State House News Service
Wednesday, May 1, 2002
House chairman: '130 different great ideas'
but no consensus
House leaders said Wednesday they are still struggling to
build a consensus on tax hikes.
"More and more" lawmakers are telling House leaders they
will only support tax hikes if the money is used to reverse cuts to favored programs, said Rep. Paul Casey (D-Winchester),
co-chairman of the Taxation Committee.
That conditional support is making it hard to find consensus, Casey said. "The crystallization
of a simple three or four maybe five [item] bill is very difficult right now," he
said. After polling 157 House members on tax hikes, Casey said he has "130 different great ideas" but
no consensus. Gaining steam after the polling are new taxes on alcohol and sales,
though each item still enjoys "fewer than 50" members in support, he said.
Majority Leader Salvatore DiMasi said after a meeting late
Wednesday with House Speaker Thomas Finneran that much of the tax debate may be hashed out in a closed-door caucus
tomorrow. Support for individual tax hikes is weak, DiMasi said, and "when you try to put
everything together in package, it gets even more tenuous," he said. "It's very tricky."
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The Boston Herald
Thursday, May 2, 2002
Pols lard up to hike taxes
by Elisabeth J. Beardsley
House lawmakers appear poised today to consider the
politically treacherous step of hiking the income tax rate to as high as 5.75 percent even as they line up to divert spending
for pet projects and pork.
House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran told the Herald yesterday
there's "comfortable" support for canceling the voter-approved income tax cut - a move lawmakers are trying to
paint as not being an actual tax hike.
And Finneran added there's a growing majority of House
members who would be willing to increase the rate to 5.6 percent - a move considered taboo until just a few weeks ago.
The current 5.3 percent rate is scheduled to go down to 5 percent next year.
"Each of them have majorities," Finneran said. "(Today) will
be ... a judgment day."
The sudden weakening in the tax-resistant House comes after
Finneran unveiled a $21.8 billion budget that slashed $1.5 billion from popular programs like education, human services
and health care.
Lawmakers are still all over the map when it comes to how
much and which taxes to hike, despite the fact that debate begins today.
Finneran plans to huddle privately with his top lieutenants
this morning, then hold a closed-door caucus before the session begins.
But sources tell the Herald that Rep. Martin Walsh (D-Boston) is pushing a leadership
preference to hike the income tax rate all the way to 5.75 percent - a move that would
raise $700 million.
At a private caucus Tuesday, Finneran offered a package of
tax hikes with the most support among rank and file lawmakers, including freezing the income tax cut, hiking the cigarette tax
and reinstating taxes on capital gains.
Walsh's amendment would drive the income tax up to 5.75
percent, raising nearly $500 million more than just freezing the rate at 5.3 percent. It also includes the capital gains and
cigarette tax pieces.
Walsh denied doing the speaker's bidding, and said he's
worried about destroying life-saving human and social service programs.
"Marty Walsh doesn't want to be the one who votes for
taxes," Walsh said. "Marty Walsh also doesn't want to be one that's driving people into the streets."
House Republican Leader Francis Marini (R-Hanson) reacted
with horror to the 5.75 percent proposal.
"This is just a flat, 'I don't care what the voters passed,
we're not doing it, mail your money in,' by Tom Finneran," Marini said. "I just can't see the governor signing a 5.75
percent tax."
Other amendments would hike the excise tax, impose new sales
taxes on alcohol, and empower the state Department of Revenue to chase down smokers who cross the border to
New Hampshire to buy cheap smokes.
Finneran's lieutenants said Tuesday they were seeking $1
billion in new taxes. But Finneran backed away from that pricetag yesterday - a day after acting Gov. Jane Swift's
senior advisers told the Herald she would never accept that much in new taxes.
"Some members would like to go that high," Finneran said.
"I'm not sure that that's the appropriate goal."
Swift, who has signaled she's willing to freeze the income
tax rollback, could receive political cover from the fact that the rollback and severe education cuts have become linked in
many lawmakers' minds.
"That's the political justification," Swift said. "We all
know what the choices are. I'll wait and see what the Legislature does."
Lawmakers are so sure huge sums of new tax money will be
raised they're rushing to pile not-yet-materialized money back into programs, pet projects and causes.
