That’s a goddamn lie
It’s the 20th of November, 2025, another dark dawn. I sit in a small room and read the news on my phone. There’s an article on the Portland Press Herald’s website headlined, “Maine launches interactive map to help residents find food assistance.” I sigh.
High up in the story I see the now familiar summary of the problem in what’s known inside newspaper newsrooms as a nut graph: “One in eight Mainers, or about 180,000 people, faces hunger — the highest food insecurity rate in New England, according to data collected by the national nonprofit Feeding America. That includes roughly 45,000 children.” Sigh again.
This is followed by a quote pulled from the press release, attributed to Amanda Beal, Commissioner of the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry. “We know that too many Maine people struggle to find nutritious food, and the new Maine Food Access Map is designed to meet this real and growing need.”
I run this sentence through my handy Orwellian Newspeak translation app (that part’s not exactly true) and it confirms that the state official in charge of farming is proposing to meet the real and growing need of human hungernot with food or money for food, but with tech — an online guide available to people who can’t afford to eat but still somehow pay their Spectrum and Verizon bills. Somewhere deep inside, I feel a rumble brewing.
I tap the link, get to the map, and enter my apartment’s address on Munjoy Hill. The closest pin point is Rosemont Market & Bakery on Congress Street, which, the map informs me, accepts SNAP. That tiny and pricy natural foods shop closed nearly 10 months ago. Rumble.
I scooch the map over to Portland’s West End, knowing this one’s gonna send me over the edge, but too angry to look away. Sure enough, there’s Fresh Approach Market, the family-owned grocery store and butcher shop that’s fed families on food stamps for over 30 years, often putting something extra in the bag when they see hungry kids in tow. Fresh Approach, the map tells me, accepts SNAP. Uh-oh…
Last winter I reported on our Substack that the federal Department of Agriculture pulled Fresh Approach’s license to process SNAP payments. An undercover agent executing a multi-visit sting operation last fall tricked a clerk into ringing up less than 10 bucks’ worth of paper products and some dish soap on their card, in violation of the rules. The mom-and-pop grocer was fined $5,700 by Joe Biden’s food-stamp police for this first offense, but allowed to make monthly installment payments of about a grand (plus 4 percent interest, naturally).
Shortly after Trump took office, the government erroneously claimed owners Chet and Peg Knights were late on a payment, and their license suspension was extended, apparently indefinitely, as federal offices were purged of staff by DOGE and then emptied during this fall’s shutdown. Despite a GoFundMe campaign organized by neighbors last spring that raised over $17,000 to save the last affordable grocer in the West End, Chet told me this looks like Fresh Approach’s last holiday season. Shit.
Here’s my nut graph: Trump’s cuts to emergency housing, heating and food aid would cause mass suffering in Maine if actually imposed, but our state can cover the cost of all those programs and more — even without raising taxes on the rich, if you’re uptight about that. The Democrats who lead our state and represent us in Congress know this full well, but they’d rather try to score political points and keep the fat cats happy than assure frightened Mainers their government has their back. Indeed, the specter of widespread hunger and homelessness in Maine is the rhetorical club they wield in public statements in a crass and vain attempt to dent the Tesla truck of Trumpism.
In 2026, outraged Mainers could hold No Kings rallies on every street corner and it wouldn’t slow Trump’s shredding of the safety net. But messages and protests pressuring the Maine Democrats who control our state’s budget to cover those gaps have real promise, especially during an election year when every seat in the Legislature is up for grabs and the governor is running for higher office.
Here’s what I mean about not raising taxes. Over the past few decades, state lawmakers and governors of both parties (and no party, in Angus’ case) have passed scores of so-called tax expenditures (a.k.a., tax breaks) written to exclusively benefit successful companies and wealthy investors. They’re called expenditures because they’re equivalent to the government spending money. If Augusta says you don’t have to pay $10,000 of income tax you’d otherwise owe on pain of prison or property forfeiture, that’s essentially the same as Augusta transferring $10,000 into your bank account, as far as you’re concerned. It’s spending public funds before we can even collect them and start arguing about what to spend them on.
The stated goal of tax expenditures is typically to spur economic activity and protect or create jobs, but the recipients are being rewarded for doing what successful business owners and investors normally do: using their piles of capital to make more money for themselves by expanding, hiring and training workers, or investing in new equipment and technology. It’s Reagan-era “trickle-down” economics, the idea that further enriching the rich will ultimately benefit everyone. The validity of that theory is reflected today in nut graphs that tell us 45,000 Maine children will starve without state intervention.
