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Showing posts from December, 2011

RE Scott Lansley's article in the Sun Journal- Dig A Little Deeper!

The latest in my letter writing binge !  Dear Mr. Lansley, I read your article in the Sun Journal , It may hurt, but it's time to suck it up and deal. As suggested, I am sending you my own thoughts on the matter, and I am not going to mince my words. Since you are a former member of the legislature, you may have helped to create what I see as the source of Maine's economic problems, which is it's government manipulated economy, which has grown to the scale of a full fledged corporate state without anybody saying BOO about it, despite the blatant unconstitutionality of the current entrenched economic system. This system has been constructed by the legislature over the course of at least thirty years. It is designed to "benefit " the "targeted sector"- those businesses that will fulfill the ideological vision of a small elite sector of Maine, which is marketed as "socially beneficial" as a form of self-justification. The legislature seeks

Transparency and the Quasi-Public Corporation.

TWEET THIS ! http://goo.gl/YgfpJ1 I have been again looking  for information on the amount of taxpayer money invested in government chartered private non-profit organizations, such as the SEGF (since 2014 known as The Maine Venture Fund), and once again I have come up with nothing. These organizations are so dispersed and intertwined with one another that even if one can find mention of an occasional sum of money invested it is as if finding one little piece of a jig saw puzzle. A few years ago I read The Non-Profit Economy by Burton Weisbrod . Weisbrod discussed three distinct economic sectors- government, private and non-profit. but I do not recall a mention of non-profit corporations which are charted by government legislatures. However there was a lengthy discussion about  entities that have a for-profit part and a non-profit part, with instances found where all expenses would be allocated to the for-profit part of the entity, thereby reducing the tax burden of the for-pro

Can De-constructing Maine's Corporate Welfare System Cover Maine's DHHS Budget Deficit ?

I have my head in the sand working our redesigning our website- which now comes up three times on the first page of a google search of "ceramic birds" with similar results for other related terms (thanks to my own SEO efforts) . We are getting a lot of phone calls as a result and so the need to get this job completed is all the more important. As long as my energy is focused there, I am not wanting to change that. I feel a bit remis about not attending to this blog but the vise versa is true when my attention is focused here. However- when I recieved an email with this report   from Sam Adolpsen of The Maine Heritage Society about the DHHS deficit in which he advocates cutting welfare and "progressive special interests" . I responded with the following: Dear Mr Adolphsen, Is "Progressive Special Interests" equitable with corporate welfare? How about eliminating the 10% annual investment in the government chartered Small Enterprise Growth Fund, which m