Having lived in Bar Harbor, Maine as a year-round resident for a short time (not anymore), this is a very interesting post! Would also be great if it was a public post so that actual people in Maine, who mostly aren't Slow Boring subscribers, could see it. :)
One issue I observed, not mentioned in the piece, is that year-round residents have a strong preference for housing to be filled by year-round residents. In the village of Bar Harbor, somewhere around half the homes are dark all winter, only used in the summer as second homes or vacation rentals (Airbnb). Local political candidates emphasize that they want to provide more housing for year-round residents, and enact policies to discourage vacation rentals. (Second homes are harder to do anything about.)
Like anywhere else, the zoning code is nit-picky and lawsuit-prone and makes it hard to add housing. The housing market in Bar Harbor is expensive, rivaling pricey coastal cities, and year-round rentals are very hard to come by. Just inland, housing is very cheap.
There's another connection between Maine's forests and clean energy besides the NIMBY issues around solar and Quebec hydropower connector. It's going to be ruinously expensive for the New England states to get to zero GHG emissions by 2050, so it has to be a net zero after carbon capture, and has to be measured regionally rather than state-by-state. BUT there are no rock formations in NE suitable for the sequestration part of CCS. So the local option for CCS is growing more trees for longer in NE, which basically means in Maine. That's not to say that we shouldn't cut trees for solar in Maine. Just that regional net zero at optimal cost likely requires overall more, bigger, older trees in Maine.
Realistically, I think that "a large influx of full-time and part-time remote workers is good for the state and we welcome it" would be a hard attitude for many Mainers (and people of other regions) to adopt.
What this means for them specifically is that "a bunch of people who are probably either younger than me, richer than me, or both, are going to come to my state and use their influence to change it to fit their preferences rather than mine."
Most people don't like change unless they find their personal circumstances intolerable. They especially don't like change in the place they think of as their ancestral homeland because that impairs their connection to their own past.
People who advocate for big social changes need to do a better job of combating nostalgia. Too often, though, they foster and rely upon nostalgia as an argument for why the CURRENT state of affairs is unacceptable. It's a weird kind of progressive conservatism, and it tends to breed NIMBYism.
Multifamily real estate investor here. Wednesday night I did a webinar for our passive investors about how the remote work trend offers great opportunities for flyover country. As part of it I linked to a site that tracks places that will pay you to move there.
From an economic development perspective, it's a much more efficient approach. Instead of focusing on tax incentives to get companies to move, just spend money on people.
The three highest property tax states are New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. All three have pretty high income taxes. Florida property taxes are much lower than New Jersey’s and there is no income tax.
It's also important to look at metro area tax rates not state averages. The property taxes in Greenwich CT are 1.1% vs. 3.75% in Austin for example. Ah but prices are lower you might say. The ongoing boom in Austin has narrowed that considerably.
Property tax rates don't increase with demand. San Antonio/Bexar County (where I grew up) has a higher average property tax rate than Austin/Travis County, even though the latter is considered "cooler" than the former. Chicago, relative to other parts of Illinois, has less onerous property tax rates on the whole.
It's also probably easy for a place like Greenwich to keep rates low because the total assessed value, relative to population, is really high (I'm guessing).
How do the assessments of the property values compare? What are the actual raw tax intake numbers per $1,000 of market value? States enjoy playing games with assessments and mill rates.
This is a very cool post and provides a lot of food for thought.
I think it's a great topic for a Friday edition of the Weeds where Matt does solo interviews. It would be great to get the reaction of Maine's governor, Senate president or House Speaker to these ideas and the future direction of Maine.
I'm a Mainer, although I don't live there anymore, and I basically think this is right on all points. Two little quibbles:
1. I wish you had talked more about immigration and refugees, which have been significant in parts of Maine, particularly Lewiston where I'm from but also Portland.
2. One issue with transmission lines specifically is that the scenic mountains extend all the way across the state, so anything coming from Quebec has to go through nice places at some point. This has been an issue in New Hampshire as well.
Just a reminder for remote workers - if you're working remotely in a state with an income tax you need to pay taxes in that state. Even if you're only there for a week. I expect states to crack down on this. You don't want to get a letter in 2 years from state X saying you owe $x,000 plus interest and penalties.
Court decisions pending, you might have to pay taxes in Mass as well as your home state if your company is located there and you work remotely from another state.