By now, these sweetheart deals — notorious for their lack of oversight, accountability and demonstrable benefit — cost Maine hundreds of millions of dollars in lost tax revenue every year, according to the Maine Center for Economic Policy (MECEP), a progressive, but nonpartisan, research and lobbying organization. Ending these ongoing giveaways is not tantamount to a tax-rate increase; it’s simply requiring the wealthy companies and individuals who are feeding at this trough to start paying their fair share, the rates specified by what government bean-counters call “normal tax law.”
Let’s go back to the Press Herald’s website: July 1 of this year, an article headlined, “Trump’s tax, spending law will slash food assistance for thousands of Mainers.”
First off, that headline should probably read “… tens of thousands of Mainers,” because unreasonable new work requirements for SNAP recipients and onerous administrative costs for the state will reportedly remove “some or all benefits for an estimated 32,000 Mainers, including families with children, older people and veterans.”
Or perhaps it should’ve read “175,000 Mainers,” because that’s how many adults and kids Democratic Gov. Janet Mills says could suffer as a result of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. “This burdensome shift would threaten the viability of Maine’s SNAP program and risk 175,000 Maine people going hungry,” Mills warned.
The Big Beautiful Bill, passed in late June, will increase Maine’s annual SNAP tab to $60 million, we’re informed, beginning in fiscal year 2028. According to Mills — who’ll be out of the Blaine House well before that year’s budget is voted on — that’s “a cost the state simply cannot absorb.”
Maine’s two Democratic members of Congress agreed. Chellie Pingree, quoted in the same article (and also up for re-election next year), predicted the act’s outcome will be “devastating” for Maine and all 175,000 of its SNAP recipients. Jared Golden released a statement in which he promised, apparently without irony, to “continue to oppose efforts to cut taxes for the wealthy while making it harder for poor people to afford food and health care.” (The federal budget is likewise filthy with stupendous tax expenditures; Golden announced this fall that he’s quitting Congress.)
Not being versed in the finer points of state tax law, and taking politicians and the press at their word, aid recipients are understandably panicking.
“People are really scared,” Alex Carter, an advocate with Maine Equal Justice, told the newspaper, “scared that they are not going to be able to survive, that they’re going to lose their housing because they can’t pay for their health care, or they’re going to have to accept whatever the food pantry has that day and not be able to buy their kids the meals that they need. And that’s terrifying.”
Last month, more bad news from Washington: a $13.5 million cut in federal emergency-housing aid for Maine that could kick over 1,200 disabled people and their families to the curb.
“Asked … if the state could find a way to fill the gap, Mills said there is a limit to what Maine can do when it comes to changes in federal funding,” the Press Herald reported on Nov. 17.
“It feels like not a day goes by where the federal government isn’t threatening [to cut] some other source of federal help in health care, education, housing, whatever it is,” Mills said. “I talk with other governors all the time, asking, ‘Can we backfill all these cuts?’ Generally speaking, no. States aren’t able to backfill all the federal cuts.”
Notice how the governor dodged the reporter’s question by shifting the subject of her answer from this specific cut to all federally funded programs. She gave no assurance this or any other vital lifeline will be funded next year; instead, she spoke vaguely about suing something and contacting our congressional delegation.
Pingree released a statement slamming “the administration” for “announcing these cuts just before winter, when shelters are already overburdened and the risks to unhoused people are especially stark.” But she basically implied they’re a done deal and likewise offered no hope the state would or could step in. “These cuts will put Mainers’ lives at risk, strain local services, and worsen our state’s already dire housing crisis,” her gloomy statement read.
In reality, Maine can easily absorb $60 million of additional SNAP spending and $13.5 million of lost housing aid in the years to come — just cancel the largest and least defensible tax expenditures buried in the books.
In a MECEP policy brief published a year ago, “Tax Policy Solutions for 2025 and Beyond,” analyst Maura Pillsbury lays out numerous ways the state can raise huge sums — most of which do involve soaking the rich a little bit, but there are some prime tax-break targets, too.
Like the Dirigo Business Subsidy, which lowers a firm’s income taxes by as much as $2 million annually if they buy equipment and train workers. That one started this year and is projected to cost Maine $45 million in lost revenue every year it continues, “with no guarantee it will have an impact worth the high cost,” Pillsbury wrote. “The subsidy draws money from Maine workers, communities, and small businesses — giving away their tax dollars — and funnels it toward big businesses that often already have the wealth and resources to make the investments this program hopes to attract.”
The Business Equipment Tax Reimbursement and Business Equipment Tax Exemption programs slash the property taxes companies owe on their equipment under normal tax law. Combined, these two tax breaks deny Maine $80 million we could otherwise devote to meeting human needs every year. Pillsbury notes in the policy paper that three-quarters of all the benefits from this pair of programs goes to just 8 percent of recipients.
