Tax cuts are really just reductions in services

To the Editor;
Taxed enough already? Median family income in Maine is about $37,500 (half of families earn more, half earn less). The “median” family might be a couple where the wife works on the grocery store’s checkout counter and the husband works in the woods. Or the “median” family might be a single parent who is a teacher, nurse or police officer. How much did they pay in taxes?
Assuming that they filed a short form with standard deductions, for 2016 they paid about $1,400 in federal taxes, and about $220 in state taxes (4 percent in federal taxes and one half of one percent in state taxes) — altogether a whopping 4.5 percent for federal and state income taxes! In addition, they paid about $2,300 for Social Security (payroll taxes), and they paid another $2,000 for local property taxes. Altogether they paid about 16 percent of their gross income in federal, state and local income, payroll and property taxes. (Of course they also paid sales taxes, gasoline taxes and a host of other smaller taxes and fees. But for now, let’s just consider the widely touted “Tax Cuts”).
What do we get for our federal, state and local taxes? At the federal level, about one fourth of the budget goes for the military, one fourth for Social Security, one fourth for health care, one sixth for interest on the debt and a tiny one twelfth for the entire rest of the federal government. At the state level, 40 percent goes for health care, 40 percent for education and only 20 percent for the entire rest of the state (including roads). Locally, about half of our taxes go to education, about 7 percent to the county (mostly courts and law enforcement), and the other half to the town (most of that for roads and protection — fire, police, street lights, etc.).
We’d all like tax cuts. However, for most of us, a tax cut means a possible deep cut in services. What services should we cut? At the federal level, should we cut the military? Should we cut Social Security (for over half of us, that’s our only retirement savings)? At the state and local level, should we cut education? At both the federal and state level, maybe we should cut health care? At the local level, should we cut, roads, police and fire protection?
We hear all the time that we should cut this or that federal agency (the EPA, Education Department, etc.). However, cuts to any programs other than military, health care or education amount to peanuts against the $1,400 in federal, and $220 in state income taxes that we paid.
So, for most of us who work for a living, income tax cuts really don’t put much money into our pockets — without really serious cuts in the services that benefit all of us, or resulting in shifts to other taxes that we have to pay. When we dig into the numbers at all, we quickly realize that, for most working Maine families, income “tax cuts” are a bad deal. We give up far more in services than we gain in our pockets; or, worse yet, “tax cuts” merely shift the burden from those who are well off to working people.
There is another approach. This gets to the comparison of the 16 percent that the average Maine family paid in income taxes versus the famous 14 percent that Mitt Romney paid in 2011. Who pays taxes, and who benefits by tax cuts? More on that later.
Let’s discuss. My email is chrism@roadrunner.com
Chris Maas
Dover-Foxcroft