You would take a credit on the one state against the other state, no? So functionally you just end up paying the amount of tax owed to whichever state has the higher rate.
Not necessarily. That only happens if your state of residence has a tax reciprocity agreement with the other state, which not all states do. For instance, Pennsylvania and New Jersey have tax reciprocity, so if you work in Philly but live in South Jersey, it works the way you say. However, PA and New York don't have such an agreement, so if you live in Northeast PA and either work in like Binghamton or take the long commute to NYC, you pay full tax to both PA and NY. The same applies if you just decide you like the view in the Poconos or the cheaper rent in Philly and decide to telework your NYC-based job. (There's some other stuff going on about nexus depending on whether you're required or allowed to telework, which is what Otis and BZC were talking about, but this is the baseline.)
(I'm a local tax attorney in Philadelphia, this is sort of my bread and butter. These issues have occupied our local bar association's tax section since last March, but they were big even before then.) (Deleted prior comment because revisions)
I've read quite a bit about NY and NYC specifically trying to recoup people who went remote. I'm just don't understand the legal rationale. If you live in another state and don't spend time in NY, what is their legal standing to tax you? Would you be able to provide a brief overview or pointer to somewhere that does?
The question is "nexus," which is one of the most headache-inducing concepts in tax law. Basically the question "where is the work being done" is surprisingly hard to answer. Seeing as it's 6 pm on a Friday, I'm too tired to fully explain it now, but yeah. "Nexus" is your Google search term.
When I was an employee with significant domestic business travel, our HR and Finance people used send us form memos annually about state tax related to business trips. It seems that most people working with a national or regional client base -- management consultants, lawyers, engineers -- would be need to complete state tax returns for any state that they worked in for more than a day. I expect that compliance rates were quite low. Someone told me that the main targets (apart from interstate commuters) were high earners with public schedules e.g. professional sportspeople and entertainers.
As a born & raised Mainer, my suggestions would be:
Give the state a fund to purchase old timber company land, and grant small lots to homesteaders who build a structure (not a trailer) there. This would mostly be in the rural 2nd District. Is this a huge-scale solution? No, but it would encourage a certain type of person to move to Maine, and any little bit helps on the margin. This could be funded with a bond, where the lifetime value of new residents is greater than the cost of purchasing the land. Maine was revitalized by a wave of hippie homesteaders moving in the 70s (including my parents!)- maybe the next wave could bring a new generation of off-the-grid types.
More radically, the state could find a financial way to keep recent grads- possibly a rent subsidy? Unlike most poor rural states, Maine has excellent colleges (Colby, Bates & Bowdoin), but of course most grads of elite colleges leave immediately upon graduation. A two or three year rent subsidy to live in Maine maybe could help keep them. It could also benefit Bangor (home of UMaine, a huge college) and Lewiston (home of Bates) just as much as Portland, so the 2nd District might be more amenable if they see a direct benefit to their largest cities
On your point about getting college graduates to stay - I've never understood why state colleges subsidize previous residents as opposed to future residents with in state tuition.
My thought would be state school should cost 40k a year so would be ~160-200k. Every year you live in state after you graduate the state would forgive 15k of your debt. So if you stayed there 10 years, 150k would be forgiven. What states really should want is for students going to their state colleges to stay in their state and if you moved out of state, they would benefit from you paying the extra amount.
In principle, the California schools do this (at least for grad school). You have to establish some number of in-state ties (bank account, clubs, driver's license) before they grant you in-state residence. Then your life is so tied up in Californian society that it's a pain to move.
(OTOH, I can't tell if the way it works in practice just ensures you pay California taxes on your income & property.)
I just doubt that Maine really has enough money in the budget to forgive those loans- especially from Colby, Bates & Bowdoin, which charge 'elite school' tuition. A rent subsidy might be more workable
I wonder if there are any legal/constitutional barriers to this. Probably not.
But I think the real problem is that even in Maine, a pretty large number of college graduates already stay in-state after graduation (maybe not Bowdoin grads, but certainly University of Maine grads do). So if you offer 15k/year to everyone who remains in state after graduation, you're not only paying the people you newly induce to stay in-state, but also the much larger group of graduates who would have stayed in state anyway. So it would get pretty expensive.
I mean you could adjust the numbers some, but a quick google search says that instate tuition for U of Maine is 9k, while out of state tuition is 29k. My point is that they should flip that around so that it costs 9k if you stay in state, and 29k if you leave the state.
