Issue Education

MECEP provides lawmakers, advocates, and the media with reliable, fact-based analysis and practical solutions to support good governance in Maine’s term-limited, lightly staffed citizen legislature. As a trusted thought partner and strategic ally, MECEP helps frame the issues and strengthen efforts to advance economic justice.

Below is an overview of MECEP’s core work on taxes, the state budget, and support for workers — three key elements of advancing economic justice in Maine.

Maine Center for Economic Policy (MECEP) develops and promotes solutions that expand economic opportunities for Mainers at every stage of life. This means:

  • Every Mainer can pay their bills, cover basic needs, and care for their families
  • Fully funded schools and strong communities with robust infrastructure and services
  • Workers have safe jobs, fair pay, and respect
  • Small businesses are able to compete with large corporations on a level playing field

Taxes

Mainers know the challenges facing our communities need a response big enough to meet the moment. Whether it’s a housing crisis, direct care workforce shortages, or aging roads and bridges, the best way to make a difference is to confront them as a state. But wealthy individuals and multinational corporations stack the deck to avoid paying taxes — and corporations continue to receive tax breaks — forcing the rest of us to pick up the slack while leaving important cornerstones of our society underfunded.

  • The people who earn the least shouldn’t pay the most in taxes. In Maine, the wealthiest 1% pay a smaller percentage of their income in state and local taxes than the middle class.
  • Tax structures that favor the wealthy shift costs onto workers and small businesses, making life harder for communities. In many states, families with low income pay a bigger share of their income in taxes than the wealthy.
  • Every year, Maine gives away hundreds of millions in tax breaks to wealthy corporations, but we don’t really know if we’re getting anything useful in return. These giveaways mostly help big companies that are already rich, making it harder for local independent businesses to compete. Meanwhile, regular Mainers — especially those who are struggling — are asked to make do with less. The state loses billions in revenue from these tax breaks, money that could instead go to things like better jobs, stronger schools, and programs that actually help people.
  • Tax fairness matters to everyday Maine people and families because the way taxes are structured affects how much money they have for basic needs and how well the state can fund services that benefit their lives. A fair tax system means people with lower and middle incomes don’t pay a disproportionate share of their earnings compared with wealthier households, and Maine’s efforts to expand credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit, child tax credit, and property tax fairness credit have boosted the financial security of families with lower incomes.
  • Lawmakers should ask the wealthy to pay what they owe so that we can boost long-term public investments that make it possible for families with low and moderate income to climb the economic ladder. Fixing our tax code will make it possible for us to invest in the things that provide opportunity for all families — essential services like education, health care, child care, and energy assistance — and ensure every Mainer has a fair chance at a better future.

Some current proposals:

Some recent advances

  • Created a “millionaire tax” that applies a 2% surcharge on income above $1 million
  • Maintained and increased the federal and state child tax credit (known in Maine as the Dependent Exemption Tax Credit), one of the most effective tools to help families manage the rising cost of raising children, shown to have moved millions of children out of poverty
  • Increased the real estate transfer tax on higher priced homes to raise tens of millions of dollars per year

Budget

Maine policymakers must continually make decisions about what public goods and services we want and how much we are willing to pay for them. We have a choice to make better policy decisions that intentionally fund the brightest future for the Mainers who face significant hardships and barriers. Our public budgets reflect our collective social and economic values and priorities. In this way they are “moral documents” as well as fiscal ones.

Through the state budget, we pool our resources to fund the things that benefit all of us — strong public schools, safe roads and bridges, clean air and water, reliable public safety, parks and libraries, revenue sharing that keeps towns stable, and health care through programs like Medicaid so no one falls through the cracks. These shared investments remove barriers to opportunity, help families meet their basic needs, and allow every Mainer to fully contribute to their community and local economy.

