You’ve really got to hand it to Gov. Paul LePage. Not everybody could come up with a budget that gives enormous tax breaks to those who need them least, while virtually guaranteeing that seniors and others on fixed or low incomes will pay proportionately more in property and sales taxes. The budget also guts essential state programs and denies the poor access to medical care. With any luck, LePage’s ingenious plan will work, and droves of those pesky low-income Mainers will die off from lack of medical care, saving Maine’s needy 1 percenters even more tax dollars.

LePage’s budget also ingeniously complements congressional Republicans’ legislative attempts to give much-needed tax relief to suffering millionaires nationwide. Under the Affordable Care Act, hard-working day-traders have been forced to pay draconian tax subsidies just so some losers at the bottom of the income scale working three part-time jobs can access medical care for trivial complaints like diabetes and cancer. The unfortunate 1-percenters forced to pay such unfair taxes have suffered greatly; they have been unable to afford Jaguars and second homes in Palm Beach, having to make do instead with Audis (and even in some extreme cases American vehicles), and second homes on Martha’s Vineyard. To add insult to injury, these oppressed 1-percenters are now not even able to buy cruelly produced luxury fur items under the Ivanka Trump label at Nordstrom’s. This is a national crisis of unprecedented proportions, but thanks to LePage’s proposed budget and congressional Republicans’ new health care legislation, the worst abuses against Maine’s and the nation’s millionaires will be addressed at the expense of the lower classes, whom divine providence has seen fit to place in poverty, because they are obviously bad people who deserve their miserable lot in life.

Janet Lynch

Pownal