I am committed to opportunities for our young people to find successful careers here in Maine. Great career opportunities require a strong K-12 education system and opportunities for technical training, community college or 4-year college at a reasonable cost. Not every student needs to attend a 4-year college, but all our students must be given the skills to allow them to succeed in the workplace. We need to ensure that our public schools have the resources, especially great teachers, to help them prepare for success in an increasingly complex economy. And we need to work with employers and higher education providers to ensure that student debt does not cripple our new graduates.

Our graduates must have employment opportunities in Maine if we expect them to stay and raise their families here. Creating meaningful job opportunities in Maine will require collaboration between government and employers to facilitate job creation and capitalize on the values that make Maine a special place to work and invest. We should promote new clean technologies, like renewable power, that create good paying local jobs. And we should work with employers to identify the obstacles to growth or investment they see in Maine and eliminate those obstacles where we can do so while still protecting our citizens and our environment.

Economic prosperity requires that all our citizens have access to affordable healthcare. In the age of Covid19, we need to take a hard look at our healthcare infrastructure in this State and whether it will meet our needs in the future. I am especially concerned about access to healthcare in our rural communities where local hospitals are facing severe financial challenges and where we are losing many critical doctors and nurses. We continue to have far too many people with no health insurance, a situation that drives up costs for all of us. And we must strongly support healthy lifestyles through education and treatment in order to reduce the huge medical costs driven by unhealthy behaviors like smoking and substance abuse.