Jacoby Keeps His Nerve on Tax Issue

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....

Romney Exposed as Big Government Governor

Time to reread this piece by Carla Howell from last May. Her group has just gotten enough signatures to get an income-tax repeal question on the Massachusetts ballot in 2008 [hooray!]:

"Mitt Romney: Champion of Big Government" [topics Howell addresses:]

• Mitt Romney has been a champion of new taxes....
• [N]ot only did Mitt Romney refuse to cut the overall Massachusetts budget, he expanded it. Dramatically.... Romney initiated massive new spending – without any prodding....
• But his grande finale was the worst of all: RomneyCare, Mitt Romney's version of socialized medicine....Ted Kennedy has pushed for socialized medicine for decades. Romney fulfilled his dream. Kennedy lobbied the legislature hard to get Romney's bill passed. It was a Romney-Kennedy alliance....

Carla Howell was the Libertarian candidate for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002. She sponsored the 2002 Massachusetts ballot initiative to End the State Income Tax – which Romney opposed. Her initiative nearly won with 45% of the vote. She is Co-Founder and President of the Center For Small Government.