Those of us here in Maine paying the taxes are no longer the people making decisions about where to spend the revenues. The legislature - in the name of efficiency, regionalization, centralization and professional expertise - takes more and more power away from the communities. Big corporations have too much power; they pay less and get more. Citizens without power pay more and get less.

That amounts to taxation without representation. Ask the ancient Romans what might happen.

It's also true that as our society grows, everything gets more complex, harder to do, and therefore more expensive. The more we grow, the more expensive the tasks and the more expensive the public bureaucracy to service the tasks. Prices rise and benefits decline. We get less and less for every tax dollar precisely because we continue to grow. Centralization makes that worse - not better - because it requires one-size-fits-all solutions.

The solution in my mind is not so much limiting the rate of taxes - which is TABOR - but realigning the authority over taxation with the authority over spending. That's taxes of all kinds: income, property, sales and so forth. Likewise fees. The legislature might set statewide ranges within which rates could float and yes there would have to be equalization mechanisms, but the taxing needs to be set at the town or regional level. Not at the state.

The victory of Citizen's United several years back showed that people are generally ok with how their money is spent when they understand where it goes and have say in spending it.

Real, fair tax reform - promised but not addressed since the defeat of the Palesky tax cap - is what we need. We need businesses to pay their fair share. In NH, businesses support a far bigger share of the budget than here in Maine. In Maine, the share is constantly decreasing. That means local property taxes go up. The governor's proposal to eliminate property taxes on business will only make that worse. That the Democrats call rolling back the business equipment tax their biggest achievement of the session is mind-boggling.

Longer term, we must call an end to growth. We need to simplify our public bureaucracy. We need to relocalize. We can run our lives better and more responsibly if we run our lives locally.

I'm more than sympathetic to the frustrations behind TABOR. I wish I could support it. Still, the right solution is not caps and restrictions, but aligning authority over taxation and spending and keeping that authority at the most local level with the citizens.

I live in Gray. Town meetings and town council sessions can get a bit rough. But conflict is necessary to community - over the long term it renews and strengthens community. We don't need TABOR to straightjacket our town meetings and council sessions; we need more real power in our communities. TABOR takes that away.