Many of the 1,555 budget amendments restored cash to
programs sliced in Finneran's austere spending plan, bringing education funding back to this year's levels and pumping
more into health and human services coffers.
More amendments, though, tied spending to election year
add-ons for courts, senior centers, playgrounds and police houses.
In Boston, $125,000 was set aside to encourage curbside
recycling while $19 million was added to the payroll at the Mass. Highway Department. Dozens signed on to a proposal
pumping $6 million more into the state's bloated court system and reps from every region
scurried to save treasured community policing dough.
As Republicans attacked the unprecedented rush for cash,
Finneran denied any "feeding frenzy" is in the works. While amendments will be entertained in the "freewheeling and fully
participatory" spirit of the House, Finneran warned that members shouldn't get their hopes
too high.
"There'll never be enough money to accommodate ... half the
cuts that were made," Finneran said.
Karen E. Crummy and David R. Guarino contributed to this
report.
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The Telegram & Gazette
Worcester, Mass.
Wednesday, May 1, 2002
Editorial
Gaping gaps
As House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran steps up his campaign to
levy some $2 billion in new state taxes in fiscal 2003, the tiny Republican minority has adopted a strategy to hold
individual lawmakers strictly accountable for their actions in the next week or so.
The GOP gambit may be Bay Staters' last, best hope for
preventing the special-interest juggernaut grinding its way up Beacon Hill from becoming a tax-and-spend bandwagon at
the Statehouse.
Nobody doubts that Massachusetts is facing a significant
cash-flow problem. However, people cannot be faulted for concluding that the Legislature's credibility on this "crisis"
is near zero.
The string of broken promises to taxpayers and displays of
utter contempt for the wishes of the people stretches back to refusal to roll back the "temporary" income tax hike imposed
during the last fiscal calamity more than a dozen years ago.
But the slippery dealing continues today. The House
leadership's current slash-and-burn spending proposal is not a budget so much as a political bludgeon designed to create
maximum disruption, maximum panic among special interests and advocates and, Finneran &
Co. hope, maximum outcry for the taxes needed to sustain yet another $1 billion increase in
state spending.
Too few in number to stop taxation measures, or even to
sustain a gubernatorial veto, House Republicans hope to do the next best thing: Put lawmakers officially on the record by
forcing roll-call votes on every taxation measure.
Mr. Finneran -- speaker for life in the House and, most
likely, representative for life in his Mattapan district -- may feel he is immune to political backlash. However, the
rank-and-file lawmakers he keeps so firmly under his thumb may be less eager to face questions on the
campaign trail this fall about why they reneged on the long-promised income tax
rollback, or raised capital gains taxes on retirees' nest eggs, or voted to halve the personal income tax
exemption of the working people they claim to represent.
At the very least, forcing lawmakers to vote "yea" or "nay"
on each measure will prompt them to think twice before hopping on the tax-and-spend bandwagon. As long as
Massachusetts -- like the South in the era of poll taxes and Jim Crow -- remains
a one-party state in which all matters of consequence are decided by legislative leaders behind closed
doors, that meager level of accountability is about the best taxpayers can hope
for. Gov. Jane M. Swift, while softening her no-new-taxes stance, has aptly labeled the Finneran
budget an exercise in "hyperbole and false choices."
It exaggerates by calculating a revenue shortfall based not
on the current spending level, but an "anticipated" spending level -- a stratagem spelled out for lawmakers last week. Ways
and Means Chairman John H. Rogers prefaced his calculation of a $2.7 billion shortfall with
the assertion, "If there was no fiscal crisis, stakeholders would expect and anticipate a
fiscal year 2003 budget of about $24 billion."
That bit of fiscal legerdemain prompted Barbara
Anderson, executive director of Citizens for Limited Taxation, to quip,
"My goodness, we should all be grateful that he didn't 'anticipate' a
$30 billion budget, or we'd now be hearing the alarm bells going off over a fiscal crisis
magnitude of $8.7 billion."
The hyperbole also permeates interest groups' campaigns for
higher taxes, now in high gear. One TV commercial in the Massachusetts Teachers Association's current $1.4 million ad
campaign alleges that, absent huge tax increases, schoolchildren will be forced to run the
cafeteria and drive the school buses.
Talk about false choices.
