidate for the Maine House of Representatives representing both towns.