Restoring Normal: Fighting High Taxes and Soaring Electricity Bills

Maine is a collapsing state, emblematic of problems nationwide. Running to be governor has allowed me to meet many people and learn what bothers them, their woes, fears, and hopes. Having met 30,000 voters in 17 months, I have learned a lot. Three concerns dominate – affordability, quality of life, and loss of “normal.”

On affordability, Mainers represent an extreme case of what afflicts America. Excessive state spending (budget doubling in eight years), no fiscal accountability, wild fraud and mismanagement, hundreds of “unfunded mandates” on towns, businesses overregulated, property and income taxes record high – all forcing workers, businesses, and taxpayers young and old to suffer, then leave.

Like California, Maine’s taxpayers, retired residents, and businesses are in full revolt. The tax base – forced to pay for the whims of an unaccountable, one-party government, mismanaged health care, public safety, electricity, and freebies for illegal aliens, worst infrastructure in America - is bolting.

Many – including young people – would like to stay, but cannot. They have no good jobs, cannot build or buy a house, see the “American Dream” dying in Maine. The combination of record property taxes – as a percent of income, waste, fraud, and corruption has put the state’s economy in a spiral.

Biggest part of Maine’s affordability crisis? The vertical climb of electricity bills, up 36 percent last year alone, highest in the nation. The fiction that all things will be powered by solar and wind has become a misery, destroying Maine’s natural beauty and causing average ratepayers –  95 percent of the state – to fund a market-defying, ideologically-driven solar and wind invasion.

Solar panel plantations made in China and ugly wind towers pollute Maine’s once pristine countryside. Worse, in the name of Nirvana – that is, ending the worlds CO2  “footprint” – Maine punishes rate payers in ways bankrupting or exiling them, one by one.

China creates more CO2 in less than three hours than Maine does all year, yet the Democratic Socialist Progressives in Maine believe that they can empty the ocean one teaspoon at a time.  Impact? Horrific on every day Mainers.

The cost of power in Maine has – as a direct result of this obsession – gone from six cents per kilowatt-hour to 20 cents per kilowatt-hour in just eight years. Projections are 47 cents by 2033, under the Democrat plan.

Understand what this means. Unless voters get off the death train – the next nine years will drive electricity rates to eight times what they were in 2020, even as property taxes keep rising. Think about the absurdity of the Democratic plan, running the taxbase out, solar energy to excess.

Compounding Maine’s affordability crisis and mismanaged economy, are the side costs – unattended drug and human trafficking, unmonitored addiction crisis, rising crime rates, asylum seeker benefit crisis, health care SYSTEM in collapse – hospitals lost and about to be.

Beyond record spending, over-taxation, over-regulation, mismanagement, and a collapsing tax base, these issues are themselves enormous – killing the “quality of life” in Maine. Audits – state and federal – confirm widespread waste and fraud, as addiction hits 150,000 (ten percent over 12), law enforcement goes underfunded, and “illegal aliens” (sanctuary state) are invited in with free housing, cash cards, and medical care. Health care and school systems are in freefall.

Finally, there is a craving – among traditional Democrats, Independents, and Republicans – for what is universally referred to as “the old normal,” public and private consensus around peace, predictability, common sense, which is increasingly uncommon.

The idea that people should wake up without anxiety over loss of home, bloody needles on the streets, constantly rising taxes, quietly widening crime, and whether their children and grandchildren will have a future at all, schools across Maine failing national standards, feels increasingly out of reach.

This is what I am learning: People want hope – grounded hope, a return to what once worked, to “normal” as defined by objective indicators. They just want fiscal management – not theft – of their tax dollars, honesty in government not lies, affordable homes, good jobs, manageable electricity costs, quality and accessible health care – no more bad news.

This is also my vision, the idea that a state in relative collapse, having been brutally mismanaged, badly led in every area, can recover. Two-thirds of the state crave “change,” and the entire state deserves it. There are answers – and they amount to restoring “normal.” In Maine and the nation, if not now, when? If not us, who? We owe our founders, fathers, mothers, and kids at least “normal.”