Not-so-gloomy Maine

The recent op-ed piece, “Maine’s business climate nothing to boast about” (BDN, June 18), by Rep. Joshua Tardy was long on the traditional Republican doom and gloom and very short on accurate information. The main reason for this is that the op-ed was based on results stemming from a survey orchestrated by the Maine Economic Research Institute, which is the propaganda arm of the Maine Republican Party. The results of the survey could have been written before the survey was conducted.

A few simple facts about the Maine economy might help to set the record straight:

. Maine’s unemployment rate has been consistently below the national and regional for more than four years.

. At the end of 2004, Maine was one of the only two states in the Northeast to recover all the jobs lost in the recession. We have added more than 5,000 new jobs and there are more people working in Maine today than at any time in our state’s history.

. We have gone from 35th to 30th in per capita income and our rate of per capita income growth has exceeded the national and regional averages in each of the past two years ranking 14th in the country in 2003.

Rep. Tardy states that we are behind as “the rest of the country is going gangbusters” (an observation that has apparently escaped the attention of most economists). Why can’t he take pride in Maine’s performance when we are outperforming the regional and national economies?

Rather than site self-serving surveys paid for by political organizations, let’s looks at observations made by impartial sources:

. Executives of T-Mobile have said recently at the Maine International Trade Commission dinner “the word is getting around the country that Maine is a great place to do business.”

. Foreign Direct Investment magazine ranked Maine number one on the country for quality of life and third for best IT and Telecom infrastructure.

. Inc. magazine ranked Portland 32nd out of 270 U.S. cities as the best place to do business. The same survey also placed Lewiston-Auburn in the top 100.

While there is much work left to do, clearly Maine is making progress. I would agree with Rep. Tardy that taxes are still too high, but this session of the Legislature under the leadership of Gov. Baldacci has done more to address that problem than any session in memory. In fact, another independent observation from the Wall Street Journal sited Maine as an example of a state that has “enacted spending caps with real teeth in them.”

Lastly, Rep. Tardy tries to convince us that raising the cigarette tax will be harmful to business. While Democrats took no pleasure in raising this tax, we all agreed that we had to address the borrowing in the state budget.

The Republican alternative would have removed 40,000 to 50,000 Mainers from health insurance roles, dramatically increasing the number of uninsured “bad debt” cases to Maine hospitals and care providers. This would result in raising health care and health insurance costs, two areas that ironically Tardy points to as problem areas.

Rep. Charles Fisher is a Democrat from Brewer.