AUBURN, Maine — Blasting a ballot measure that would hike Maine’s minimum wage, Gov. Paul LePage said Thursday that two proponents of the increase — Ben Chin and Mike Tipping of the Maine People’s Alliance — “should be thrown in jail for what they’re doing to the elderly.”
Tipping, a Bangor Daily News blogger, has long been a LePage antagonist. Chin, who lost the Lewiston mayoral race to Bob Macdonald last year, works with Tipping for the Maine People’s Alliance, a progressive advocacy group that has clashed often with LePage and is working to pass Question 4, which would increase the minimum wage in Maine to $12 an hour by 2020.
LePage also told the audience at a Lewiston Auburn Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce breakfast that the price increases businesses would need to impose to cover higher wages would hurt elderly Maine residents.
LePage said the 325,000 people who depend on Social Security “are going to be pushed deeper into poverty” if voters endorse the proposal.
During the event, LePage urged voters to reject all five questions on the Nov. 8 ballot.
He also confessed to more than 200 business leaders that his sometimes coarse vocabulary “needs improvement” and that he sometimes says things he shouldn’t.
“If my grandmother were here, she’d have a bar of soap and make me chew it,” LePage said.
The crowd appeared especially receptive to LePage’s plea to block a proposal that would impose a 3 percent surcharge on incomes above $200,000 annually to help pay for education.
“This is not the way to move Maine forward,” the governor said. “This is a quick way of moving Maine backward.”
But his comments on Question 4, which would increase the $7.50-an-hour minimum wage, were the most strident. He called the proposal “crazy.”
Tipping said the comments were “completely outside the norms of political discourse.” They were also off the mark, he said.
Chin tweeted that “Pinstripes= my go2 fashion under dictator.”
@miketipping and I FINALLY attacked together! Surely he loves @mebeacon podcast. Pinstripes= my go2 fashion under dictator. #mepolitics https://t.co/VCFwhcKPbo
— Ben Chin (@BChinME) October 13, 2016
Tipping, the alliance’s communications director, said he figures LePage was mad about a news conference Wednesday pushing the wage hike proposal. He said the higher pay plan is “incredibly popular“ among older Mainers, many of whom are “working incredibly hard and they can’t retire” because they don’t have enough money.
“It’s just complete fearmongering,” Tipping said.
LePage also elaborated on his opposition to Question 1, which would legalize recreational use of marijuana.
He’s worried, he said, that more people will get behind the wheel while high.
“The drug people are going to die on the highway,” LePage said, pointing to statistics he said that show traffic deaths are skyrocketing in Colorado and Washington after they legalized marijuana.
He’s right.
A 2015 report from the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Traffic Area found that from 2006 to 2015, marijuana-related traffic deaths increased by 154 percent. A similar study in Washington by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Study found that fatal crashes involving drivers who recently used marijuana doubled after the state legalized the drug.
LePage also fretted that increased marijuana use will cause another problem as THC, the drug’s active ingredient, go into snacks and edibles that can kill pets.
He said he’s worried for his Jack Russell terrier mix named Veto — adding that he wants two more dogs that he plans to name Sustain and Override.
LePage also said that ballot questions aren’t the best way to make laws.
“It’s a sad situation,” he said, that the state has reached the point “where we’re running government by referendum.”
The governor tossed in one of his standard insults about Maine media as as well.
“Anybody who buys a newspaper in Maine is paying somebody to lie to them,” LePage said.