When Gov. Janet Mills unveiled her proposal to send $500 checks to 800,000 taxpayers, the Democrat credited Republicans with first floating the idea, which spends half of the state’s projected $822 million surplus.
“I think they’re right,” Mills said during her State of the State address.
Some Republicans have, in fact, supported returning the surplus to Mainers through one-time “direct payments.” More often, Republicans have called on using the money for longer-term relief in the form of income or sales tax cuts.
The latter is clearly now winning out among Republicans, nudged or perhaps shoved along by the party’s most recent and potentially next governor – Paul LePage.
“She needs to help Maine people,” LePage said Wednesday at the State House after dropping off petition signatures to qualify for the ballot. “I urge her today, please, Gov. Mills, take the $400 million and instead of giving people $500 checks, lower the income tax effective immediately, so in 2021 people can get money right now to fill their oil tanks.”
Welcome to the first official policy debate of Maine’s 2022 gubernatorial campaign.
LePage has already made clear that he plans to make tax cuts a key part of his campaign platform – just like he did in 2010 and in 2014.
“I’m not saying reduce it, I’m saying eliminate it,” LePage said during his Sept. 2021 campaign launch. “There are better ways to tax – there are better ways.”
LePage does have a record to campaign on, having reduced Maine’s top tax rate from 8.5% to 7.95% and then to 7.15% during his eight years in the Blaine House. He also eliminated any income tax liability for the lowest-income Mainers.
But LePage failed to make more headway on his larger goal of gradually eliminating the income tax in part because of opposition from members of his own party.
The big sticking point: how to plug the massive budget hole created when income taxes dry up. Income taxes account for roughly 40% of the state’s annual revenue, or about $1.6 billion.
LePage’s campaign did not respond to a request for details on how the candidate proposes to eliminate the income tax or how to pay for it. But he could face similar headwinds, depending on how he structures his proposal.
In both 2015 and 2017, LePage proposed paying for additional income tax cuts by applying the sales tax to more goods and services. LePage had also proposed at times to increase the meals and lodging tax. The idea was to reduce Maine state government’s reliance on income taxes by broadening the sources of tax revenue, most notably by collecting more from the millions of tourists staying in hotels and going to restaurants.
Some Republican lawmakers balked at the idea of forcing Mainers to pay more in sales taxes, however. At the time, they noted that Republicans led a successful “people’s veto” campaign in 2010 to overturn a Democrat-crafted law that paid for income tax cuts by broadening the sales tax.
The disagreement over tax policies soured LePage’s relationships with some prominent Republicans.
Republicans say their message hasn’t changed
It’s also unclear how much pushback Mills will get from legislative Republicans over her proposal to use half of the projected budget surplus to send $500 checks to an estimated 800,000 Mainers.
Last fall, Senate Republicans launched a “Give It Back” campaign, but there were never any details. Senate Minority Leader Sen. Jeff Timberlake tried to introduce a bill to split any surplus equally between government coffers and taxpayers, but Democratic leaders blocked the proposal from being introduced.
Some Democrats are now accusing Republicans of changing their tune on the one-time checks.
And Mills’ office has sent press releases featuring links to news coverage in which Republicans at least expressed an openness to direct checks.
In one of those, published in January in The Maine Monitor, Assistant Republican Leader Sen. Matt Pouliot, R-Augusta, is quoted as saying Republicans support sending 50% of the surplus to the state’s Rainy Day Fund and 50% “in the form of checks back to Maine taxpayers.”
Speaking Thursday, Pouliot disputed that he used the word “checks” and said Republicans haven’t changed their position about long-term tax reductions in Maine.
“We definitely don’t want direct checks sent to people,” Pouliot told Maine Public. “Let’s be clear here: what we want is people getting long-term relief from the tax burden in the state of Maine and we want Maine to be competitive nationally in terms of our tax structure. And right now we’re not. So this is an opportune time.”
Pouliot said Republicans will come out with a counterproposal on the surplus in the coming weeks even as he acknowledged that, because of their majorities in the House and Senate, Democrats can pass a supplemental budget without Republican support.