This week, taxpayers are being asked -- by lawmakers who
decline to forgo even the recent dramatic hikes in their expense accounts -- to believe that a $21.3 billion budget
would constitute fiscal Armageddon, even though the state operated quite smoothly on that sum just
two years ago.
Whatever the real budget gap may be, it certainly is dwarfed
by the yawning credibility gap of the Legislature.
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The Boston Herald
Thursday, May 2, 2002
Imminent vote on tax hike
prompts pols' wild spending
by David R. Guarino
State pols might not agree exactly how taxpayers should get
the bill, but they now apparently see eye to eye on at least one thing - a sudden, frantic determination to spend.
A day before an expected vote on a massive tax hike package, lawmakers yesterday quietly launched a
bid to lay claim to the riches they expect to receive.
From new cash to patronage-laden courthouses to aid to
Latino farmers in Western Massachusetts, House lawmakers proposed billions of new spending on pet projects and
hometown pork.
In the 1,555 new spending amendments to the state budget,
representatives use hundreds of earmarks to divert cash to local projects and drive up spending in countless accounts -
all before even casting a single vote for new taxes.
"We'll have all this money, now we have to decide how to
spend it," said state Rep. Carol Donovan (D-Woburn), who herself proposed $730 million in new spending in amendments
alone.
"What do you expect?" asked House Republican Leader Francis
Marini of Hanson. "They don't want to cut. The only thing they want to cut is the paycheck of the person out there
who pays the bills."
The amendments to the House's $21.8 billion budget proposal
floated in to the House Clerk's office in recent days, piling up as the deadline approached late Tuesday. By
yesterday, the unprecedented number of add-ons - going beyond the 1,400 new
spending amendments proposed for the huge surplus budgets of the late 1990s - clogged State House
photocopiers and jammed up the state's Web site.
A Herald review of hundreds of amendments shows House
lawmakers eager to find ways to divvy up the tax pie.
Most of the proposals add controversial earmarks to state
accounts, a practice banned in the austere House budget unveiled by Speaker Thomas M. Finneran only days before.
But, even beyond that, the pols unleash a flurry of
spending.
Donovan proudly boasts of being one of the top spenders,
admitting to her $730 million filing.
The liberal lawmaker said her proposals were meant to chew
up much of the $750 million that the state expects to take in if pols approve hike in the sales tax from 5 percent to 6
percent. Donovan's proposals focus mostly on education and health care.
But many more take their cash local for basic, election year
pork.
Freshman Rep. Michael F. Kane (D-Holyoke) proposed reserving
$125,000 for the Farm Workers Association to help low income and Hispanic farmers in Western Massachusetts.
Veteran Rep. Angelo Scaccia (D-Hyde Park) wants to help
funnel hundreds of thousands more into the accounts of Secretary of State William Galvin.
In Wilmington, Democratic Rep. James Miceli earmarked a
special $47 million of a $97 million hospital line-item specifically for Tewksbury Hospital in his district while, in
another amendment, sought legislative approval to force the MBTA to tear down a maintenance
shack at the Wilmington station.
In nearby Lowell, the three-member Democratic delegation
hiked the appropriation for the city's Middlesex Northern Registry of Deeds by $1.3 million and pumped another $400,000
into the Lowell District Court accounts.
In Springfield, state Rep. Cheryl Rivera put in amendments
to give $100,000 to the Puerto Rican Veterans Association, another $57,750 to the Bilingual Veterans Outreach Center and
another $100,000 to the Puerto Rican Cultural Center - all in her hometown.
Chelsea state Rep. Eugene O'Flaherty put in $109,000 for the
Life Focus Center in Charlestown, but just in case that didn't fly, he added another $135,000 allotment to the
same center from a different state account.
Donovan asks colleagues to pump another $1.3 million into a
neonatal home parenting program and $2.3 million more to the city and town libraries. Her proposals bring literacy
grant spending from $12 million to $20 million and MCAS test remediation programs from a
mere $20 million to $50 million.
"If we have that pool of money, I feel like I can persuade
people that this is how we should spend it," she said.
Dozens of other pols also try to filter money back into
primary education spending.
Asked if the flood of amendments amounted to a legislative
feeding frenzy, Finneran said, "No, no, no, no.
"It's an appropriate member response or an institutional
response to try to protect programs and services that the members deem very, very important and that, in normal times,
they would protect with great intensity," the speaker said.
