LePage Tax Reform in Context of Policy, Nietzsche and Niels Bohr

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BANGOR, Maine — Gov. Paul LePage on Wednesday took his budget-promotion roadshow to the Queen City, where he pledged to fight in 2016 to defeat any lawmaker who opposes his efforts to decrease the income tax.. LePage vows to spend ‘rest of my days’ fighting opponents of income tax cuts Bangor Daily News

The communicative devices of politicians are simplistically packaged ideas aimed at a mass mentality which, in concept, is easily manipulated. However.LePage as a crusader for lower taxes is a hard sell to large swaths of Mainers including the Maine Municipal Association, the non-profit community, property owners and a plethora online commentators who recognize that higher sales taxes means higher over all taxes for most, and that a potential closing of non-profit services will make life harder and eliminating municipal revenue sharing will mean higher property taxes with only the wealthiest seeing an overall benefit by LePage's reduction in income taxes.

LePage is threatening to conduct a campaign against his own party members during election season if they do not do his bidding and instead heed the voices of their constituencies, leaving one to wonder who is going to finance LePage's election season campaign against his own party ?

On Wednesday, he said he had little faith the amendment would pass this year, but he seemed confident that even if he couldn't win in the State House, he can win in the court of public opinion.LePage vows to spend ‘rest of my days’ fighting opponents of income tax cuts Bangor Daily News

We can see a preview of  Lepage's promised election strategy against his own party in his State of the State speech where in LePage targets the Maine Municipal Association

The Maine Municipal Association is supposed to represent cities and towns. MMA is not a taxpayer-friendly organization. Its mission is to protect local officials—not local taxpayers.

Your local officials pay dues to MMA with your tax dollars. MMA uses those dues to fight for bigger and more expensive local government. They should be called the Middle Man Association. They pit local taxpayers against local officials. They fight against any kind of tax reductions.

In Waterville, the city manager worries about a one-million-dollar loss in revenue sharing. Neighboring Winslow gets $500,000 in revenue sharing.But residents of Waterville and Winslow are paying 17-million-dollars in income taxes.I ask them: Would you trade 1.5-million-dollars to keep 17-million-dollars in your pockets? I’ll take that deal any day. State of the State Speech 2015

One of the many fallacies in Lepage's argument is that the LePage solution trades a generally distributed benefit for an individually distributed benefit. The purpose of government as provided in the Maine Constitution is to promote the common welfare meaning that which is common to all. Municipal governments provide services used by general public. Income is taxed individually. Exchanging municipal revenue sharing for a reduction in income taxes benefits those who pay a higher income tax and decreases revenue for services shared commonly by all and that exchange underscores the code at work in the Lepage governing philosophy.

There are 9 states with no income tax. 19 other states are working to reduce or eliminate the income tax. Maine is leading the nation with our bold plan. We’re the first out of the chute.State of the State Speech 2015

The point quoted above from Lepage's State of the State address seems disconnected from an audience of Maine people. It is a talking point for LePage's political ambitions but has little effect in the everyday lives of Mainers. What difference does it make in the lives of the people if Maine is the first or the boldest in putting a popular political trend into action ? From the people's perspective, what is important  is whether or not LePages over all plan will serve a common good and benefit their own lives.

Lepage sells  the idea of reducing or eliminating the income tax in the way that Obama sold America ObamaCare. Many naively believed that Obama Care meant free health care for all and who doesn't want free health care- or no income taxes? But the health care bill was 2000 pages of regulations and sold to the public with intentional lies. LePage is selling reducing the income tax as an unexamined and isolated good fragmented from the the means used to achieve the end. 

In 2014 another popular trend was used to market LePage's failed jobs bill- that was "Right To Work", which backfired on LePage since no one in the media seemed to have actually read the bill, in which the state takes over the role of the union and redistributed taxpayers money replaces union dues. The public and media alike responded like Pavlov's dog to the term "Right To Work" used to sell LePage's bill. The outcry that the bill would have resulted in lower wages was completely wrong because the bill was essentially Pine Tree Zones tax exemptions for capital extended to big businesses which locate in Maine's two city-states of MRRA and Lorring. It required the usual trade off - tax incentives for capital in exchange for a state revenue stream derived from jobs providing higher than average taxable income and benefits. 

When promoted for their surface value, "Free Health Care", "Right To Work" and "Eliminate the Income Tax" and even "Prosperity not Poverty"  are jiffy mix slogans for success and political stardom, which is exactly what Lepage is telling us that he is implementing when he threatens to go after Republicans who do not support his bill. Those Republicans will me framed as being against the end (reducing the income tax), when in fact they are against the means.

The way to reduce the income tax fairly is to reduce the size of government. Maine has two readily identifiable bloated systems - the general welfare system for the bottom half of the economy and the corporate welfare system for the top half of the economy- the one distributing rations and the other distributing opportunity. Lepage  wants to reform one and aggressively expand the other. There is no public discussion about where and how budget cuts are to be made, this is decided within the private enclave of the overlord class just as was done many years previously when the corporate state was instituted as Maine's new governing system. The Jiffy slogan for corporate welfare is "creating jobs"- that's all the public needs to think about. "Creating jobs" is another slick and slippery surface presentation for public consumption, concealing and not revealing the real activity that the jiffy slogan makes so copacetic to the public's ears. What has become of another conservative slogan- " the government doesn't create jobs? The private sector does" ? When the government hires its own corporate boards to redistribute taxpayer money to capitalists, that line has been unmistakably crossed.