The key point is that you subsidize people who stay and pay taxes in your state, not those who happen to live in the state before they went to college.
Right, but to make that work you'd have to charge in-state students 29k up front, and that would be... unpopular. And would probably affect enrollment.
Maybe - though at the rate that young students are taking loans, I'm not sure that many think deeply about the costs. For older people, I think it could actually be better if the state agreed to pay off more. It would also incentivize finishing the degree immensely.
Glad to see the land value tax, one of my pet policy ideas, get some love. There's definitely room in the takes market for more Georgist writers.
I've heard that the tax situation for people living in one state but working for a company located in a different state can be hell. This is really something that needs to be addressed, but I'm not quite sure how.
I just moved to New Hampshire from California as part of a bet on remote work, and that has paid off nicely. The winter was bad, but at this point neither as miserable nor unpredictable as a
California summer. (We had power the whole winter).
You could write a similar article about New Hampshire, though in a lot of respects , we’re already pretty well set up to be a remote work state by having built southern New Hampshire around being a Massachusetts commuter hub.
I think NH is a good bet. The smart money says when the next recession hits the first to go will be the remote workers. Asking everyone to come back to the office is a good way to reduce staff without the stress and drama of a layoff. In NH you can still get a job in Boston. In Maine that’s not really a viable option.
There are certainly some similarities between the two states, but also some huge differences. Maine is about four times the size of New Hampshire and New Hampshire has more than three times the population density.
Maine already redistributes state revenue to towns using a formula that explicitly takes property values into account, as does Vermont and Massachusetts. And on the sales tax, given how overbuilt retail is in the US with changing consumption habits, I am not convinced incentivizing more being built is the way to go. When I lived in Colorado cities did get a piece of the sales tax and it tended to lead to over building and charges by neighboring cities over building retail right on the border to steal sales tax revenue.
I don't mind the seasonal sales tax adjustment, particularly on restaurants.
But a state sales/income tax distribution (not really a "redistribution" since local gov'ts never collected it in the first place) is not really addressing the fundamental structural issue, which is that local governments are primarily reliant on a revenue source that is mostly a function of geographic luck.
It does to some extent since towns with less real estate value per resident get more money from the state. I am sure it could be more, but a local sales tax is going to have most of the same geographic luck issues, in addition to incentivizing local governments to subsidize some bad retail development schemes.
As Lance Hunter mentioned, you've got to consider winter.
It is amazing that in a piece that suggests Maine could really attract a lot of year-round residents who work remotely and looks to Florida as inspiration, Matt does not mention "winter" even once -- even though he himself only talks about how his family goes to Maine in the summer.
Yes, there are a lot of small bore good ideas in this piece. And the really challenging big idea of fundamentally changing the way taxes work in Maine. They all seem pretty good.
But if the goal to get more people to move to Maine year-round, you have to factor in people's willingness to deal with Maine's winters. Even though they've gotten milder in more recent years, they ate still New England winters. And, nationally, we do not see states with serious winters attracting tons of people the way we see states without serious winters.
Counterpoint:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/07/maine-caterpillar-itchy-poisonous-browntail-moth/619376/?utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook
Having lived in Bar Harbor, Maine as a year-round resident for a short time (not anymore), this is a very interesting post! Would also be great if it was a public post so that actual people in Maine, who mostly aren't Slow Boring subscribers, could see it. :)
One issue I observed, not mentioned in the piece, is that year-round residents have a strong preference for housing to be filled by year-round residents. In the village of Bar Harbor, somewhere around half the homes are dark all winter, only used in the summer as second homes or vacation rentals (Airbnb). Local political candidates emphasize that they want to provide more housing for year-round residents, and enact policies to discourage vacation rentals. (Second homes are harder to do anything about.)
Like anywhere else, the zoning code is nit-picky and lawsuit-prone and makes it hard to add housing. The housing market in Bar Harbor is expensive, rivaling pricey coastal cities, and year-round rentals are very hard to come by. Just inland, housing is very cheap.
There's another connection between Maine's forests and clean energy besides the NIMBY issues around solar and Quebec hydropower connector. It's going to be ruinously expensive for the New England states to get to zero GHG emissions by 2050, so it has to be a net zero after carbon capture, and has to be measured regionally rather than state-by-state. BUT there are no rock formations in NE suitable for the sequestration part of CCS. So the local option for CCS is growing more trees for longer in NE, which basically means in Maine. That's not to say that we shouldn't cut trees for solar in Maine. Just that regional net zero at optimal cost likely requires overall more, bigger, older trees in Maine.