  • Lawmakers are often faced with creating a balanced budget when the money coming in isn’t keeping pace with rising costs. During these times, instead of asking millionaires and multinational corporations to step up, much of the penny pinching comes at the expense of Mainers already chronically undervalued and underpaid. There’s a way to raise revenue that doesn’t cut vital programs or shift the belt-tightening to working families — ask the wealthy and large corporations to pay their fair share in taxes.
  • We don’t have to choose between bold policies and balanced budgets — we know how to do both. Maine’s recent economic success didn’t happen by accident. While other states disinvested in their people and handed tax breaks to the wealthy and big corporations, Maine chose a different path: investing in its people. To sustain vital programs like paid leave, free community college, and free school meals, we need a tax system that asks more from those who benefit most from our economy.
  • Policy choices favoring the wealthy have resulted in Maine losing hundreds of millions of dollars each year due to tax cuts that mostly helped the rich. Instead of protecting the ballooning wealth of millionaires and multinational corporations, let’s side with working families and small businesses.

Recent state budget decisions will make a real difference for Maine people and communities by investing in the foundations of economic security.

Lawmakers funded the startup of Paid Family Medical Leave, stabilized property taxes for older Mainers, expanded access to the Medicare Savings Program, boosted and improved the Maine child tax credit for young children, and addressed major child care shortfalls — steps that help families afford basic needs and stay in the workforce. The Legislature also protected funding for school meals, safety net programs, and K–12 education at the full 55% level, supported affordable housing through progressive revenue changes, and restored key cost-of-living adjustments for direct care workers.

Support for Workers

Maine’s economy depends on a strong, stable workforce, yet workers across the state continue to face barriers that undermine their ability to participate fully in the labor market and support their families. Across industries, outdated or inadequate labor protections further destabilize workers’ lives.

  • Irregular scheduling practices, like lack of reporting (or “show up”) pay, undermine economic security for hospitality and retail workers
  • Limited wage transparency — including the lack of publicizing wage gaps by gender — keeps workers from negotiating fair compensation or finding better jobs
  • Farmworkers remain excluded from core labor standards, a gap that disproportionately harms Black, Latino, and Indigenous workers
  • Direct care workers — who provide essential support to older adults, people with disabilities, and those with behavioral health needs — are chronically undervalued and underpaid, creating severe shortages that ripple across the economy. Key challenges include:
    • Low wages and high turnover, which weaken the quality and consistency of care
    • Inadequate reimbursement rates, leading to burnout and insufficient staffing
    • Family members leaving the workforce to provide care, costing the state more than $1 billion in lost GDP annually
    • Strain on hospitals, which often cannot discharge patients due to the lack of available care settings
  • Maine’s child care sector — essential for early childhood development and for helping parents, especially mothers, stay in the workforce — faces similarly acute challenges:
    • Child care costs that exceed affordability, often surpassing public university tuition and far above federal benchmarks
    • Low wages for early educators, which fuel staffing shortages and reduce available child care slots
    • A shrinking supply of providers, especially in rural areas, pushing parents out of the labor market
    • A market that fails to meet family needs, making public investment essential to stabilize the system
  • Maine’s new Paid Family and Medical Leave law establishes a statewide program accessible to all workers, allowing up to 12 weeks of paid leave per year for qualified reasons
  • Continue to raise the minimum wage each year as current law provides so it keeps up with costs of living
  • Modernize Maine’s salary threshold for overtime pay to ensure salaried workers with low wages are eligible for overtime pay
  • Provide a flexible work schedule and sufficient notice of schedule changes
  • Grant farmworkers the right to bargain collectively and earn a fair wage
  • Require “reporting pay” — being paid for coming into work even if you’re sent home early, common in hospitality and retail industries — preventing them from being exploited by employers who don’t properly value their employees’ time or work expenses
  • Ensure wage and benefit information is readily accessible to all jobseekers by requiring all job postings in Maine to indicate a pay range
  • Raise reimbursement rates for direct care labor to at least 140% of the state minimum wage, strengthen training and credentialing, and secure federal funds to support Maine’s direct care workforce
  • Expand eligibility for child care subsidies, provide wage supplements for early childhood educators, make infrastructure investments (building, expanding child care slots, especially in rural areas), raise reimbursement rates for providers

Major MECEP Publications

See more MECEP featured research.