LePage's  plan calls for the elimination of municipal revenue sharing but that elimination applies only to Maine's municipalities that actually have municipal governments. Lepage's 2014 jobs bill was designed for projects "in a military redevelopment zone"- in other words for the only two municipalities in the state that do not have municipal governments and are governed instead by boards appointed by the state. Although these municipalities are promoted as economic development centers for the state, the abundance of Maine and federal taxpayer dollars that flow into the two towns are used exclusively for economic development within the geographical municipal boundaries. Does not this qualify as a special class of municipal revenue sharing? What is revenue but money that the state takes in ? The city states of MRRA and Lorring are getting an oversized share by standards of municipal revenue sharing but LePage's elimination of municipal revenue sharing does not apply to MRRA and Lorring. Municipalities which serve as instrumentalities of the state are governed, by definition, by laws of their own. Every taxpayer in Maine and the USA contributes to the economic development of Maine's two state governed municipal corporations. The municipal revenue sharing which Lepage wants to eliminate distributes funds back to the rest of the state. MRRA and Lorring, having no municipal governments, cannot provide municipal services as those are not state functions. The (unconstitutional) special act of legislation that chartered Maine's two city states identifies them as "municipal corporations that serve as instrumentalities of the state" -Unnecessary middle men (municipal government) has been eliminated and replaced with state appointed middle men (tzars).

CONSTITUTION OF THE STATE OF MAINE
2013 ARRANGEMENT

Article IV.

Part Third.

Legislative Power.

Section 14.  Corporations, formed under general laws.  Corporations shall be formed under general laws, and shall not be created by special Acts of the Legislature, except for municipal purposes, and in cases where the objects of the corporation cannot otherwise be attained; and, however formed, they shall forever be subject to the general laws of the State.

Most politicians would not come out so boldly as Mr Steve Woods and say that their economic solution is population displacement, (implying an end goal of population replacement- gentrification). Baldacci employed different ideas. Baldacci's solution to the economy was to encourage "the creative class" to move into Maine, using a definition of 'creative class' which must include a higher economic status. Baldacci's guru was social engineer Richard Florida. When the state put out its juried creative economy list serve, all who passed the jury's approval displayed a message on their web pages attributing Richard Florida as their inspiration.

The Übermensch (German for "Overman, Overhuman, Above-Human, Superman, Super-human, Ultrahuman, Higher-Person, Higher-Being"; German pronunciation:[ˈˀyːbɐmɛnʃ]) is a concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. In his 1883 novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra (German: Also Sprach Zarathustra), Nietzsche has his character Zarathustra posit the Übermensch as a goal for humanity to set for itself. Since this is a work of fiction, the utterances Nietzsche assigns to Zarathustra are not immediately discernible from his own thoughts and writings.  Wikipedia on Übermensch

Most politicians understand that Steve Wood's approach doesn't play well with the masses. One can only imagine that such a disconnect between the politician and the people comes from spending too much time in the exclusive company of those sharing one's own vision and values- or in my own terminology, by surrounding oneself predominantly with members of the overlord class of Maine, in mutual agreement on their designs for the state. Let it be noted that we are talking about man made designs alienated from the concept of God and/or concepts coming out of twentieth century quantum philosophy, ie, of a non-local reality (wholeness) interactive within the local reality of many separable parts as perceived within physics classical limit, which was the known scientific dimension during Nietzsche's lifetime. Nietzsche died in 1900, the same year Planck's Constant was published, setting off a revolution in scientific understanding which included a recognition of the limits of scientific understanding, prompting Niels Bohr to say "we have reached the end of what we can know", resonating with long held concepts of God expressed with such turns of phrases such as "God can only be known from behind", meaning that we cannot know God in totality. Such alienation from God and/or Nature is part and parcel of Nietzsche's philosophy which has been heavily entrenched in America's university system along side the political philosophy of Karl Marx. There is no higher understanding than that of man in the nihilistic philosophy which thus intellectually justifies the right of  designated overlords to implement their own designs upon the world.

Lepage vision for reducing income taxes redistributes funds used for common welfare to private person's bank accounts within the upper sector of the economy - Just another public private relationship, not different in its redistributive effect from The Expanded And Improved Seed Capital Tax Credit of 2013, which name reveals the code of the Maine legislature to be the same code operative in the LePage governing philosophy. The Seed Capital Tax Credit improves profits for private capitalists and owners of the means of production and expands burden on the general taxpayer. The LePage budget decreases funding for common uses and increases the size of bank accounts of private individuals. The reason why the legislature could vote unanimously in support of the Seed Capital Tax Credit is because it is spun as "job creation" and the actual details of what the refundable tax credit does is left largely unknown to the general public. The details of LePage's jobs bill are not so easily hidden behind the spin of "lowering- even eliminating the income tax". Too many constituencies understand exactly what effect LePages tax reform will have on their own circumstances. It's readily understandable.

The legislature must answer to the voters if they want to be re-elected to pass more bills like the "Expanded and Improved Seed Capital Tax Credit". The game of politics is all about perception. The public perceives beneath the hastily constructed surface of Lepage's tax reform- the cost of being the first Governor out with a bold plan to eliminate income taxes.