Realistically, I think that "a large influx of full-time and part-time remote workers is good for the state and we welcome it" would be a hard attitude for many Mainers (and people of other regions) to adopt.
What this means for them specifically is that "a bunch of people who are probably either younger than me, richer than me, or both, are going to come to my state and use their influence to change it to fit their preferences rather than mine."
Most people don't like change unless they find their personal circumstances intolerable. They especially don't like change in the place they think of as their ancestral homeland because that impairs their connection to their own past.
People who advocate for big social changes need to do a better job of combating nostalgia. Too often, though, they foster and rely upon nostalgia as an argument for why the CURRENT state of affairs is unacceptable. It's a weird kind of progressive conservatism, and it tends to breed NIMBYism.
Multifamily real estate investor here. Wednesday night I did a webinar for our passive investors about how the remote work trend offers great opportunities for flyover country. As part of it I linked to a site that tracks places that will pay you to move there.
From an economic development perspective, it's a much more efficient approach. Instead of focusing on tax incentives to get companies to move, just spend money on people.
https://www.makemymove.com/articles/find-the-places-that-will-pay-you-to-move-there
Not according to the source you provided. Other measures give NJ, NY, and CT. NJ is on just about everyone’s top three list.
Eh. Tennessee over Maine. Better weather, especially in winter. And no State Tax. Still easy to get to NY and other cities.
Alternative is Black Hills, SD. Also zero Tax.
Nice areas of Wyoming are expensive. Same with Nevada.
I have a cabin in Eastern Oregon. Underappreciated, but high state tax.
I was looking at Maine property a few years ago. Was so cheap. I should of lept, but so far away from Boise.
Also… my guess is most Mainers have no desire to overtly encourage more people moving there.
Boise and surrounding areas are becoming pretty big remote work locations. Direct flights to West Coast cities.
My coworkers… 100 travel, live anywhere… 16 of us live in…
1 Az
1 ID (me)
1 OK
4 Florida (no tax)
3 Tn (no Tax)
1 Mn
5 Tx (No tax). (1 has a house in Wisconsin… but splits time… claims Tx)
All the non-tax staters are there because of family ties.
"... Oregon. Underappreciated, but high state tax."
High income tax but low property tax and no sales tax.
Yep. I make my big purchases there. Bought my quad. And my property tax is like 300 a year. Or something crazy low.
Eastern Oregon is going to blow up one day. Joseph. Sumpter. Baker City. John Day.
Dallas is less than 3.5 hrs by plane from most places in the continental US. No state tax. Better BBQ than Tennessee too.
Yes. But Dallas is ugly. And hot. And flat.
When you say "no tax" is it like TX where there is no state income tax but property taxes are 3x what they are in states with income taxes?
Property tax varies more within state than out.
The three highest property tax states are New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. All three have pretty high income taxes. Florida property taxes are much lower than New Jersey’s and there is no income tax.
The top three are actually NJ, IL and NH.
It's also important to look at metro area tax rates not state averages. The property taxes in Greenwich CT are 1.1% vs. 3.75% in Austin for example. Ah but prices are lower you might say. The ongoing boom in Austin has narrowed that considerably.
Yes, of course, if you want to live in the cool area you’re going to pay more. Same in Maine.
Property tax rates don't increase with demand. San Antonio/Bexar County (where I grew up) has a higher average property tax rate than Austin/Travis County, even though the latter is considered "cooler" than the former. Chicago, relative to other parts of Illinois, has less onerous property tax rates on the whole.
It's also probably easy for a place like Greenwich to keep rates low because the total assessed value, relative to population, is really high (I'm guessing).
“Property tax rates don't increase with demand.”
Property taxes are not connected to price?
How do the assessments of the property values compare? What are the actual raw tax intake numbers per $1,000 of market value? States enjoy playing games with assessments and mill rates.
Edit 2.75%
This is a very cool post and provides a lot of food for thought.
I think it's a great topic for a Friday edition of the Weeds where Matt does solo interviews. It would be great to get the reaction of Maine's governor, Senate president or House Speaker to these ideas and the future direction of Maine.
I'm a Mainer, although I don't live there anymore, and I basically think this is right on all points. Two little quibbles:
1. I wish you had talked more about immigration and refugees, which have been significant in parts of Maine, particularly Lewiston where I'm from but also Portland.
