To the degree this year’s legislative elections are not about Gov. Paul LePage – and he’s undoubtedly a big factor – they are about the numerous changes in direction initiated by Republicans during their first unfettered control of the State House in 44 years.

Nowhere are the differences between Republicans and Democrats more stark than on taxes, and a lively debate has ensued on the op-ed pages during this election season.

In 2011, Republicans pushed through, with some Democratic votes, a tax cut package they described as “the largest in Maine history,” and there’s some evidence to support that claim. But whatever consensus there was back then, it’s long since departed.

Republicans still praise the tax cuts as balanced and overdue, while Democrats depict them as an assault on working families. What happened?

Well, for one thing, the rosy budget assumptions on which the tax cuts were based proved almost immediately faulty. By the end of the year, LePage announced a deficit equal to the tax cut package over its first two years, and insisted that social services be cut by that amount – a demand Republicans ultimately met by passing a majority supplemental budget without Democratic support.

Democrats say they only voted for the original tax cuts because of the promise that social programs wouldn’t be slashed. They now say Republicans reneged, and it’s a fair assessment.

But, even on paper, are the tax cuts “balanced”? Only if you accept the original premise that all Mainers are over-taxed, and that the top income tax is rate is unfair to wealthier citizens. What the Republicans pointedly don’t include in their analysis are all the other taxes Mainers must pay –- chiefly sales tax and property taxes.

When those taxes are included, the picture shifts dramatically. A minimum wage worker pays 17 percent of her income in state and local taxes, while someone making $350,000 pays 10 percent. Like most states, Maine has a regressive tax system, and only the income tax keeps it from becoming even more regressive.

But even besides the issue of who pays, it’s clear the tax cut package is too large to be sustained –- something I believe Democrats should have seen from the beginning. Most of the eventual tax cut bill, which exceeds $550 million per biennium, kicks in only after the current budget expires, and there’s no way revenue growth will come close to filling the gap -– not with the national unemployment rate stuck at 8.3 percent and Maine’s now rising to 7.5 percent.

Based on what they did in 2012, it’s safe to predict that a re-elected Republican majority would refuse to modify the tax cuts in any way, and instead continue to cut away at the rest of state government. The choice in November thus becomes even more stark.

And one shouldn’t neglect another big feature of the tax system that Republicans also dramatically altered — aid to municipal government and public schools, which amounts to 40 percent of the state budget. The only way the state budget could be balanced was to keep local aid far below its statutory levels.

It’s true that governors in the past – John McKernan in 1991, and John Baldacci in 2009 – cut revenue sharing and school aid, but these measures were temporary expedients during recessions. LePage and the Republicans want to make these reductions permanent.

The state is supposed to pay 55 percent of local school budgets; this year’s it’s paying 43 percent. It’s supposed to pay towns and cities 5.1 percent of all sales and income tax revenue; instead, it’s paying 3.5 percent. These reductions amount to hundreds of millions of dollars – again, outpacing the initial two years of tax cuts.

Municipalities and schools face a double bind. Unlike the early Baldacci administration, when the state was “ramping up” increased school funding after a 2003 referendum vote, they’re now facing seemingly permanent reductions in state aid. So they, too, must slash budgets or inflict sharply higher property taxes on residents.

The tax cuts look unaffordable from a variety of perspectives. Much like Republicans nationally, Maine Republicans seems to believe that prosperity involves tax cuts for the wealthiest and sharp reductions in government programs that help working families, particularly for health care and education.

And Democrats, having been snookered once, are laboring to make clear what the impacts on the middle class are sure to be. It may be a more complicated message to sell, but then there’s the referendum on the governor and his policies to back it up. Almost any voter can understand the issues put in those terms.