To the Editor:
I am writing this letter in support of our Governor and his policies. By the time that you read this, he will have given his first state of the State address and the roadmap for at least the next year will be a bit clearer.
There is a lot of hand wringing and worried people right now and rightly so. We have stood by and watched our hard earned tax dollars squandered away by the former elected residents of Augusta. As quoted by the Governor quite simply, if you have $100 dollars in your checkbook, you have no business writing a check for $200.
That is what has been going on for a long time in Augusta. The difference between the $100 and the $200 check has been borrowed, removed from the highway fund to the general fund, gifted (stimulus tax dollars) from Washington, furlough days for state workers all squandered as a temporary fix to keep a bloated state government afloat.
Tax dollars have been squandered on things like massages for MSHA staff, elaborate entertainment by the Turnpike Authority along with gift cards given out like candy, $314,000 dollar low cost housing, a 60 million dollar computer system for DHHS that was paid for and sat unusable for three and a half years, a state funded program to teach theater in the prison system, the list goes on and on.
No one wants to see cuts that directly affect them, but these cuts are only fair if they come from all across the board.
Some things have and will continue to improve in the future. You will soon have access to health insurance from more than the two companies that have had a monopoly in this state, we have just had the largest tax cuts in Maine history and a lot of folks think that this benefited the rich but the truth is a single guy making $19,500 was in the top bracket; I don’t call him rich.
Also 76,000 low-income folks will no longer pay any state income tax and the tax cut affected over 400,000 taxpayers. It seems that there is a lot of uproar at every turn on exactly where the cuts will have to take place. I am confident that the safety net for the truly needy will remain intact.
I thank my lucky stars that we can have a resident of the Blaine house with some common sense who can read a balance sheet.
Kerin Resch, Jefferson