2. One issue with transmission lines specifically is that the scenic mountains extend all the way across the state, so anything coming from Quebec has to go through nice places at some point. This has been an issue in New Hampshire as well.
God I can't believe it corrected live to like.
Posting this because of the mention of land value tax:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fzk_Sc4bBY
The land! The land! 'Twas God who made the land!
The land! The land! The ground on which we stand!
Why should we be beggars with the ballot in our hand?
God gave the land to the people!
(But srsly tho, LVT is a good idea and why don't more places do it?)
Just a reminder for remote workers - if you're working remotely in a state with an income tax you need to pay taxes in that state. Even if you're only there for a week. I expect states to crack down on this. You don't want to get a letter in 2 years from state X saying you owe $x,000 plus interest and penalties.
It depends on the state. Some have thresholds. I work all over the US. Generally I try and avoid 30-days in any single state.
Not critical though. Idaho has state tax. Just gets deducted 1 for 1. Usually. Extra paperwork.
Court decisions pending, you might have to pay taxes in Mass as well as your home state if your company is located there and you work remotely from another state.
You would take a credit on the one state against the other state, no? So functionally you just end up paying the amount of tax owed to whichever state has the higher rate.
Not necessarily. That only happens if your state of residence has a tax reciprocity agreement with the other state, which not all states do. For instance, Pennsylvania and New Jersey have tax reciprocity, so if you work in Philly but live in South Jersey, it works the way you say. However, PA and New York don't have such an agreement, so if you live in Northeast PA and either work in like Binghamton or take the long commute to NYC, you pay full tax to both PA and NY. The same applies if you just decide you like the view in the Poconos or the cheaper rent in Philly and decide to telework your NYC-based job. (There's some other stuff going on about nexus depending on whether you're required or allowed to telework, which is what Otis and BZC were talking about, but this is the baseline.)
(I'm a local tax attorney in Philadelphia, this is sort of my bread and butter. These issues have occupied our local bar association's tax section since last March, but they were big even before then.) (Deleted prior comment because revisions)
I've read quite a bit about NY and NYC specifically trying to recoup people who went remote. I'm just don't understand the legal rationale. If you live in another state and don't spend time in NY, what is their legal standing to tax you? Would you be able to provide a brief overview or pointer to somewhere that does?
The question is "nexus," which is one of the most headache-inducing concepts in tax law. Basically the question "where is the work being done" is surprisingly hard to answer. Seeing as it's 6 pm on a Friday, I'm too tired to fully explain it now, but yeah. "Nexus" is your Google search term.
When I was an employee with significant domestic business travel, our HR and Finance people used send us form memos annually about state tax related to business trips. It seems that most people working with a national or regional client base -- management consultants, lawyers, engineers -- would be need to complete state tax returns for any state that they worked in for more than a day. I expect that compliance rates were quite low. Someone told me that the main targets (apart from interstate commuters) were high earners with public schedules e.g. professional sportspeople and entertainers.
As a born & raised Mainer, my suggestions would be:
Give the state a fund to purchase old timber company land, and grant small lots to homesteaders who build a structure (not a trailer) there. This would mostly be in the rural 2nd District. Is this a huge-scale solution? No, but it would encourage a certain type of person to move to Maine, and any little bit helps on the margin. This could be funded with a bond, where the lifetime value of new residents is greater than the cost of purchasing the land. Maine was revitalized by a wave of hippie homesteaders moving in the 70s (including my parents!)- maybe the next wave could bring a new generation of off-the-grid types.
More radically, the state could find a financial way to keep recent grads- possibly a rent subsidy? Unlike most poor rural states, Maine has excellent colleges (Colby, Bates & Bowdoin), but of course most grads of elite colleges leave immediately upon graduation. A two or three year rent subsidy to live in Maine maybe could help keep them. It could also benefit Bangor (home of UMaine, a huge college) and Lewiston (home of Bates) just as much as Portland, so the 2nd District might be more amenable if they see a direct benefit to their largest cities
On your point about getting college graduates to stay - I've never understood why state colleges subsidize previous residents as opposed to future residents with in state tuition.
My thought would be state school should cost 40k a year so would be ~160-200k. Every year you live in state after you graduate the state would forgive 15k of your debt. So if you stayed there 10 years, 150k would be forgiven. What states really should want is for students going to their state colleges to stay in their state and if you moved out of state, they would benefit from you paying the extra amount.