They must be very large businesses with lots of equipment, but as with most of the biggest expenditures, it’s unclear exactly who’s taking advantage of them (i.e., us) and for how much. “Not only are these programs ineffective; we don’t know what money is going to these businesses,” Pillsbury told The Bollard last month. “There’s no or little transparency. … We don’t know if we’re subsidizing Amazon; we don’t know to what degree we’re subsidizing Walmart.”
On the phone, Pillsbury mentioned a few fresh tax expenditures passed last session and signed by Gov. Mills, who requested no changes to any current tax breaks in her most recent budget proposal.
Among the biggest, weighing in at a quarter-billion over eight years, is the New Markets Tax Credit. This one slashes income taxes for investors who put cash into so-called community development entities that in turn give loans or investment money to businesses in low-income Maine communities — defined, in part, as those with at least a fifth of their residents in dire poverty. Apparently the first round of this tax credit, issued in 2011 and also costing us a quarter-bill, failed to erase the pockets of destitution they were designed to fix. A summary of the tax break prepared by Portland law firm Pierce Atwood lists some examples of businesses that qualify for this indirect, state-subsidized investment, including hotels, “commercial real estate projects,” and museums.
Another humdinger bearing Mills’ signature: An Act to Promote Food Processing and Manufacturing Facility Expansion and Create Jobs.
Pillsbury highlighted this one as an example of the type of tax expenditure specifically written to benefit one or, at most, two huge companies, like the Shipbuilding Facilities Credit reserved for Maine businesses with over 5,000 shipbuilders on payroll. Bath Iron Works takes $3 million from our public treasury every year thanks to that giveaway, on top of the $81 million property-tax break the City of Bath handed BIW last decade (see “Ship of Fools,” Feb. 2018). The state tax break — first granted by then-Gov. King in 1997 and re-upped by Republican Gov. Paul LePage in 2018 — will hand the war profiteers $45 million in total, on top of the $60 million they got from us in the first round. Meanwhile, BIW’s parent company, General Dynamics, continues to blow billions buying back its own stock to pump up its value and enrich the top brass.
The Food Processing expenditure was written to benefit only two companies in Aroostook County: potato processor Penobscot McCrum and Taste of Maine Potato Chip Co. Pillsbury called this one “really egregious,” because during the public hearing, she said it was clear both companies intended to complete their qualifying projects whether they got a big tax break or not. But it gets worse.
In addition to doubling the maximum amount of investment that qualifies for tax breaks, to $200 million, it removed the requirement that applicants’ businesses be headquartered in Maine now or during the past five years. A few months after being given this giant handout, Penobscot McCrum announced it’s selling its processing operation to global food giant McCain Foods, which now stands to pocket $19 million of our money over the next two decades while it churns out potato chips in a new factory on the former Loring Air Force Base in Limestone.
Mills, Ag Commissioner Beal, and state lawmakers from both parties showed up for a ceremonial bill signing last summer at Penobscot McCrum’s Washburn HQ. “Expansions are tough, but anytime the potato industry needs something, you’ve always had our back,” Nick McCrum told those assembled, according to an article in The County.
Beal was quoted calling the tax break a “powerful investment” in Maine, perhaps oblivious that it’d soon be benefitting a multinational corporation headquartered in Canada — though given the number of Cumby’s pinpointed on her map of nutritious meals, maybe more state-subsidized junk food will help someone’s kid sleep at night.
Last session, two other proposals to raise revenue included in MECEP’s 2024 report — an increase of the corporate tax rate that could net us $35 million a year, and new tax brackets for high-earners that could bring in maybe $100 million more — passed the Maine House and Senate but stalled in the face of veto threats from Mills, who expressed opposition to any increase in “broad-based” taxes. A third, to create a “millionaire’s tax” similar to the one Massachusetts voters passed a few years ago (projected to net Maine about $50 million a year), was narrowly defeated, the nonprofit news site Maine Morning Star reported in a summary last June.
The refusal of top Democrats (and pretty much every Republican lawmaker) to collect the funds needed to keep Mainers fed and sheltered is an affront to the will and wishes of the people they purport to represent, rich and poor. The latter desperately need the help, and the former have been providing it privately, as evidenced by the surge of donations to food banks and other charities during the shutdown crisis. Working-class Mainers, students and retirees have also been contributing money and volunteering during these MAGA-made catastrophes.
Sitting in my little room some mornings, I daydream of a Maine politician whose response to Trump’s assaults on the poor goes something like this: Fellow Mainers, the president’s actions are despicable and dangerous, but we live in a big, strong state full of hardworking, compassionate people and highly creative and successful enterprises. We have each other’s back in hard times — that’s the Maine way — and this time is no different. No Mainer will go hungry or become homeless due to Trump’s cruelty. The richest among us, those companies and investors who’ve taken generous handouts for decades, will simply have to return the favor and start contributing their fair share.
If you decide to run for office next year, feel free to use that on the stump.
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