From the Editor
TABOR and other muddled thinking
In our annual attempt to address the symptoms of our tax burden conundrum while ignoring the cause, we will have in front of us the grandly named Taxpayer Bill of Rights, now known widely as TABOR.Vote for it or not, but in doing so, do not mislead yourself that anything is being solved here. Maine has one of the highest, if not the highest, effective per capita tax burdens in the country for a very simple reason. There is hardly any business here in comparison to the people who live here or own seasonal homes here.
And why is there hardly any business here? Because we, collectively, in the form of the people we allow to run things in Augusta, and in the decisions we make in our local and county governments, don't want business here.
This is not news to anybody who tries to run a business in this state. One would have to travel pretty far, say California, to find a state less welcoming and more burdensome to the entrepreneurial spirit than this one. The net of this is predictable. A lack of revenues from Maine-based businesses leads to a squeeze on other available tax bases, namely, property.
But in one of our more curious contradictions, it is often those that are most affected by a heavily-based property tax structure (i.e., high value property owners) that are also among the most anti-business in terms of what sort of neighbors they want in their backyard.
So where does that leave us? It leaves us manufacturing artificial bogeymen, like schools or necessary infrastructure spending, or anything else that is not important to us as an individual, and then convincing ourselves that if we just put the clamps on these spendthrifts we will be doing right.
Well, wrong. To run a state requires money. Even a well-run state like, say, anyplace besides Maine. In the rest of the country they get a lot of that money from encouraging business. Someday in Maine we might try that as well, and if we are unwilling to, we ought to at least be honest with ourselves and agree that there is a price to pay for it.
Well done, Nate Cox
Having written disapprovingly earlier this season about a performance of the National Anthem at a local sporting event, we would be remiss if we did not recognize the truly outstanding work being done lately by York's own Nate Cox. An alumnus of the York High School Chamber Singers, Mr. Cox has been a solo performer of the National Anthem at several York High School sporting events over the past weeks. His performance alone has been worth the effort of attendance. From here then, well done Nate Cox.Ready for prime time
They are the best team in this town right now, and for those of you who were there last Thursday night at the York High School varsity field under the lights, you know what a great show it was to see the undefeated field hockey team finally play in front of the type of crowd they deserve. Playing most of their season in the relative obscurity of afternoon games behind the parking lot, it was a deserved prime time slot that Coach Barb Marois’ powerhouse team enjoyed on Thursday. More of this, we say.
