Last Friday the Franklin Journal published a column entitled “Governor LePage: Wrong on Taxes.” It would be unkind to mention the author’s name, but the text is worth examining because, with one exception, it presents all the standard fallacies without doubts, second thoughts or serious analysis.

The one exception was an argument resting on a comparison between the New Hampshire property taxes of the author’s brother with his own. This is novel because most of LePage critics have sense enough not to try making a point by comparing the tax cost of houses in two locations without any reference whatsoever to their respective size, features, and location.

No need to dwell on the uselessness of that incomplete comparison. What is for more important, and far too common, is the author’s failure to grasp our governor’s primary objective in proposing elimination of the income tax. Paul LePage aims to give Maine an

economic future. As things now stand the future promises to continue the pattern of an elderly population getting steadily older, and the number of people in the workforce declining as our sluggish economy stagnates and younger Mainers head for sunnier climates with jobs.

Most people will think it redundant to point out that a shrinking workforce means shrinking payrolls and shrinking payrolls mean declining tax revenues. I’ve nevertheless felt it necessary to point this out since last Friday’s column missed the Maine/New Hampshire comparison which really counts. The economic statistics for our two states were comparable around the time Maine’s income tax was passed by the legislature. Since that time New Hampshire has drawn steadily ahead. This may not be entirely coincidental.

I am not proposing a final and comprehensive analysis of Governor LePage’s economic policy prescription in this short column. It has not gone without criticism and the science of economics gives plenty of room for debate. In the end we will have to rely on proverbial New England wisdom: the “proof of the pie is in the eating”.

Those who support abolition of the income tax point to Texas which has no income tax and a dynamic economy. Opponents go looking for other causes for Texan dynamism. That is a debate worth having. Those who refuse to acknowledge that there is an economic rationale for abolition worth discussing can be ignored without any harm to the public welfare.

Little sermons on the glories of government always pop up in columns and letters to the editors defending taxation. Here’s a sample: “Taxes pay for necessary state and local services, including education, fire and police, and bridges. To have a decent society, we all need to pay taxes.”

I’m kind of hurt that last Friday’s author didn’t include “paying Frary’ salary and benefits for 32 years” as one of his prerequisites for a decent society. I was pretty well paid for 32 years thanks to the generosity and gullibility of New Jersey’s taxpayers, but part of that pay covered flunking or scaring off about 40 percent of my students.

What! Scaring off? How brutal was that? Not so brutal as it sounds. Having one foot in the college bureaucracy for my first eight years I could compare results in my class with outcomes elsewhere. I gave more W-grades, fewer “F”s. My colleagues gave more “Fs” fewer”Ws”.

Add the two grades together and the totals were about the norm. It’s not difficult to make the case that a “W” is a better result than an “F” but that’s beside the point. Those New Jersey taxpayers were paying Middlesex County College to flunk or otherwise dispose of 40 percent of its students year after year. I don’t believe they ever knew it.

We might pause for a moment while praising governments for providing the necessities of a decent society and reflect that the Sunlight Foundation has calculated that the “influence industry” spends about $12.5 million on lobbying for every single member of Congress, i.e., an estimated $6.7 billion in 2012. Does anyone believe they all these lobbyists are beavering away in our nation’s capital in order to make us all more civilized and decent? Anyone?

All I’m saying here is that we should not allow our gratitude for all those bridges to blind us to the self-seeking at work in government at all levels, including in the Augusta level.

The “fairness” issue appeals to a lot of voters. It’s especially appealing to voters who believe fairness means other people pay more so they can pay less. The graduated, or “progressive,” income tax, seems to promise this.

Fairness has been part of the rhetoric of tax reform ever since the income tax was imposed. Loopholes are created and plugged and loopholes are bored in the plugs and new loopholes are created in the name of fairness; and so we come to an income tax code that stretches out over 70,000 pages. Nobody really believes this is fair except perhaps the tax lawyers and accountants who receive large fees for delving deeply into those pages on behalf their wealthy clients.

Maine cannot achieve this “fairness” by steeply graduated rates alone. It would also require the imposition of heavy excise taxes on the most expensive automobiles, on stretch limousines, on yachts, on private jets, and on every form of transport that can carry wealthy people into New Hampshire, Florida , Texas or some other low-tax state. They know the way.

Professor John Frary of Farmington, Maine is a former US Congress candidate and retired history professor, a Board Member of Maine Taxpayers United and publisher of www.fraryhomecompanion.com and can be reached at: [email protected]