Fantasy worlds in Maine

Nowhere are the dangerous delusions of our politics more clearly demonstrated than in Pat Colwell’s recent op-ed article (BDN, Feb. 3) exhorting Mainers to shut up and fall in line behind the governor and his recently passed tax relief plan. The article’s enthusiastic misrepresentation of its own facts and its condescending instructions to “naysayers” to cheer on the governor’s and the Democrats’ good work sound a lot like editorials I’ve seen in state-sponsored Chinese newspapers. We are being ordered to rally behind a scam, as Dexter’s town manager characterized the plan (BDN, Feb. 19-20).

Colwell brags that under the tax plan “most Maine towns will be able to reduce property taxes paid for education” and “while the majority of towns receive an increase in state funding next fiscal year, not one will receive reduced funding.”

This is a way of saying, without saying, that the original plan cut funding to many poor school districts while it increased funding by millions of dollars to wealthy districts. In the original proposal SAD 3, where I live, would have lost about $340,000. Eventually, after lawmakers from the poorer districts pressured Democratic leadership, the package that was passed increased SAD 3’s funding by about $196,000 – which I guess is an example of Colwell’s “win-win,” but in fact this amount will not even cover the district’s coming increases for existing salaries and health care. Meanwhile, Sanford will receive a $5 million increase over two years and Yarmouth $2 million, among other cities and towns of far greater financial resources than all of SAD 3 put together.

In a committee meeting where the details were being debated, a lawmaker from north of Augusta asked a lawmaker from south of Augusta how decreasing poor schools’ funds squares with increasing wealthy schools’ funds. The reply was: If the rural people want a good education they should move south.

Let them eat cake, as the French queen said of the peasants before the French Revolution’s horrors began.

I’m not sure what Democrat, who is really a Democrat, would sign off on arithmetic and attitudes as blatantly classist as this. But a whole raft of them did. The Democrat who represents the SAD 3 towns himself voted to sell them down the river.

The tax relief itself – when you look at it in the place where we actually live and not in the parallel universe where the governor apparently does his figuring – is not “real,” to use Colwell’s parlance. Most of us are not going to get “real” tax relief. At first the average property owner’s saving was going to be $207 a year, but in Colwell’s figuring it jumped to $328. If I actually save $328 on my property taxes next year – which I won’t, but to the point – the saving will amount to $27.33 a month. I spend this much on coffee in a month. It will have about the same effect on my household as putting an ice cube in a gallon of lemonade, which is to say, virtually none. The “real” beneficiaries of the tax relief plan are going to be the people who need it least.

In Pat Colwell’s world, all this is a “historic achievement,” and he instructs us to cheer the governor’s star-spangled guidance, vaguely implying that not falling in line behind the glorious leader is some kind of moral failure. This is how Chairman Mao’s minions spoke to the Chinese in the 1950s, while millions in the countryside were suffering massive natural and economic devastation. Eventually things got worse, especially in the cities.

Maybe this kind of thinking, which appears to be divorced from all inconvenient realities, is to be expected. Our national leaders, who after all map our general direction, have sent more than 10,000 Americans to death and mutilation using facts that were not facts; and using arithmetic as bogus as the governor’s, they say they will halve the national budget deficit by cutting taxes and increasing spending. Why shouldn’t everyone else, including the Democratic executive and legislature of a financially challenged Northeast state, follow their lead into crisis?

The peasants north of Augusta are not yet ready to storm the Bastille over Yarmouth’s millions vs. SAD 3’s $190,000, but two things I can tell you. One is: In no foreseeable local election will I be voting for a Democrat, unless he persuades me personally that he lives in the same world the rest of us do. The other is: Since the Republicans’ alternative is Bush and Rumsfeld, I am changing my party affiliation from Democrat to independent. There must be a way back to reality, somewhere.

Dana Wilde is a Copy Desk editor with the Bangor Daily News.