Dear Editor:

Senator Dow’s campaign presented him as devoted to education. So what does he talk about in his first column (1/19/17 Boothbay Register)? He wants to undermine school funding.

Dow trots out all the same tired old chestnuts of misleading and misinformed arguments we have heard before. He complains that taxes hurt small businesses. Any small business that produces a $200K profit for its owner is highly successful. Any highly successful business owner who puts this small marginal tax before children’s education is simply greedy.

When the top 2 percent of people who make these huge profits from the working and buying public, shirk their civic duty to pay their fair share, the tax burden is shifted onto everyone else’s shoulders in the form of higher property taxes.

Dow seems to believe that exploiting workers by denying them fair wages is good for business. Really folks, if a business has to rely on poverty wages to turn a profit; that’s not the sort of business that we should be coddling in our community.

It is this sort of thinking that has created an economy where good jobs are few, education is expensive, health care is unaffordable and retirement is a dream. Basically these sort of policies are cannibalizing the economy for the middle and working classes.

The best incentives for starting or running a business is that there is a ready market of people who can afford to buy what is being sold; the workers are educated, skilled and have reliable transportation to get them to work on time. Poverty wages and tax cuts for a favored few do not do this.

Each of us are in the business of raising families and building a flourishing culture in our communities. Myopic policies that favor greed over things like children’s education and the well-being of the workers on whose backs businesses are built makes America poorer.

But the most troubling aspect of Dow’s complaints is that in doing so he is not showing due respect to the democratic will of the people who voted to enact these laws.

Fred W. Nehring

Boothbay