March 28, 2024
Letter

It happens in Maine

While pondering the great things about living in Maine, I decided to jot down a couple of them. Where else but Maine can you go before the city or town council and ask for Tax Increment Financing (TIF) to expand or for whatever reason? Then they go to the Legislature and/or the governor and ask them to take away the few remaining Workers’ Compensation benefits, because the employees they have maimed or crippled have cost them so much they are having a hard time making a profit.

Then a few years later, after they have picked taxpayers’ and employees’ pockets of everything they can get, they announce they are closing. And we find out they have moved overseas to some country where they don’t have to worry about injuring or even killing employees because there is no such thing as Workers’ Compensation or minimum wage or union contracts. So now they can sell their products for the same price as when they were being made in Maine and the profit margin is even greater. Some past employers that come to mind are the woolen mills, shoe shops and textile mills.

Those former employees who have worked so hard for them will be left with no health insurance coverage because on unemployment they cannot afford to pick up the policy they are guaranteed to be able to buy when they lose their jobs due to plant closing under the government’s COBRA law. Yet, the convicts we just built new facilities for in Warren have full health care coverage, paid for by the taxpayer.

We should sell York and Cumberland counties back to Massachusetts. Issue everybody else Smokey Bear hats and shovels and Yogi Bear picnic baskets and make them Angus King Park Rangers.

Lawrence W. Carr Jr.

Fairfield


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