I recently learned that New Mexico has established a trust, modeled after Norway’s national sovereign fund, to provide free, universal child care. In both settings, royalties from natural resource extractions provide the funding.    Imagine if recently acquired tariff revenues were allocated to an American sovereign fund with similar purpose. Without the financial burden of child care, […]

I am 79 years old. Currently I: I don’t get recruited to boards because I’m rich (Social Security is our big paycheck). I am valued because I know how to make things work — a talent that has apparently increased as I have aged. I don’t suspect that there are many Mainers of any age […]

“Quiet, piggy!” Really? With fewer quiet senators, would there have been a “Quiet, piggy!”? Possibly. But it probably wouldn’t have been hissed at a journalist just doing her job on Air Force One. Sen. Susan Collins’ irresponsible silence is her vote of support for such outrages. Calculated, cowardly, quiet in the face of the escalating […]

I believe Gov. Mills is the most electable and, in my view, the best candidate to run against Susan Collins. However, Mills’ age, by the end of a six-year Senate term, is going to be a problem for some voters who are open to replacing Susan Collins. Gov Mills recognizes this and has stated that the most critical period of […]

I’m responding to Joe Charpentier’s great article on heat pumps (Nov. 16). It has always amazed me that weatherizing was not a prerequisite of purchasing heat pumps through the Efficiency Maine program. We have updated our insulation, doors and windows, furnaces two or more times in our old house. The products available today are vastly […]

You can really tell that Zohran Mamdani’s election to lead the city of New York has really got people in a full-blown tizzy by reading letters like Kevin Landry’s (“Democrats take a page from Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm,” Nov. 16). Landry reels from hyperbole to hysteria as easily as Donald Trump navigates a golf course during […]