State Rep. Christopher Fallon (D-Malden) appeared to be one
of the few reps following the calls from House leaders that any amendments be accompanied by cuts of similar size.
Fallon, a member of Finneran's Ways and Means Committee, proposed cutting
out the $405,000 budget of the Judicial Conduct Committee but, with the cash, proposed dozens of
early intervention programs.
"There is money in these accounts we can go after. We don't
need to raise money solely through taxes for every single line item that was cut," Fallon said. "I felt it was important to
try to help trim some of the fat from the budget."
In the end, though, even advocates of tax hikes said the
pols won't get all the want for their pet programs. They said Finneran will draw the line and insist on keeping some deep
cuts.
"People will be disappointed, there will be some lost
opportunities here," said Jim St. George of Tax Equity Alliance for Massachusetts.
Elisabeth J. Beardsley contributed to this report.
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The Boston Globe
Thursday, May 2, 2002
For most in House, election is certain
By Rick Klein
Globe Staff
As they prepare to take controversial votes on tax increases
today, there's one thing most legislators don't have to worry about: reelection.
About two-thirds of the 144 House members running to keep
their seats this fall won't face a a major party challenger, freeing most lawmakers from the fear of losing their jobs.
Republicans will challenge just 40 incumbent Democrats. Many of those GOP candidates are
untested neophytes, and fewer than a dozen races are expected to be competitive.
Many expect the dearth of opponents to embolden lawmakers to
approve new taxes.
Yesterday, the House, by a vote of 125-29, passed a $1 per
pack increase to the cigarette tax, which would give Massachusetts the highest tax on tobacco products in the nation
and would generate an estimated $225 million next year. More votes are expected tomorrow as
House leaders push for as much as $1 billion in tax increases.
House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran put off debate on taxes
until this week, when candidates were required to turn in signatures to run for the Legislature. Many saw
Finneran's schedule as strategic, allowing incumbents to find out whether
they have an opponent before taking up the controversial tax proposals. In 1990, after the Legislature
raised the income tax, 18 House members lost their seats.
Without the threat of being swept out of office, tax votes
are far easier for legislators to take, said Dennis Hale, a professor at Boston College who specializes in state and local
politics.
"They don't feel constrained," Hale said. "If they don't
have to worry about facing an angry electorate who can vote for another candidate, then it's much easier to do it."
Despite early noise about gubernatorial candidate Mitt
Romney helping Republicans attract legislative candidates, the GOP will not run challengers against the vast majority of the
127 House Democrats seeking reelection.
That means the Republicans have no realistic chance of
breaking the Democrats' current 134-22 stranglehold in the House, no matter how many taxes the Legislature raises this
year. The same goes in the Senate, where it's unlikely the Democrats' 34-6 advantage will suffer,
since only 10 Republicans are headed for the ballot against an incumbent
Democrat.
Jonathan Fletcher, executive director of the state Republican Party, acknowledged
disappointment at the number of GOP candidates this year. The problem stems from the
years in which party leaders failed to lay the proper groundwork, Fletcher said.
"We're not where we need to be as a party at all," Fletcher
said.
Still, he added, the GOP will field candidates in 72 House
districts and 19 in the Senate, including incumbents and challengers. That makes 2002 the party's best in eight years.
Two years ago, the Republicans ran 59 House and 15 Senate candidates.
"Our efforts are going to keep going, especially after these
tax things happen," Fletcher said.
Republicans and antitax groups are warning that many House
and Senate members who aren't facing opponents now may still have to face write-in candidates if they vote to raise
taxes this year. Fletcher noted that a flurry of candidates emerged in the last few weeks
alone, as the Legislature prepared for its first major votes on taxes in more than a decade,
and hope to run as write-ins.
"This is awful for the people of our state, but potentially,
it's good for the Republican Party," he said.
Meanwhile, the Libertarian Party is fielding about 15
candidates of its own, and all can be expected to draw attention to lawmakers who support higher taxes. "We are
attempting to run as many candidates as we possibly can, to give people a choice," said Dave Rizzo, a
Libertarian spokesman.
Some Democratic incumbents will get pressure from the
political left as well, with liberal groups looking to tap into negative sentiment toward House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran.
They are recruiting candidates to run on anti-Finneran platforms and are targeting a few close
Finneran allies and open seats. However, they said they were still finalizing their
lists yesterday.
