November Referendum Question Seeks to Penalize the “Rich” Who Live in Maine in Order to Expand Public School Funding

By:  David Deschesne

Fort Fairfield Journal, August 31, 2016

   A referendum question on the Maine ballot this November will ask Mainers if they want to increase the taxes of their neighbors who make more than $200,000 per year in order to increase the funding of the failed public education system in the State.

   The proposal asks for a 3% tax on all income over $200,000 as a penalty for being “rich” in Maine.  The tax is modeled after the old-line Communist redistribution of wealth scheme to force the “rich” to fund schools in “poorer” communities so they can keep up with the more affluent communities in Maine.

   “That critical gain in revenue is needed if children in Fort Fairfield want the same public school opportunities as children in Cape Elizabeth,” said Felicia Knight, from the Knight Canney Group, an organization helping to promote the tax increase.   “The reality is that education for K-12 is simply more expensive than it once was, and a strong K-12 foundation is needed to launch students into post-secondary education or training.”

   Fort Fairfield’s school system currently enjoys a $6+ million annual budget for around 500 students, a cost of about $12,000 per year, per student, to provide education services.  Many private and Christian schools provide the same, or higher, level of education services for a fraction of the money.

   As for the “rich” being forced to stay in Maine to pay the tax, Ms. Knight is not worried about any outmigration as a result of the tax increase.  “Of course there is no mandate under any circumstance for people to stay or leave Maine [sic]—and it is our belief that more people will stay in and come to Maine if it is known to have a superior public education system in all communities, not just those that can afford it.”

  Knight cites a study by the non-profit, non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, that tax flight is a myth. According to the study, “Compelling evidence shows that this claim [tax flight] is false. The effects of tax increases on migration are, at most, small — so small that states that raise income taxes on the most affluent households can be assured of a substantial net gain in revenue.”

   However, the question remains at what threshold of taxation will the wealthy producers in Maine decide the additional tax penalties on them are untenable and begin to leave.  Like all government taxation plans, this proposal will start off small - a meager 3% - but history as shown it will grow exponentially as legislators seek to drink from that revenue stream for even more pet projects in the future.

   Knight says in 1973, 28% of jobs in the U.S. required more than a high school diploma. “In 2020, that figure will be 65% of jobs. Students need to leave high school ready for college or technical training—and the technology involved in education and today’s job market, whether for a research chemist or an auto mechanic, is also expensive.” 

  Public education is more expensive today because the government has made it that way with its unfunded mandates and social engineering programs to promote the idea boys can identify as girls and shower and change with girls in the girls' locker rooms.  These mandates and destructive social programs have caused a bloated administration infrastructure and wasted teacher time doing data entry on the multitude of education-based software packages that are ubiquitous in public school systems today, with precious little of those additional funds used to actually teach reading, writing and arithmetic - skills public school students today are sorely lacking, considering the amount of remedial education local colleges and universities have to provide to get their incoming freshmen up to minimum standards.

   These public education problems have their genesis in the ideology of the big-government, communist controllers at the Maine and U.S. Departments of Education and more money isn't going to solve them.  Though the voters will be tempted to believe that way after reading the wording of the referendum question, thinking somehow the additional tax money will magically increase the quality of students being produced by Maine's public education-industrial complex.