Maine families pay more so the wealthiest can pay less.
This is part of The Squeeze — a five-part series on how Washington’s choices, from tariffs to tax policy to corporate consolidation, are driving up costs for Maine families. Each part looks at one piece of the picture: what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what it’s costing you.
Read part one on the war in Iran, part two on tariffs, part four on corporate power, and part five on how Washington is spending your tax dollars.
By Karin Leuthy and Garrett Martin
The tax code does more than collect revenue. It determines who pays, who benefits, and whether we raise enough to invest in the things that make our economy work for everyone, from health care and housing to energy efficiency and schools. Right now, it’s failing on all counts: asking working families to pay more while letting the wealthiest households and biggest corporations pay less, and leaving us without the resources to invest in what actually lowers costs for everyone.
Tax breaks for billionaires, “no money” for everyone else
This isn’t a leftover problem from some distant tax reform. It’s the direct result of a current policy choice: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the sweeping tax and spending law signed last year that made the 2017 tax cuts permanent and added new breaks on top. The same people who found trillions for tax breaks benefitting the wealthy and corporations say there’s no money left for health care, schools, housing, or food assistance.
Before this law passed, nearly 40% of Maine households were already struggling to make ends meet, and close to half had dealt with medical debt in just the last two years. When affordability problems are this widespread, the issue isn’t individual budgeting. It’s structural, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is making it worse.
Wealth wins, work loses
A nurse shouldn’t pay a higher effective tax rate than a hedge fund manager, but that’s exactly what happens today. And it’s by design. In 2026, the richest 1% of households saw their tax bills fall by nearly $9,000, while households with middle income paid $900 more. Nationally, 70% of the net tax cuts in the law go to the richest fifth of Americans. The imbalance runs all the way down the income ladder: the 20% of taxpayers with the least amount of wealth already pay nearly 60% more of their income in state and local taxes than the wealthiest 1%.
It wasn’t always this way. The decades of America’s most broadly shared prosperity, when incomes across the board grew roughly in step with the economy, were also the decades with the highest top tax rates on the wealthy.
It’s not just rates, either. Billionaires can borrow against their stock holdings to fund their lifestyles tax-free, then pass those fortunes to their heirs the same way, while a working family’s home, their biggest asset, gets taxed every single year whether they’ve sold it or not. Rather than address any of this, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act makes it worse.
The corporate free ride
Some of the country’s most profitable corporations are getting an even bigger break. Tesla received more than $1 billion in tax breaks last year, earned $5.7 billion in income, and paid $0 in federal income tax. Alphabet avoided more than $18 billion. They’re not outliers: 339 of the largest U.S. corporations sidestepped over $168 billion in taxes last year on more than a trillion dollars in profit. When corporations get a free ride, the rest of us pick up the tab.
What got cut to pay for it
To help fund these tax breaks, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut nearly $1 trillion in health care spending, roughly equal to what the top 1% is getting back in tax cuts. It also let enhanced health care tax credits expire for 22 million people nationwide. In Maine, that means at least 31,000 people lost coverage outright, and another 56,000 face a kind of health care shrinkflation where premiums climb and coverage shrinks. Rural hospitals and state budgets are feeling the strain, too. The law also cut food assistance for more than 100,000 Mainers and eliminated energy-efficiency credits worth thousands of dollars per household. That’s money that could have helped put food on the table or lowered energy bills for good.
A plan that’s working exactly as intended
The average federal tax refund is up about $350 this year, until you set it against everything else that’s disappeared from Maine wallets. Tariffs are costing families about $1,100 a year, and higher gas prices tied to the war in Iran add more than $1,200 more. A $350 refund is quickly swallowed by well over $2,300 in new costs.
This is a tax code executing precisely as designed: enrich the wealthiest households and the biggest corporations, and strip away the resources everyone else needs to get by. Every piece fits — the tax cuts at the top, the health credits allowed to lapse, the nutrition assistance cut, the corporate loopholes left wide open. None of it is an accident, and none of it is unplanned. It’s just not a plan built for Maine families.
And it doesn’t stop at economics. As wealth concentrates at the top, so does political power. The same money that buys a lighter tax bill also buys influence over the next set of rules. An economy rigged for billionaires leads to a democracy rigged for billionaires, too.