It went unimplemented through the end of his tenure, leaving the task eventually mandated by a judge to his successor. LePage vetoed several legislative plans to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act on cost grounds and resisted it even after Maine voters approved it in 2017. By fall 2018 as he was set to leave office, those figures were at 261,000, 7,600 and 176,000, respectively, due to tightened eligibility standards and improving national and state economies. When he took office in 2011, there were 350,000 Mainers who received Medicaid, 25,000 children in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program and 246,000 Mainers who received food stamps. Reining in welfare programs was perhaps LePage’s top priority. She allowed a Republican-led bill to pass that will freeze property taxes for Maine seniors who enroll every year, a program criticized by some cities and towns for administrative burden. Her most recent spending bill raised the amount of retirement pension income exempt from income tax from $10,000 to $35,000 by 2025, which would mostly benefit families in the top 20 percent of income-earning households, the liberal Maine Center for Economic Policy said.ĭuring the governor’s tenure, the state has funded K-12 education and revenue sharing to cities and towns at long-unmet statutory levels and expanded property tax relief programs. She backed down from a 2021 plan to tax federal COVID-19 loans as income after pressure from Republicans and business groups. As governor, she has been able to sharply hike state spending and preside over record reserves without tax increases because of a massive amount of federal COVID-19 aid. Mills campaigned in 2018 on a pledge to not increase taxes, which her campaign has repeated in this race.
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