Maine Beacon89%
How taxing the rich helps everyone, and how we can do it more 66%
By Beacon Staff82%
7/3/2026, 5:10:47 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 32 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Post Hoc (False Cause), and False Dilemma, with Appeal to Emotion as the most egregious example at 19.1% saturation with 470 hits. Analysis detected 5,737 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,462 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 52.4% and a BS Rank of 66% (9,673 of 27,714 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 65.10% of the article peer group.
This week on the podcast, Nora sits down with Maine Center for Economic Policy President and CEO Garrett Martin to talk about why tax fairness has become one of the biggest economic issues in Maine and across the country.
Nora and Garrett talk about major tax fairness victories in the last legislative session, look at what’s ahead, and look back at how decades of tax policy have shifted more wealth to the richest Americans while leaving public services underfunded.
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Interview (edited for length and clarity):
Nora: Starting broadly, Garrett.
Why do we pay taxes, and why does a fair tax system matter?
Taxes actually matter to all of us.
Taxes are basically how we in this democracy make good things happen and have good things.
So, when you think about the history of this country, tax policy has been central to our nation’s success.
In fact, if we look at the Civil War, for instance, one of the reasons why the North won was in part because of their willingness to enact an income tax, which allowed them to raise the revenue they needed to actually fund the war effort.
Then you think about other ways in which taxes make a difference in people’s lives, the infrastructure that we rely on every day when we go out on our roads and drive places, the mail service that we rely on, a whole host of making sure our food systems are safe and secure and effective.
There’s just any number of things that you can’t go through a daily life without acknowledging taxes help undergird, so that’s really part of it.
Going back to our nation’s early years, there was a period of time where settlers were expected to all work on the roads and improve the roads together, and one way in which you could get out of that was by paying to support others in working.
There’s this idea that there are things we want to do in our collective interests, they’re common goods and services that we all rely on that we want to sustain and build together, and so we need the revenue to do that.
So it’s whether you’re looking at schools, you’re looking at roads, you’re looking at safe food, you’re looking at good safety and security services, all those things are funded through revenue that we provide through taxation.
So basically, taxes are how we pay for the things that we need.
Not only that we need, but even nice things that we want.
At some level, taxes represent our highest aspirations when we’re willing to raise the revenue we need or want to, for instance, provide access to health care more broadly, that’s a choice that we make.
There are some countries in this world who value those public and community goods more highly than others, so they’re willing to raise the revenue to do that.
Here in the United States, interestingly, we’re on the lower end of that continuum.
If you look at how much we raise in taxes as a share of our overall economy, we’re actually one of the lower tier countries in the world in that regard, compared to other countries, where, for instance, they have universal access to health care, they have universal access to child care, they have universal higher education.
When we take that investment away, it means we have fewer resources to fund those kinds of things that we were funding before.
It’s little surprise that, for instance, a lot of working people now feel like higher education is out of reach for them.
One of the reasons why that’s the case is there used to be a point in time where states and the federal government put up a lot more money to fund higher education, which meant that it was a lot more affordable for working families, for working people, for first-time college goers, and now those dollars aren’t on offer.
This all makes a lot of sense.
But the idea that super rich people and really profitable corporations should pay something at least closer to what they owe in taxes has become a harder sell over the last few decades.
From your perspective, what is behind this?
Can we talk about the 1980s and Ronald Reagan?
Because a big reason for for the success of that shift was convincing people in the public, regular people, non-millionaires, that that we should cut taxes for the rich, that we should cut the size of government was by employing some really bad faith racist tropes to make people feel like tax dollars don’t do good things for people.
I’m not going to repeat them because we don’t do that, but basically we saw those tropes being repeated again.
We see them all the time, but by Governor Paul LePage, as well, when he was making the case to cut taxes and to cut the size of government in Maine, where did this kind of language leave Mainers during and after the LePage administration?
And where did it leave Americans?
Yeah, embedded in our nation’s history, and still to this day, is a racist framework for both how to undercut our ability to have nice things and to have a democracy and an economy that actually truly works for everyone, and it is the clearest divide and conquer strategy that is used by those who want to get your eye to look side to side with the people next to us and not necessarily look up and see who’s actually winning in this scenario, the unfortunate thing is it’s those tropes, if you will, are still as potent today as they were back in the era of slavery, and that’s deeply troubling, because it claims it’s both dehumanizing, but it’s also extremely harmful to the overall purpose of the great American experiment, if you will, but here’s what’s most galling about that, right, is that the very people who are getting pitted against each other by using those are the same people who lose out.
Right now for example we have this prosecution of fraud, quote unquote, in public assistance programs.
So, if we really wanted to go where the big money is, we would not defund the IRS’s ability to go after the biggest tax cheats, because that’s where the real money is, and in fact their estimates on what the tax gap is in this country, meaning how much money theoretically should be paid and how much money is actually being paid, and if we enforced the law and audited those larger returns where there’s clearly money being withheld, it’s order of magnitude something like $660 billion in dollars, could get you, it could get you universal child care and universal public higher education and paid family medical leave and an expanded child tax credit, similar to what we had during COVID, which cut child poverty in half.
