2007-11-14
Portland — Kudos to Opportunity Maine, the citizens initiative that was supported unanimously by the House last year and that will offer Maine college students a very generous tax break if they promise to stay in Maine to live and work. Research from the University of Southern Maine has found that 50,000 college educated young people have left the state in the past twenty years. Maine has the fourth oldest population in the country, and if this mass exodus continues, in the year 2020 21% of all Mainers will be senior citizens.
According to the initiative’s website, www.opportunitymaine.org, tax credits would have a maximum of $2,100 per year or $8,400 total for a graduate who spent all four years in a Maine college. This November, Maine will be the first state to offer such benefits. This legislation will come not a moment too soon. According to a study by the Finance Authority of Maine, two-thirds of the state’s best high school students ultimately wind up living and working outside of Maine.
Though this financial incentive will certainly help Maine by providing a more educated workforce, it is not enough. The state government needs to do more to stop what has become known as the Maine “brain drain”. We need to create jobs that young people want, and make it easier for young college graduates to start their own businesses. The University of Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy has found that “there is longitudinal evidence that highly skilled people not only play an important role as new hires, but also as a wellspring of entrepreneurial start-up companies. For example, the record of MIT graduates is startling. They have founded over 4,000 firms, employing 1.1 million people, and generating $232 billion in sales.” So what can we do to improve Maine’s economy and create more highly skilled high wage jobs?
In order to create exciting jobs that young people actually want to do, Maine needs to strengthen its appeal as an employment option for young educated people from other places in the country. Technology is what drives our country today, and Maine has been unable to keep up with other states in terms of enabling technology-based companies to thrive here. We must focus on developing technological jobs and opportunities to entice our own young people to stay and invite others to join. We also need to increase funding for research and development in the state’s major universities, make tuition rates more competitive with other out of state universities, spend more on higher education, and offer incentives and initiatives to encourage people to start businesses in a state whose beauty and character are unmatched elsewhere in the world. If we rely solely on this new tax incentive for college students without enhancing other opportunities, appeal, and resources, Maine will continue to serve the rest of the country as a skilled employee farm team.
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Nov 27, 2007 3:13 PM
I'm 23 and I am going to be graduating from college in May with my Master's degree in Occupational Therapy, I will not be a registered OT until atleast August, but as soon as I am, I'm moving out of state. Why? There is nothing to do for a person my age to do other than going to the old port every weekend which gets old very quick. There needs to be more nightlife for people my age. Also, my income will be AT LEAST $5,000 - $10,000 more annually out of state. I could live either in Northern Maine or Central Maine where the pay is reasonably more than the the Portland area because the need is higher, but then once again we're at the same issue that there is nothing to do in those areas.
Nov 18, 2007 11:07 AM
Right idea, wrong direction. The State cannot create jobs, what it does is create a greater drain on the resources of it's citizens and make it more onerous for any business to locate here. This state has one of the worst business climates in the country. Until that is corrected all the incentives in the world will not keep our college graduates in the state. Maine is a beautiful state, but unless one can find a job that will justify the time and money spent on college it will lose graduates to other states like New Hampshire which has similar beauty and a better economic climate.
Nov 17, 2007 9:10 PM
History has shown clearly that the state of Maine is hapless when it comes to real economic development.
The people that understand economic development are people that have created companies and jobs with their business sense, sweat equity and their hard earned money. They aren't the part-time lawyers and the retired teachers that make up our legislature.
Sadly, our brain drain will end only when the State clears away the hurdles they have placed in the road to economic development and gets out of the way.
Until such time as they do, this tax credit isn't going to be of much help in solving the problem.
This proposal is typical of Maine. The state continues to chase and treat symptoms of the problem without ever facing the problem head-on. They think in silos, as if the issue of our young people leaving was unrelated to the lack of business opportunity.
This legislative myopia can not deliver a solution because such "vision" can not identify the problem.
Nov 16, 2007 7:51 AM
The answer to having more young people come to Maine or just stay here isn’t more government initiatives; it is just getting government out of the way. Let’s look at what local government in Portland has done to help business;
It has taken Stop and Shop years to get permission to build a store on a derelict piece of property.
The council can’t decide who they want to develop waterfront property or what they want there.
It took Becky’s, a waterfront diner, over two years to simply get permission to add-on a second floor.
On the state level, casinos are denied, energy plants are blocked and needed highways are needlessly delayed.
Taxes and mandated expenditures scare away potential investors for business expansion and growth and force existing businesses to look in other areas of the country in order to keep their bottom lines competitive with other companies.
Creating more government to help develop business and jobs in Maine is a ridiculous premise. As state government has grown, there has been less and less opportunity for business and young people in Maine. At some point people will see that the areas where there is most growth, the companies are less inhibited by government and taxes. Government micro-management of business and people’s lives is a recipe for disaster.
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