As we approach the height of the political primary campaign season, candidates have begun releasing their plans detailing the actions they will take if elected. One would think that those running for governor would take the time and effort to scrutinize these plans in every detail before making them public, something one might expect from whoever ends up becoming governor. Unfortunately, this is simply not the case, and even a quick review exposes how little serious thought has gone into these proposals.
Last week, for example, Shenna Bellows released the outline for her “New Deal for Maine,” a series of proposals addressing what she believes is wrong in Maine. Point by point, however, the plan fails on many levels. For example, the Massachusetts born and Vermont educated Bellows plans to solve the problem of too-high local property taxes by freezing property tax rates for Maine residents and shifting the burden to those pesky out-of-state interlopers who own vacation homes here.
Setting aside the fact that the vast majority of Maine towns without a coastline have few, if any vacation homes, Shenna’s tax shift has already failed in an insurmountable way.
Acknowledging that her plan may be unconstitutional, she says she will propose an amendment to the state constitution to rectify this. Unfortunately, her idea violates the U.S. Constitution through its Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8), its Privileges and Immunities Clause (Article IV, Section 2), and its Equal Protection Clause (14th Amendment). These prohibit states from discriminating against non-residents in property taxation and courts have repeatedly ruled against such efforts.
This should come as no surprise since Bellows previously demonstrated her lack of constitutional prowess when she held a sham hearing to prevent Donald Trump’s name from being printed on Maine’s presidential election ballots. Within days, her position was shot down by the U.S. Supreme Court when it ruled unanimously that only Congress, and not the states, can act as Bellows attempted.
Next, Bellows wants to solve the housing crisis by having the state act as a cosigner on mortgage loans for new home buyers. If this sounds vaguely familiar, you may be recalling that in the early 2000s, Congress passed laws that forced banks to issue subprime mortgages to people whose income was not enough to make the payments on those loans. In 2007, the collapse of this misguided program plunged the U.S. into the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.
Only a decade and a half removed from the enormous suffering caused by that disastrous mistake, Bellows is now proposing that government again allow those who cannot afford mortgages to get them, and she wants state government to guarantee those loans with taxpayer dollars. It doesn’t take an economic historian to realize this idea will again lead to disaster, only this time as a burden to be borne just by Maine and not the entire country.
Promoting her New Deal, Bellows claims, “I’m going to invest in modernizing our state’s government infrastructure to make it easier for small businesses to interact with the state, saving time and money,” adding that, “I’ve modernized systems at the B[ureau] of M[otor] V[ehicles]. I can modernize systems in the rest of state government.”
At the moment she made that statement, however, the wait for an appointment time at the BMV offices in Augusta, Portland, and Bangor was two months.
In another puzzling proposal, Bellows’ fellow Democratic candidate Nirav Shah says he will support a two percent surcharge on Mainers who earn more than a million dollars annually, claiming it will generate $70 million in new revenue. The problem with Shah’s proposal, as with many other statements he made to Mainers during the COVID-19 pandemic, is that his idea is not based on facts or proper research.
According to the Maine Revenue Service, 2,267 Mainers filed income tax returns with an income exceeding one million dollars in 2025. These returns had a total earned income of $350,796,863. Two percent of that figure is just $7 million, which means Shah’s plan is off by a factor of ten, something that does not bode well for his other proposals or his potential effectiveness as governor.
Fear not, however, as this flawed plan comes from a man who once publicly stated that, “I don’t, I, you know, you’ve gotta, you know, one of my rules is never, ever, ever speak definitively on anything.”
Not to be left out, Democratic candidate Troy Jackson proposed what he calls his “Free Universal Child Care for Maine’s Working Families” plan. At the State House announcement on Friday Jackson said “his time in the state senate has shown him the increasing bipartisan need for childcare.” In his eight years in the senate, six of them as Senate President, the most powerful person in the state legislature, Jackson never once proposed this plan.
What he did support during those years was an increase of nearly $2 billion in taxes per year (70%) and a net metering solar program that now siphons $643 million per year from the pockets of working Mainers who pay electric bills that go into the profits of some of the world’s richest corporations.
Jackson says his plan would cost $350 million in new spending and would be the biggest investment into childcare in state history, raising what he admitted was the obvious question—how will he pay for it?
In a stunning lack of understanding of how state government and the economy work, Jackson, a two-decade veteran of the state legislature, claims the current childcare situation “costs the state economy an estimated $403 million in lost earnings, productivity, and revenue, roughly the same cost of my plan.”
By his logic, in order to make the plan work, the purely statistical concepts of lost earnings and productivity will somehow be converted into actual dollars deposited into state revenue. Never mind that only about five percent of all taxable spending in Maine ends up in state coffers, which would mean those imaginary “lost earnings” would represent a tiny fraction of the $403 million even if they were real dollars, which they are not.
For the plan to generate $400 million in state revenue, it would need to cause $8 billion in new taxable spending. To achieve this, each of the 18,000 people he claims are out of the labor force due to a lack of childcare would have to earn and spend $444,444 per year to pay for the plan. Since this is obviously an unachievable number, the program would have to be paid for by taxpayers as part of an expanded state budget.
Regardless of which candidate’s plan, if any, ends up becoming part of the budget process next year, it will have to survive an ominous funding situation created by eight years of wildly irresponsible spending by Democrats in the legislature.
In the latest budget that ended last June 30, the state confiscated $1.9 billion more from Mainers in taxes and fees than it did in the budget before Democrats took full control of state government in 2019. That’s a jump of 70% in just seven years.
Last week, the state’s Revenue Forecasting Committee projected that over the next two years it expects state revenue to rise by just $8.8 million. At the same time, the state is facing the very real threat of needing to find $28.7 million to send back to the federal government as a result of improperly billed Medicaid claims.
In addition, the current state budget includes nearly $5 billion in federal funds above the previous biennium. Much of this is one-time COVID-19 recovery funds that must be replaced by state taxpayer dollars going forward, or the programs they fund must be allowed to expire in the next budget.
These are the options presented by the field of Democrat candidates for Governor of Maine: poorly thought out, badly calculated proposals that defy the factual logic of the state budget, which will not have a fraction of the revenue required to implement them.
Given that each candidate has had months to think through these ideas, there is no escaping the reality that this is the kind of incredibly poor decision-making we can expect from each if elected.
