To the Editor:

Rep. Margaret Craven’s July 5 Letter to the Editor may seem at first reading to be an attack on Sen. Lois Snowe-Mello. That is a superficial reading.

In reality, it is a part of the Craven’s ongoing effort to claim the title of Maine’s Silliest Liberal. Rather sad in a way. She has no hope of competing with Cynthia Dill, Maine’s funniest blonde joke.

Her letter has some interest, however, as a sampling of standard liberal talking points. She writes that “the top 6,800 households, families making $366,000 or more, will realize an average savings of $21,638. Let’s not pretend that helping the most successful among us somehow helps the least fortunate among us; all it does is amplify income inequality and class tensions.”

Notice Craven’s assumption that we can have a capitalist system without successful capitalists: her belief that allowing people to keep what they earn is “helping” them, as well as the spectacle of liberals everywhere beavering away to build class tensions while shedding crocodile tears over class tension.

Look at her figures and see just how much of our tax burden is carried by those 6,800 households, if a small percentage reduction saves them over $21,000. I’d like to see 13,600 or 20,400 such households. Wouldn’t aggravate my class tensions in the least.

Does Representative Craven really think that if we raised the taxes on those wicked, greedy rich households we would still have 6,800? Last month Maryland’s Gov. Martin O’Malley was keynote speaker at the Maine Democratic Party convention in Augusta and received lusty cheers for his vitriolic attacks on Republicans.

In his first term Governor O’Malley and the Democratic legislature imposed an income tax surcharge on the rich to balance the state’s budget. The very next year one third of those rich households disappeared from the state’s tax rolls.

Felix Rohayten, a long-time star among Democrat financial advisers, noted the same mobility among New York’s rich. These people don’t have to “vote with their feet.” They can head for the border in their yachts and planes. This is what happens in the Real World.

Things are different on Planet Craven, where the welfare system and other government activities never needs reform, only expansion.

Professor John Frary

Farmington

Professor Frary is a former U.S. Congress candidate and retired history professor, a Board Member of Maine Taxpayers United and an associate editor of the International Military Encyclopedia. He can be reached at: jfrary8070@aol.com.