MoldyNalgene t1_j1zqvtx wrote
Reply to comment by mainegreenerep in Newcomers to New Hampshire and Maine continue to drive population growth: More people are dying than being born, so population growth depends on people moving in from elsewhere by TurretLauncher
Many lists of states by tax burden have Maine listed as #3; refer to the link below. Then you have taxes like vehicle excise tax, which many states do not have. The average new car costs about $48k as of July 2022. With Maine's excise tax you'll be paying an additional $3600 in the first six years, and that's on top of the sales tax paid.
The other big issue is the tax brackets. If you as an individual made more than $54k in 2022, you are in the highest tax bracket of 7.15%. In Southern Maine an income of $54k is not much given cost of living. The average one bedroom apartment has a rent of just about $1800/month in Portland in fall 2022 according to the Bangor Daily News. That comes out to $21,600/year just in rent. At a gross income of $54k/year you'll be spending 40% of your income on rent. Generally they say rent should be no more than 30% of gross income. Explain to me why the state should be taxing someone in the highest tax bracket that can't even afford to keep rent at at less than 30% their annual income. Maine really needs to update their tax brackets because it currently acts like middle class people are going home and jumping into pools of money like Scrooge McDuck.
It gets better though. The state has now decided that regardless of income or wealth, the boomers and silent generation can freeze their property taxes if they've owned a home in Maine for 10 or more years. At some point the state will need to raise taxes on the younger generations to pay for that freeze or start cutting services.
mainegreenerep t1_j204bsu wrote
> Forbes List
That's problem number one right there. Forbes is pretty mediocre for cherry picking, and rarely accounts for things like reduced services, privatized costs etc.
Unless you're doing a cost of living comparison, a tax burden comparison is less informative than you might think. I'm not saying Maine's the best! (we're not) nor that we can't improve, but any argument that's just is about how Maine's taxes are terrible, you can pretty much just discount that argument. It's almost always based on biased or poorly calculated sources (you can't compare taxes in a dense, warm climate state to a rural poor state fairly). But even just going off taxes and nothing else, Maine's taxes are higher, but compared to other cold weather states on a relative scale, not so much.
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