Tax Justice Digest stories about Maine

State legislators in Maine last week missed a great opportunity to expand health care coverage to a significant number of residents.  The state’s health insurance program was originally created in 2003 with the mission of providing insurance to 135,000 uninsured persons by 2009.  Currently, just 15,000 people are covered by the program.  The reason for this huge disparity is primarily an unwillingness on the part of legislators to raise taxes to pay for it.  In describing this year’s legislative session, one representative stated that avoiding tax increases was one of the “overarching goals that we began the budget deliberations under”.

Rather than seizing upon the fast-approaching 2009 target they set for themselves, legislators working under the “overarching goal” chose to expand coverage to only 4,000 of the additional 120,000 people they had originally planned to cover by next year.  Instead of addressing the problem head-on with needed tax increases, Maine legislators sidestepped the issue by only enacting relatively minor excise tax increases on alcohol and soda. 

This proposal is totally inadequate and will disproportionately affect those lower-income Mainers who are most likely to have trouble affording health care coverage in the first place.  In addition to having all the regressive traits of the sales tax, excise taxes possess an additional degree of regressivity in their per-unit rather than percentage basis.  That is, rather than being levied at a fixed percentage of a product’s price (5-7% for general sales taxes in most states), excise taxes are levied at a fixed amount on a specific type of good, regardless of that good’s price.  The Maine excise tax collected per gallon of wine, for example, is the same 65 cents whether that wine costs $6 or $600 per bottle.  The obvious result is that low-income people who purchase less expensive brands will usually face a higher effective tax rate than their wealthier neighbors.

Admittedly, Maine has taken more initiative to provide health care than most states.  This does not change the fact, however, that thousands remain uninsured and many would quickly enroll in the state-subsidized program if funding was to be provided in amounts sufficient to meaningfully raise existing enrollment caps.  Next time health care is debated in the Maine legislature, policymakers would do well to make assisting the uninsured, rather than steadfastly avoiding tax increases, the “overarching goal” of their work.

There are several proposals in states across the country that would expand state sales tax bases to include services. These efforts aim to improve both states' financial stability and the fairness of their tax codes. It's probably not fair, for example, that in some states people who do their own laundry pay sales taxes when they buy a washer or dryer but people who have their clothes laundered by someone else pay no sales taxes at all.

One component of an overall tax proposal in Maine would expand the sales tax base to include a variety of personal and real property services. In Maryland, a state house committee on Wednesday debated House Bill 448, which would expand the sales tax base to include luxury services like interior decorating and other personal services. In Michigan, Governor Jennifer Granholm has also proposed a measure to expand the sales tax base. The political ramifications of taking on previously untaxed businesses may make some policymakers wary. Nonetheless, as states shift from manufacturing economies to service economies, it's essential that tax structures change too. For more on expanding the tax tax base, check out ITEP's policy brief.

This November Maine voters will have the opportunity (unless the Legislature acts first) to vote on a proposal that would provide tax cuts to assist college graduates as they pay back their student loans. If the initiative is approved, college students in Maine who stay and work in the state after graduation may claim a tax credit of about $2,100. Advocates of the proposal say that offering the tax credit will make education more affordable for students and also "raise the wage and skill levels of Maine's workforce." However, some important questions remain regarding how much the tax credits will cost, where the money to pay for the credits would come from, and whether or not offering a tax credit will really ensure that students stay in Maine. 

In Iowa a similar proposal is focused on keeping college graduates in the state and slowing the state's "brain drain." The proposal allows businesses who repay new employees' student loan debt (up to $25,000) to receive tax credits of up to $7,500. In order to qualify for the credit, employers have to pay a minimum salary of $25,000 and start repaying the employee's loan within six months. The Des Moines Register's editorial board sharply critiques this proposal and raises good points about whether or not providing tax credits to businesses really is the best strategy for ensuring that college graduates stay or move into the state. Instead, the Register rightly suggests, "To reduce student loan debt, public money would be better used to hold down tuition costs at state universities, so students don't graduate with huge debt in the first place."

While the Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives (and apparently also the Senate) on Tuesday has has given new hope to advocates of progressive tax policies at the federal level, the results of ballot initiatives across the country indicate that state tax policy is also headed in a progressive direction. 

In the three states where they were on the ballot, voters rejected TABOR proposals, which involve artificial tax and spending caps that would cut services drastically over several years. Washington State defeated repeal of its estate tax. Several states also rejected initiatives to increase school funding which, while based on the best intentions, were not responsible fiscal policy. Two of four ballot proposals to hike cigarette taxes were approved and the night also brought a mixed bag of results for property tax caps. 

Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR):
Maine - Question 1 - FAILED 
Nebraska - Initiative 423 - FAILED 
Oregon - Measure 48  - FAILED
Voters in three states soundly rejected tax- and spending-cap proposals modeled after Colorado's so-called "Taxpayers Bill of Rights" (TABOR). Apparently people in these three states had too many concerns over the damage caused by TABOR in Colorado. 

Property Tax Caps:
Arizona - Proposition 101 - PASSED - tightening existing caps on growth in local property tax levies.
Georgia - Referendum D - PASSED - exempting seniors at all income levels from the statewide property tax (a small part of overall Georgia property taxes. (The Georgia Budget and Policy Institute evaluates this idea here.)
South Carolina - Amendment Question 4 - PASSED - capping growth of properties' assessed value for tax purposes. The State newspaper explains why the cap would be counterproductive. 
South Dakota - Amendment D - FAILED - capping the allowable growth in taxable value for homes, taking a page from California's Proposition 13 playbook. (The Aberdeen American News explains why this is bad policy here - and asks tough questions about whether lawmakers have shirked their duties by shunting this complicated decision off to voters.)
Tennessee - Amendment 2 - PASSED - allowing (but not requiring) local governments to enact senior-citizens property tax freezes.
Arizona's property tax limit will restrict property tax growth for all taxpayers in a given district. South Dakota's proposal was fortunately defeated. It would have offered help only to families whose property is rapidly becoming more valuable, and those families are rarely the neediest. Georgia's is not targeted at those who need help but would give tax cuts to seniors at all income levels. The Tennesse initiative, which passed, is a reasonable tool for localities to use, at their option, to target help towards those seniors who need it.

Cigarette Tax Increase:
Arizona - Proposition 203 - PASSED - increase in cigarette tax from $1.18 to $1.98 to fund early education and childrens' health screenings.
California - Proposition 86 - FAILED - increasing the cigarette tax by $2.60 a pack to pay for health care (from $.87 to $3.47) 
Missouri - Amendment 3 - FAILED - increasing cigarette tax from 17 cents to 97 cents
South Dakota - Initiated Measure 2 - PASSED - increasing cigarette tax from 53 cents to $1.53.
While many progressive activists and organizations support raising cigarette taxes to fund worthy services and projects, the cigarette tax is essentially regressive and is an unreliable revenue source since it is shrinking.

State Estate Tax Repeal:
Washington - Initiative 920 - FAILED 
Complementing the heated debate over the federal estate tax has been this lesser noticed debate over Washington Stats's own estate tax which funds smaller classroom size, assistance for low-income students and other education purposes. Washingtonians decided it was a tax worth keeping.

Revenue for Education:
Alabama - Amendment 2 - PASSED - requiring that every school district in the state provide at least 10 mills of property tax for local schools.
California - Proposition 88 - FAILED - would impose a regressive "parcel tax" of $50 on each parcel of property in the state to help fund education 
Idaho - Proposition 1 - FAILED - requiring the legislature to spend an additional $220 million a year on education - and requiring the legislature to come up with an (unidentified) revenue stream to pay for it.
Michigan - Proposal 5 - FAILED - mandating annual increases in state education spending, tied to inflation - but without specifying a funding source. The Michigan League for Human Services explains why this is a bad idea.
Voters made wise choices on education spending. The initiative in California would have raised revenue in a regressive way, while the initiatives in Idaho and Michigan sought to increase education spending without providing any revenue source. Alabama's Amendment 2 takes an approach that is both responsible and progressive.

Income Taxes:
Oregon - Measure 41 - FAILED - creating an alternative method of calculating state income taxes.
Measure 41 was an ill-conceived proposal to allow wealthier Oregonians the option of claiming the same personal exemptions allowed under federal tax rules and would have bypassed a majority of Oregon seniors and would offer little to most low-income Oregonians of all ages.

Other Ballot Measures:
California - Proposition 87 - FAILED - would impose a tax on oil production and use all the revenue to reduce the state's reliance on fossil fuels and encourage the use of renewable energy  
California - Proposition 89 - FAILED - using a corporate income tax hike to provide public funding for elections 
South Dakota - Initiated Measure 7 - FAILED - repealing the state's video lottery - proceeds of which are used to cut local property taxes 
South Dakota - Initiated Measure 8 - FAILED - repealing 4 percent tax on cell phone users.

Kiplinger reports that business are expected "to mount pitched battles to defeat" TABOR-esque spending tax cap initiatives in Maine, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, and Oregon. In fact, there's a concerted effort forming in Oklahoma that is actually being lead by business groups. The Chairman of Tulsa's Chamber of Commerce was even quoted as saying that TABOR would be a "train wreck" for Oklahoma.