So I think most people would argue those are actually really good things, and yet we’re leaving that money on the table because we wouldn’t want the IRS to have the capacity to actually go after tax cheats, but at the same time that we’re doing that, we have Vice President Vance coming to Maine trying to make a big deal about fraud that actually, in most instances, are paperwork errors that are being corrected and that have been identified and acknowledges meaning correcting, but more importantly, let’s call it for what it is, and this comes back to your point.
What they’re trying to do there is they’re trying to make you think about that person who’s kind of at your level and probably a person of color, and you’ve seen that very clearly in some the way some groups have engaged these issues while ignoring where the real corruption and fraud is, and that that is just it’s such a tried and true playbook
We’ve been talking a lot about about super rich people and corporations benefiting from this, I just kind of want to bring us back a little bit to, and I think the LePage era in Maine is a great way to think about this, just because it was so bald that what we saw as a result of the tax cuts and government spending cuts during that era, that Health and Human Services got cut dramatically, and kids died, and they still haven’t been able to rebuild that department after all those cuts.
People literally get sick and die as a result of these things.
Anyway, given how effective these people have been at deploying these really divisive, racist, and elitist and gross narratives about tax, the fact that regular people who are not fabulously wealthy have been reclaiming the idea of fair taxes all the more impressive.
So, Garrett, tell me, what has happened over the last few years, and how you can conditions have changed to make that possible.
So, I will answer your question, but to your point that you just made, it is true there are tremendous harms that have been caused for on people because of this sort of anti-tax, racist mindset, and I think in the preferential treatment to a certain class of people look no further than the one big beautiful bill act that passed Congress last year, the Trump tax plan.
It was $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.
Meanwhile, they cut health care by over a trillion dollars.
I think part of the reason why people are increasingly migrating to a space where they are talking about the unfairness of our tax code is because we have increasing number of examples in how the economy is failing working people and in how corporations and the wealthy are getting bailed out, while everybody else is getting left behind, and for me personally, I think some of this fervor really started to take hold after the 2008 recession, and that’s when we saw Occupy Wall Street.
So, we’ve got the recession 2008 we’ve got space billionaires, we’ve got Trump and Trump 2.0 we’ve got massive health care cuts, we’ve got a global pandemic.
People are quite rightly fired up about all of this, and starting to see that, gosh, maybe it’s not that person down the street’s fault, maybe it’s that guy up there’s fault, and maybe I should start looking up there instead of over to my right.
We’ve seen some big changes in not just the way people think and talk about taxes, but in Maine, in the last couple years, in the actual progress we’ve made toward turning our tax system back, so it’s right side up again.
And tell me a little bit more about what we’ve seen in the last couple years.
Yeah, I think we’ve seen a couple of things that reinforce why this matters.
First of all, we’ve made changes to our tax code that are actually lifting kids out of poverty, so the improvements we’ve made to, for instance, the earned income tax credit to the child independent tax credit are boosting incomes for low and moderate income households, such that it’s actually raising kids out of poverty.
That’s a good thing.
More recently this past year we passed the millionaires tax, and what’s so interesting is to observe the debates around that issue from and the transition from where we were even as recently as 2016 to where we are today, there was much more support and appreciation of the need for tax fairness of the desire to raise the funding we needed to make the investments in things like family planning in free community college and programs that were potentially at risk of not getting funded had we not raised this additional funding, which goes back to your original question of like why do taxes matter.
I think that is a very clear example of a victory that we’ve had, and I think it’s also a very compelling case for why we in Maine continue to honor that I lead motto that we have, and Domain is one of four states this year who that had a major win on tax fairness, and I think is in opposition to what has happened at the federal level, which is going in the opposite direction, and so we’re like a riptide right now, right, the federal government is pushing more and more costs down into the states, they’re enriching people at the top more and more.
A lot of things are in flux right now at both the state and the federal levels, but overall, as you look toward next year in the state legislature and fights that we would try to take to the federal level what is on the tax fairness list for the next little while.
I think a lot of what we are looking at as we think about issues at the state level is building on the wins we’ve had, while recognizing that again the risk here for Maine and for Maine people is not necessarily so much what’s happening at the state level, but more what’s happening at the federal level.
Our ultimate desire would be we enact tax fairness at the federal level, which raises the resources to make the kinds of investments that make even bolder change more possible, but short of that, I think in the near term, what we need to do is make sure that Maine can be the best version of itself that it can be, and part of that means that we need to make sure we’re continuing to raise the resources to provide the supports that are in place to make the investments in our communities and in our infrastructure, and it turns out that there are actually some tax fairness things we can do in our state tax code.
We still have this issue of how we’re taxing wealth and inherited wealth relative to how we tax work.
It turns out there are things you can do at the state level to try and address some of that, along with corporate taxation.
I think those are some of the core ones, and then you got all kinds of great things out there about what’s going to happen with AI data centers and what’s going to happen with luxury taxes and those kinds of things, which are all fun to muse on, but we’ll see where we go with those.
The post How taxing the rich helps everyone, and how we can do it more first appeared on Maine Beacon .
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90%flagged-word coverageGarrett Martin
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