Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter for 40 years. He welcomes comment at [email protected].

Normally the last supplemental budget of a governor’s second term is devoted to housekeeping and cleaning up. Not so this time.

Instead, Maine Democrats have launched something of a mini revolution by affixing a 2% “millionaire’s tax” surcharge onto the state income tax, after four decades in which both parties agreed that while income tax rates might go down, they could never go up.

Yes, the tax “polls well,” but that’s been true for a long time. The public broadly favors “soaking the rich,” yet somehow it never comes to pass.

What changed things in Maine was a national movement to rediscover the income tax as a way to raise baseline revenue. Soon, Washington state, for the first time in a century, will be taxing earned income — though the 10% levy applies only to households earning more than $1 million annually.

The model for Maine’s new effective 9.15% rate is clearly Massachusetts where, after the Legislature failed to act, a 2022 referendum campaign succeeded in applying a 4% surcharge, bringing the top rate to 9%. Maine’s legislative Democrats are essentially getting ahead of the curve.

They wouldn’t have succeeded, however, without a dramatic reversal by Gov. Janet Mills. After seven years of discouraging and vetoing almost any tax proposal lawmakers tried to send her, she took the occasion of her U.S. Senate campaign to proclaim a higher income tax part of her legacy as governor.

Whatever the reasons, it’s an important course correction after decades in which the income tax just couldn’t get any respect. The business and Republican argument against the progressive income tax is that it “punishes success” by assessing higher rates on higher incomes.

For decades, this argument persisted in defiance of the economic facts, as income and wealth became distributed more and more unequally, wages stagnated and the two-income household became a minimum requirement for raising children.

Yet the current enthusiasm to tax “millionaires” does play into a unfortunate stereotype — that we need to take punitive measures against the wealthy. These convictions, unfortunately, are what’s produced the yin and yang of federal policy, with Republican administrations (Reagan, George W. Bush and Trump) dramatically cutting top rates and Democratic administrations (Clinton, Obama, Biden) raising or restoring them.

Tax policy has become a war zone, and that is not what we need at the federal or state level.

As it happens, when it was adopted in 1969, Maine had an income tax widely admired for fairness, equity and predictability. Unlike federal changes under Republicans, which created dramatic “cliffs” between brackets, Maine’s rates started low and rose only gradually. This minimized tax avoidance because there wasn’t much advantage in it.

So the millionaire’s tax is only a stopgap, a Band-Aid if you will, against the more thoroughgoing restoration of the original income tax, which in its day was not only accepted but popular, winning a 3-1 margin in a 1971 referendum meant to repeal it.

Massachusetts reformers were stymied because the state constitution established a flat 5% rate; there are now only two effective brackets, 5% and 9%. But Maine has no such restrictions. It can assess any income at any rate it wishes.

True tax reform — an inviting goal for the next administration — would review the dozens of tax preferences legislated in recent decades, including the tilt toward business in the King and Baldacci administrations, and the constant drumbeat for new credits and exemptions heard annually in the Taxation Committee.

Counterintuitively, lawmakers should also aim to include more taxpayers under the income tax. It was the Republican ploy to “take people off the tax rolls” that produced Mitt Romney’s notorious statement during the 2012 presidential campaign that 47% of Americans were “takers” because they paid no net income tax.

Romney’s estimate, while technically accurate, was misleading because the same “takers”  pay a far greater proportion of their income in property, sales and excise taxes — all regressive levies — than many millionaires pay on their incomes.

Making the income tax closer to universal would increase public support and hopefully create a consensus behind it, rather than continuing the economically damaging see-saw each time a new administration takes office. Lower-income individuals would pay very little, but it’s a fact that universal programs like Social Security and Medicare are far more stable politically than “needs- based” programs such as Medicaid and food stamps.

While the Mills administration’s final supplemental budget does represent a welcome change in direction, it’s still only a baby step. Maine should again seize the opportunity to make its tax system among the most admired in the nation.