While he acknowledged that his party pushed for the $285 direct checks sent to more than 500,000 Mainers at the end of last year, Pouliot said some people regarded that as “a slap in the face” compared to income tax cuts.
He also rejected the idea that you need to increase sales taxes or other taxes in order to replace lost income tax revenue. Instead, he said they should be “right-sizing government,” which is another theme of the LePage campaign.
“I don’t know why the narrative has to be that we still have to generate the same amount of revenue,” Pouliot said.
Trump-Collins tensions
Former President Donald Trump was irked by a recent comment from Maine Sen. Susan Collins.
The Maine Republican was quoted as saying that “No one should be afraid of President Trump, period” in a New York Times article published last Sunday.
The gist of the article was that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is trying to “thwart” Trump’s hold over the Republican Party by recruiting candidates. Collins has been involved in at least one of those efforts, to woo moderate Gov. Larry Hogan to run in Maryland.
Trump unleashed on Collins on his website.
“Funny thing about Susan Collins, who is absolutely atrocious, and has been for a long time, I won Maine 2, by a lot, and those hard working people attended a rally of many thousands,” Trump said. “Just one word about her and the fact that she didn’t help the fisherman, as their rights were taken from them from the federal government, and the lumberjacks, she would have had no chance to win. But I remained silent and positive and allowed her to have her victory. She would have lost in a landslide. Gee, aren’t I nice?”
There’s a lot to unpack in that jumble of words.
But Trump won the 2nd Congressional District (“Maine 2” in his statement) by roughly 7%, while Collins had a 24 percentage-point advantage over Democratic challenger Sara Gideon. And she did it without ever saying whether she was voting for Trump, despite the many, many times she was asked.
“In 2020, Senator Collins became the only Senate candidate in the last 69 Senate races to win by splitting the ticket with the state’s presidential results — something she has done three times, the only sitting senator to do so,” Collins’ spokeswoman Annie Clark said.
This is now the second time in a little more than a month that Collins has been on the receiving end of Trump’s name-calling and angry missives.
In January, he called her “wacky Susan Collins” because of her efforts, along with a bipartisan group of senators, to reform the way Electoral College votes are counted. Collins and her colleagues are trying to prevent a repeat of what happened in late-2020 and early-2021, when Trump and his allies tried to pressure members of Congress and then-Vice President Mike Pence to toss out election results in some states and replace them with pro-Trump electors.
Some Democrats have questioned the sincerity of Collins’ efforts on this front. However, Collins used an op-ed piece in the New York Times Friday to outline her commitment to fixing any ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act. She also called Pence “heroic” for resisting Trump’s pressure to overturn the election on Jan. 6 of last year.
“He stood up to a determined president who relentlessly pressured him to swing the election his way. And he refused to be intimidated by rioters who assaulted police officers, swarmed the Capitol and chanted ‘Hang Mike Pence!’,” she wrote.
“But the peaceful transfer of power shouldn’t require heroes,” she added.
Collins concluded by saying there’s bipartisan support for clearing up any ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act, but she also warned that efforts to broaden the scope of the bill could splinter the consensus.
Those bipartisan negotiations continue, as will Trump’s opposition to the changes.
Hancock County election is set
The parties have chosen their candidates to run to fill a vacant Maine Senate seat in Hancock County.
Democrats nominated Rep. Nicole Grohoski of Ellsworth for the District 7 seat formerly held by Democratic Sen. Louis Luchini, who resigned recently to take a job in the U.S. Small Business Administration. Grohoski, who is serving her second term in the House, is a geographic information system specialist with a mapping company.
Republicans, meanwhile, nominated Brian Langley, who formerly represented the region in both the House and Senate. Langley is a restaurant owner and culinary instructor from Ellsworth.
The entrance of a Green Independent, Benjamin Meiklejohn of Mount Desert, means voters will likely have at least three choices on the ballot. But because this is a general election, not a party primary, the contest will not involve ranked-choice voting.
The election will be held in June 14, which is the same day as the statewide party primaries.
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