Dear Editor:

It’s an outrage! Why should a married wage earner with two children who earns 120K pay over 11K in federal taxes plus Social Security, but a rich elite, with the same income derived from dividends and capital gains unfairly pays nothing?

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The tax code is riddled with loopholes and giveaways that allows the wealthy to accumulate and pass on vast fortunes while paying lower effective tax rates than many working families.

Wealth and profit in the classical economic model are built upon mutually beneficial transactions generating employment, further investment and even philanthropy. Wealth is a reward for creating value and contributing to the betterment of society. It is an earned privilege.

When wealth becomes a calcified entitlement and built on exploitative practices that result in the upward transfer of wealth, structural inequalities emerge that perpetuate poverty. This is evident in the disparities in access to healthcare, housing, education and retirement security. These concentrations of wealth also warp our political environment.

Driving this inequality is our tax code. Tax cuts for the rich has been sold to us as a way to stimulate economic growth through "trickle-down economics." However, economic improvement for wage earners has never materialized. Rather, financing tax breaks for the rich has come at the expense of programs that fostered the growth of the middle class and lift people out of poverty.

The Republicans throw around the terms “fiscal responsibility and “austerity” to justify ignoring the economic needs of their constituents, but these virtues are quickly forgotten when it comes to carving out new tax cuts for the rich. What is especially galling is that federal debt is used to fund these tax cuts.

Senator Collins and her husband’s net worth is estimated to be over $45 million, having richly benefited from the tax cuts she helped to pass. There is little chance that we can count on our senator to right this unfair situation, so this November, I will be voting for the candidate who promises significant reform on this front.

Fred W. Nehring

Boothbay