In principle, the California schools do this (at least for grad school). You have to establish some number of in-state ties (bank account, clubs, driver's license) before they grant you in-state residence. Then your life is so tied up in Californian society that it's a pain to move.
(OTOH, I can't tell if the way it works in practice just ensures you pay California taxes on your income & property.)
I just doubt that Maine really has enough money in the budget to forgive those loans- especially from Colby, Bates & Bowdoin, which charge 'elite school' tuition. A rent subsidy might be more workable
I wonder if there are any legal/constitutional barriers to this. Probably not.
But I think the real problem is that even in Maine, a pretty large number of college graduates already stay in-state after graduation (maybe not Bowdoin grads, but certainly University of Maine grads do). So if you offer 15k/year to everyone who remains in state after graduation, you're not only paying the people you newly induce to stay in-state, but also the much larger group of graduates who would have stayed in state anyway. So it would get pretty expensive.
I mean you could adjust the numbers some, but a quick google search says that instate tuition for U of Maine is 9k, while out of state tuition is 29k. My point is that they should flip that around so that it costs 9k if you stay in state, and 29k if you leave the state.
The key point is that you subsidize people who stay and pay taxes in your state, not those who happen to live in the state before they went to college.
Right, but to make that work you'd have to charge in-state students 29k up front, and that would be... unpopular. And would probably affect enrollment.
Maybe - though at the rate that young students are taking loans, I'm not sure that many think deeply about the costs. For older people, I think it could actually be better if the state agreed to pay off more. It would also incentivize finishing the degree immensely.
Glad to see the land value tax, one of my pet policy ideas, get some love. There's definitely room in the takes market for more Georgist writers.
I've heard that the tax situation for people living in one state but working for a company located in a different state can be hell. This is really something that needs to be addressed, but I'm not quite sure how.
I just moved to New Hampshire from California as part of a bet on remote work, and that has paid off nicely. The winter was bad, but at this point neither as miserable nor unpredictable as a
California summer. (We had power the whole winter).
You could write a similar article about New Hampshire, though in a lot of respects , we’re already pretty well set up to be a remote work state by having built southern New Hampshire around being a Massachusetts commuter hub.
I think NH is a good bet. The smart money says when the next recession hits the first to go will be the remote workers. Asking everyone to come back to the office is a good way to reduce staff without the stress and drama of a layoff. In NH you can still get a job in Boston. In Maine that’s not really a viable option.
There are certainly some similarities between the two states, but also some huge differences. Maine is about four times the size of New Hampshire and New Hampshire has more than three times the population density.
Maine is the better beer state.
Maine already redistributes state revenue to towns using a formula that explicitly takes property values into account, as does Vermont and Massachusetts. And on the sales tax, given how overbuilt retail is in the US with changing consumption habits, I am not convinced incentivizing more being built is the way to go. When I lived in Colorado cities did get a piece of the sales tax and it tended to lead to over building and charges by neighboring cities over building retail right on the border to steal sales tax revenue.
I don't mind the seasonal sales tax adjustment, particularly on restaurants.
Here's the redistribution formula:
https://www.maine.gov/treasurer/revenue_sharing/calculate_distributions.html
But a state sales/income tax distribution (not really a "redistribution" since local gov'ts never collected it in the first place) is not really addressing the fundamental structural issue, which is that local governments are primarily reliant on a revenue source that is mostly a function of geographic luck.
I share your concerns about the sales tax piece.
It does to some extent since towns with less real estate value per resident get more money from the state. I am sure it could be more, but a local sales tax is going to have most of the same geographic luck issues, in addition to incentivizing local governments to subsidize some bad retail development schemes.
As Lance Hunter mentioned, you've got to consider winter.
It is amazing that in a piece that suggests Maine could really attract a lot of year-round residents who work remotely and looks to Florida as inspiration, Matt does not mention "winter" even once -- even though he himself only talks about how his family goes to Maine in the summer.
Yes, there are a lot of small bore good ideas in this piece. And the really challenging big idea of fundamentally changing the way taxes work in Maine. They all seem pretty good.
But if the goal to get more people to move to Maine year-round, you have to factor in people's willingness to deal with Maine's winters. Even though they've gotten milder in more recent years, they ate still New England winters. And, nationally, we do not see states with serious winters attracting tons of people the way we see states without serious winters.