The State of the Budget: Bad. Why? Mills.

Maine is at rock bottom. The state is half a billion dollars in the hole, even after receiving an unprecedented injection of some $15 billion in invented-from-thin-air pandemic funds. The roads are like a Zydeco vest frottoir, the schools are so terrible that Mills will stage a cover-up of the latest NAEP results tomorrow, and transnational criminal organizations are making millions in Maine by peddling fentanyl and trafficking poisonous cannabis grown in slave houses. Absolutely nothing in the state has improved as a result of all that spending. Nothing has improved; everything has gotten worse, and Mills is so low and mean that the best she’ll be able to do tonight is point a finger at minority Republicans.

The reality is that Maine is scraping rock bottom, and it’s entirely Gov. Janet Mills and legislative Democrats’ fault. That may sound crass and partisan, but it’s true. For six years, Democrats have militantly excluded all but the party loyalists from decision-making. Democrats who dared to think independently were harangued to the point of tears (ask Rebecca Millett about that). Those who voted against sacred idols of the left found themselves tossed from office on the strength of special interest cash (ask Bruce White about that). Slavish loyalty to Gov. Mills was rewarded over actual competence and experience (ask District Attorney Maeghan Maloney about that). This iron-fist governance may have kept the whip counts strong, but it also means Democrats own the present mess entirely. That is, Maine’s financial crisis is a Democrat spending crisis.

Now, you may wonder why a governor staring at a half-billion-dollar hole she dug for her state would want to label her speech a “State of the Budget” speech when our books look like Bernie Madoff’s. It’s probably because the State of the State is even worse. Taxes are high and going higher, which means Mainers’ paychecks are shrinking and shrinking. Electricity prices have skyrocketed even as we’ve all been forced to switch to energy-efficient light bulbs, dishwashers, clothes dryers, and heat pumps. No development happens in the state without some tough-guy construction manager first asking: Is there some government money for this? Rural Maine has slipped deeper and deeper into disrepair, as if some slow-motion tornado has torn apart all the houses, while Maine’s cities have become teenage shooting galleries and open-air drug markets. Dark times, indeed. So you can understand why she’d focus on something as mundane as the budget.

In her last tedious address to the state, Mills could at least rely on our shared grief from the Lewiston mass shooting to provide a degree of insulation from criticism. Even her predictable calls for gun control would face just token resistance. Now, though, her speechwriters find themselves in the unenviable position of equipping an uncharismatic governor with the words to sell a record of demonstrable failure while standing atop a heap of broken promises. She promised not to liberalize abortion laws or raise taxes, but she’s done the former and is preparing to do the latter. Unfortunately for Mills, the instances where she’s kept her promises have led to some of the more disastrous consequences for the state.

The Mills Administration has massively expanded welfare to the point that the state is now threatening to stop Medicaid payments to hospitals. She’s boosted funding for housing assistance to the point that her budget now relies on capping Emergency Rental Assistance for economic migrants who’ve flooded southern Maine. Regarding the opioid epidemic, she’s stacked cash into the “harm reduction” initiatives that have littered our streets with used needles, as bankrupt and defunct needle dealers lose their state accreditations. Additionally, she’s reformed Maine’s child welfare services, paying Deloitte Consulting $30 million for a software program criticized by internal and external sources for its ineffectiveness in helping the DHHS prevent child fatalities. Of course, it’d be best not to have kids in state care dying at such a rate. But at least, thanks to Mills, we’ve got a $30 million way for social workers to record their names.

Alas, the speechwriters still have to find a way to shine this turd. So Mills has two things going for her. First, one-third of the state still inexplicably thinks she did a stellar job protecting them from the Fauci Bat Flu. In reality, Mills seized on a mild flu bug to impose tyrannical lockdowns on the state. Her punitive and egomaniacal lockdowns amount to economic terrorism waged on the people of Maine from the Blaine House. Yet the affluent white female liberals living on their husbands’ investment accounts were largely immune to the business-destroying consequences of the needless havoc. So they’ll pet their cats and fondly recall pandemic days spent reading the governor’s prosaic poetry. We’ll likely hear Mills speak of those dark days as if she were Churchill helping inspire us through the bombing of London. In truth, her leadership during that time was a little more continental.

The second thing Mills has going for her, in terms of getting through this speech, is a good boogeyman in the White House. So expect her to reach for the laziest possible speech crutch: the specter of Trump. We know from previous administrations that Mills is more than comfortable lying about what Trump has said and done. These are, she’ll inveigh, dark times for the climate millenarians, the servants of Moloch, and the transgender groomers. Darker times still for those whose political and economic interests lie either in endless foreign wars or in trafficking as much Third World poverty into the U.S. welfare system as is humanly possible. However, she will tell us that her administration remains united in its resolve to stop Trump from… well… whatever bad things Trump plans on doing because it’s certainly bad.

So she’ll paint a gloomy portrait of Trump’s emergent Golden Age. We’ll hear some pithy but ultimately meaningless platitudes about moving forward, not backward, pushing for more progress, not moving into the past. She’ll cast herself as the vanguard of the dwindling harpy minority, rushing to confront the forces of Magadom armed with wind turbines, solar panels, box wine, and maybe some help from her brother’s associates in the Chinese drug cartels. Sadly, deluding herself into thinking she’ll lead Maine as part of some anti-Trump resistance is really the only thing she can do with the speech. Because, as we’ve established, she certainly can’t tout any record of accomplishment whatsoever. Everything she’s touched has turned to shit. The only positive news from tonight is that this will be one of the last insipid staff-written spiels we’ll have to endure until Sen. Susan Collins tosses her into the dustbin of Maine political history with a 60-40 rout in the 2026 Senate race.