Rebuilding Maine’s Economy through Green Housing Investments

As altruistic as this bill appears to be, I'd like to take a moment to speak for myself (a taxpayer who has never qualified for anything remotely close to assistance - even though there were times in the past that I worked 2 jobs and STILL barely made enough to live).

I am all for helping people who need assistance to build a better life, but I have to say that I am at my wits end with all of the discussion of "job creation" that will only create jobs in the short term. Jobs that pay a living wage with reasonable benefits are all but gone now. The death of the many paper mills, shoe factories, textile mills, etc...have provided a dearth of jobs that cannot, and I repeat, cannot be replaced with mainly part-time service-sector minimum wage jobs with no benefits. I know how many residents of this state are employed - albeit - underemployed and qualify for Mainecare and other assistance. It is staggering to me. Contrary to popular belief, a considerable amount of Mainecare recipients aren't welfare cheats - many work full-time (or as close to full-time as they are allowed to). Construction jobs are great, yes, but the fact of the matter is that construction jobs wax and wane and sooner or later, they simply go away until the next "boom or bubble" of building.

This situation probably would have more support from many people IF it weren't for the indisputable FACT that this state seems to be working a budget that not only appears to be based on voodoo mathematics, but also seems to be addicted to spending revenue that it doesn't even have yet. I'll use the current school consolidation situation as an example of that: First the penalties are this much - oops! We were wrong...it won't cost you that much, it'll cost you this much - for now anyway. As a taxpayer all I can say is basic arithmetic will take us very far - do not spend what you don't yet have in order to generate an amount whose end will not justify its means. I'm also becoming less than impressed with a populace who seem to vote bond issues through as if free matching federal fund money rained down from the sky. Harsh perhaps, but I see what federal taxes fly out of my paycheck as well.

Furthermore, ForestBeekeeper hit the nail on the head when he said "But a portion of the money will go to administration, to banks, only a part of it will go to construction workers, and then only until the money runs out." After the money runs out, many of the construction workers will go back to qualifying for services, and the taxpayers will continue to pay both for this bill, and for the services that the newly-unemployed construction workers will then qualify for.

Personally, I would like to see the money spent in incenting businesses that don't have their corporate headquarters in another state (and send the bulk of their profits there) to come up here and hire Mainers so that they don't have to live in pre-1976 mobile homes. Reasonable wages and reasonable benefits would keep a lot of the working poor off Mainecare - which truly is a giant draining vortex of a program that's parting a lot of Mainers from a lot of their wages (in the form of taxes).

Additionally, with the number of people I now know who have recently received "pink slips" and the number of mortgage forclosures that I see daily in the paper, it'll be a matter of time before the tax-payer pool shrinks even further and I end up having to sell my home to move into a pre-1976 trailer. Sound contrived? Perhaps, but not to all of my acquaintances that were living high off the hog (and forking over big state taxes in the process) in the mortgage business for the last few years. It's all relative to me - for now anyway - able to still pay my bills and feed my kids without assistance. I'd like to keep it that way.