What your tax dollars are funding — and what they could be funding instead.
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 three on the tax code, and part four on corporate power.
By Karin Leuthy and Garrett Martin
Over the last four parts, we’ve traced tariffs raising prices at checkout, a war in Iran raising the cost of gas and heating oil, a tax code that rewards wealth over work, and corporations facing less accountability than ever. Each one reads like its own story. Put side by side, the pattern becomes clear: a series of specific decisions push costs onto working families while protecting the people at the top.
This administration was elected on a specific promise. “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again,” Trump told a rally crowd in Montana in August 2024.He made the same “day one” pledge on gas, groceries, and electricity prices in the weeks that followed. Nearly two years in, Maine families are paying more, not less for gas, groceries, health care, and housing. And that’s not just true of Maine families, it’s true of families across the country in red, blue, and purple states alike. This administration’s cost-of-living plan is actually a billionaire-enrichment plan.
Nearly 40% of Maine households were already struggling to make ends meet before this latest wave of cost increases. Nearly half have dealt with medical debt in just the last two years. When affordability problems are this widespread, the issue isn’t individual budgeting.
This final part asks the question that ties the whole series together: if there’s supposedly no money to ease any of this, where is the money actually going?
The costs families are already absorbing
Maine’s Medicaid program is facing $2.7 billion in federal cuts, and once fully in effect, an estimated 61,466 Mainers will lose health coverage. More than 15,000 Mainers have already lost food assistance, a 9% drop, as the One Big Beautiful Bill’s SNAP restrictions take hold. Child care in Maine now averages $16,144 a year. Home prices have risen 86% since 2019, the fourth-highest increase in the country. And 5% of Mainers now carry medical debt in collections, higher than the national average. In Somerset County, it’s 11%, with a median debt of nearly $2,000.
These are the exact pressures this administration says there’s no money to address. Here’s where the money went instead.
Where the money is actually going
Tax breaks for the wealthy. As we covered in Part 3, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act hands out $4.5 trillion in tax breaks that mostly benefit the ultra-rich.
Interest on debt those same tax cuts helped create. Taxpayers are now paying roughly $970 billion a year in interest on the national debt that’s ballooned in large part from tax cuts for the wealthy. The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, their extensions, and the 2017 and 2024 tax cuts have together reduced federal revenue by $10.6 trillion, more than a quarter of the entire national debt. And much of the interest taxpayers now pay on that debt flows right back to the wealthy individuals and institutions who hold it.
A $269 billion mass deportation program that targets law-abiding residents. Of the 784 immigrants detained in Maine between January 2025 and July 2026, most had no criminal conviction. Maine taxpayers alone are covering roughly $800 million of the program’s cost.
Between $37 billion and $113 billion or more on the war in Iran to date, with another $73 billion requested, the same open-ended war we covered in Part 1 continues to add to gas and heating costs with no end in sight.
$30 billion to bail out American farmers hurt by the administration’s own trade war — and $20 billion to bail out farmers in Argentina, a direct competitor to American agriculture. Maine and American farmers get squeezed by tariffs while a competing country’s farmers get a check.
$4 billion to cancel offshore wind projects, walking away from energy investment that could have helped lower electricity costs over time. This is a direct reversal of the same promise cited above. In August 2024, Trump pledged to cut electricity prices in half within 12 to 18 months. Instead, as we covered in Part 4, investor-owned utility rates have climbed 49% faster than inflation.
Nearly $650 million on Trump’s vanity projects that include a $480 million ballroom, bomb shelter, and visitor center, plus $162 million more for a triumphal arch and statue garden.
The money being left on the table
On top of all that spending, the administration has also cut IRS enforcement funding, shrinking the agency’s ability to collect taxes that are already legally owed. The US loses roughly $696 billion a year to unpaid taxes, driven largely by underreporting among wealthy filers and businesses that can afford to contest or outlast audits a thinned-out IRS no longer has the staff to pursue.
That amount of money could otherwise fund universal child care, paid family and medical leave, free public college, a permanent child tax credit, and climate-proofing communities across the country without raising taxes on working people by a dollar. This is a choice being made right now: less enforcement on people who can afford to pay, more pressure on families who already do.
A plan after all
Across this series, we’ve shown a war with no plan, tariffs with no plan, and a tax code executing its plan perfectly — just not for you. Washington’s priorities are trillions for tax breaks, billions for a mass deportation program, billions more for an open-ended war and a foreign country’s farmers while Maine families absorb rising health costs, disappearing food assistance, and a housing market that’s outpaced their paychecks by 86%.
As wealth concentrates at the top, so does political power. An economy rigged for billionaires leads to a democracy rigged for billionaires. The affordability crisis Maine families are living through is the sum of choices about who this government is actually built to serve. An administration that promised to lower costs has instead spent trillions making sure the wealthiest few pay less, while the bills for everyone else keep climbing. Different choices are possible. Maine families are still waiting for the ones they were promised.