Jeff Jacoby has a excellent piece in today's Boston Globe: "A resolution: Abolish the income tax" (12-30-07). While Jacoby has lost his nerve on issues that open him up to name-calling (you know which issues we mean), he's kept his nerve on taxes. He's totally behind the new effort to abolish the state income tax, which will be on the ballot in 2008. Currently, the income tax brings in just 40% of state revenues. We'd still be taxed to death even if it went away. Excerpts:
...Massachusetts without a personal income tax would not be a "place with no taxes." It would be a place with corporate income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, gasoline taxes, meals taxes, hotel taxes, excise taxes, workers' compensation taxes, estate taxes, capital gains taxes, cigarette taxes, wine and liquor taxes, motor vehicle taxes, and real estate transfer taxes, not to mention the taxes ("license fees") imposed on a vast array of professions and occupations. The $11 billion collected in personal income taxes accounts for only 40 percent of state revenue. Take that away and the government of Massachusetts still helps itself to more than $16 billion a year. That's not exactly "no taxes." ...
"Civilization costs something," the governor says, echoing the 1904 dictum of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: "Taxes are the price we pay for civilized society."
Maybe so. But in Massachusetts lately, taxes are also the price we pay for Big Dig corruption, for larcenous public-employee pensions, for state-owned golf courses, and for wretched public schools. Higher taxes are no guarantee of a more civilized society....
Eliminating the state income tax would reduce government spending by about $11 billion, shrinking the budget to its 1995 level. But that $11 billion would not be lost. It would be back in the private sector - back in the hands of the men and women who earned it, and who are far more likely to spend, invest, or donate it wisely than the bloated state bureaucracy it goes to now....
