You learn every day talking with people, listening to their stories, absorbing their anger, fear, and concerns and channeling that into the solutions that will lead us to a better place. As a conservative running to be Maine’s next Governor, I learn more every day. So far, the campaign trail has highlighted one basic truth: Our pain is real.
Some lessons are sobering. People are hurting. People who did everything right watch as Augusta Democrats betray them, take what they worked for over a lifetime. Examples of this are legion.
This week, a senior couple who had always played by the rules, always worked hard, finally paid off their mortgage, raised their kids, just hoped for a peaceful retirement – reached out to me. Their property tax bill went from $2700 a few years ago to $8900, a shocking, more than three-fold increase. They, like many, are in acute distress.
“Why did this happen?” they asked me. Answer: Maine, under Democrat control, pushes endless mandates on towns and counties, death by a thousand cuts, everything from new accompaniment requirements for non-violent offenders to prisoners’ dental work, pop-up drug treatment to more and more school mandates.
Legislators push, people pay, and mandates drive property taxes up and up.
At the same time, costs of education continue to rocket, by school, by pupil, by administrative salary. In Maine, they doubled between 1986 and 2006, doubled again to now. Sadly, to no good end. Scores for 4th and 8th graders were best in the country in 1992, now “dead last,” 50 of 50.
Dig deeper. Why did that happen? Teachers’ unions, driven by national agendas but paid by local teachers, pull millions from Mainers – then use that same money to lobby for political mandates on schools, creating bureaucracy, distraction, indoctrination, minimizing critical skill learning.
Of course, administrators protest that bold statement, but it is true. Lesson learned? When you stand up, express the pain of everyday people, object to absurdities that create and perpetuate that pain, expect spit in the eye, and belligerent blowback.
But as they used to say in the military, “if you are taking flak, you know you are over the target.” The resulting bureaucracy – across Maine school systems – is suffocating teachers, demoralizing them, while depriving students of time for math, reading, writing, science, history, and shop.
But there is more. Beyond dramatically falling, objective indicators of critical life skills and emphasis on enabling weakness, excusing underperformance, replacing hard lessons with accommodation, emotionalism, indulgence and widely acknowledged administrative failures, costs just keep rising. So, we are now paying the government, as they elevate failure.
Unions push legislators to create more administrators, pay them more, excuse their failures, all the while using good teachers as a foil, an excuse. What else? Unions pay themselves more. Maine’s top eight union staff each make $200,000, five times the average teacher. Make sense?
The kicker is those miserable results – and they are miserable, 70 percent of Maine’s 4th graders unable to read or read at level, nearly the same percentage of 8th graders ignorant of math. No accountability, yet more spending. Results: Low teacher morale and unprepared students.
So, why may that good Maine couple lose their home? Simple. Democrat mandates, unending regulation and indoctrination, pressure on schools to conform to political nonsense – like boys in girls’ sports, pressure on towns to keep spending. And Democrats still dominate school boards.
Meantime, young Mainers face a similar problem, other end of the generational failure. They do not get the privilege of paying sky-high property taxes, because they cannot afford a home. As a young US Marine – in his late 20s – told me at the Wayne Memorial Day parade, “Sir, you had the American Dream, rent, save, get a home, pay it off – we do not believe in the dream.”
Shocked, I asked him to explain. He did. “To buy a home, you need a good job, not minimum wage but career, chance to rent, save a downpayment. My family ten years ago paid $800 dollars a month to rent a house; today, I cannot get a studio apartment in Portland for $2000 a month.”
Bam! There it is. Bottom line: Rich, out-of-touch Democrat leaders, more interested in progressive subsidies for “green” crap, electric buses, wind towers, solar forests, more administrators and illegal aliens, are killing young Mainers’ dreams – yet do not see the damage.
Lessons on the trail are sobering, especially when it comes to the lack of affordability, uneducated leadership, bureaucracy, inexperienced people who constantly find excuses to break promises and grow government, not cutting but pushing more taxes, spending, and “green” everything – destroying the hopes of honest Mainers, like that older couple and young Marine.
Words are cheap, but Maine’s pain – the most important lesson so far – is very real.
