The price of commodities will always go up. Will raising the minimum wage be a benefit or a panacea?

Imagine being a retiree, living on Social Security. Hopefully, your mortgage and car are paid for, leaving food, health care, heat and such other necessary things as water/sewer, real estate taxes, insurances, electricity, telephone and any maintenance to home to come out of … what?

The costs for raw materials increases each year. Those costs are passed on to the manufacturers who pass along their costs to the retailers. Guess who the retailers pass their increased costs along to?

So how does a retiree get the benefit of that minimum wage increase? Social Security checks didn’t go up.

Gov. Paul LePage wants to cut income taxes, but to make up for the revenue loss, he wants to increase the sales tax. Retirees can’t all go to New Hampshire to buy their goods. Their expenses just keep going up.

Households with incomes more than $200,000 will be paying an extra 3 percent in taxes, supposedly to benefit public education. The state lottery was supposed to alleviate the cost of education but ended up in the general fund. Will the new tax money actually go for education?

The future looks bleak for children of low- to middle-income parents. It will be difficult or impossible to pay college expenses. Those children will have to work extra hard and apply for scholarships or take out huge loans in order to pursue training beyond high school.

George Ferguson, Sabattus

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