"We think there's a considerable interest in challenging
leadership, bringing in new ideas, and opening up the political process," said Eric Weltman, organizing director of Citizens
for Participation in Political Action, which is coordinating an "Overthrow Finneran" campaign this
year.
Although the candidates were required to turn in signature
papers to run for the Legislature at city and town halls this week, those signatures are yet to be certified, so some of the
hopefuls may be disqualified.
About two dozen legislative candidates are planning to seek
public financing under the Clean Elections Law, and many will be sharply critical of Finneran's leadership, since the speaker
has been the biggest roadblock to the law's full implementation. Massachusetts Voters for
Clean Elections will work with candidates and is planning advisory questions in the
districts of some lawmakers who oppose the voter-approved law, to draw further attention to the
issue.
Most of the jockeying will come in the 16 open House seats
created by redistricting, retirements, and representatives running for new positions, said Patricia Schroeder, political
director of the Commonwealth Coalition, a liberal political group that tracks legislative races.
"People are jumping in, with several candidates in all of
them," Schroeder said, referring to the open seats. "But there's still not a lot of contested races against incumbents,
as is typical of every year."
It's a much different climate than in 1990. Then, the
Republicans ran candidates in 122 of 160 House seats.
This year, most lawmakers can make their decisions on taxes
without worrying about direct political backlash. But that freedom comes at a cost, since antitax sentiments could be
minimized on Beacon Hill because of the lack of opposition, said James Glaser, chairman of
the political science department at Tufts University.
"Challengers are important to a democracy," Glaser said.
"Choice is what a democracy is all about. Choice brings accountability."
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The Boston Globe
Thursday, May 2, 2002
The House yesterday overwhelmingly approved a $1 per pack
increase to the state cigarette tax, easily surpassing the two-thirds threshold needed to override a promised veto by
Acting Governor Jane Swift and positioning Massachusetts to install the highest tax on tobacco
products in the nation - one that would generate an estimated $225 million next year.
But House leaders acknowledged that it may have been the
only easy tax vote members will take this week.
For the first time since the Dukakis era, the Legislature
faces major decisions on taxes. Although consensus has been reached on about $750 million worth, House Speaker Thomas
M. Finneran is trying to find agreement on several hundred million dollars more - possibly in
a single package.
"People are all over the place," said House majority leader
Salvatore F. DiMasi, a North End Democrat. "When you try and put everything together, in a package, it becomes even
more tenuous. It's very tricky. Right now, there is no package. The package is being
developed."
Finneran is promising a marathon session of tax debate
today. House members will meet in caucus at 10 a.m. for a final round of negotiations before all of the tax issues are thrown
to the body at large.
"If we don't go with a package, it'll be one tax at a time,
up or down," said House Taxation Committee chairman Paul C. Casey, a Winchester Democrat.
The tobacco tax increase passed without debate by a vote of
125-29. Eight Democrats joined 21 of 22 House Republicans voting in opposition. The measure would place the
cigarette tax at $1.76 a pack in Massachusetts - well above New York's
$1.50-a-pack tax, now the nation's highest.
House leaders said the bill could be scaled back today, with
a final version adding only 50 or 75 cents to the current 76-cent state levy. But unlike proceeds from the current tax,
money from the increase would not automatically fund health-care programs under the proposal that
passed yesterday.
House assistant minority leader Bradley H. Jones Jr.
predicted the new tax would help balance New Hampshire's budget by driving Massachusetts smokers across the state line to
buy cheaper cigarettes. He and other Republicans maintain that the state doesn't need new
taxes to cope with a $2 billion budget gap in the fiscal year that begins July 1.
"This crisis, if you want to call it that, is able to be
solved through a combination of cuts, existing revenues and reserve funds, and some new revenues," said Jones, who
represents North Reading.
Republicans propose to collect those new revenues through
the establishment of casino gambling in Massachusetts and limiting state Lottery payouts, but those ideas have gotten a
cool reception from House Democratic leaders. Yesterday, House Ways and Means
chairman John H. Rogers rejected the Lottery concept in a letter to his colleagues, writing
that it would "wreck the most successful state lottery in the world."
Finneran and his top deputies met behind closed doors into
the night yesterday, periodically summoning selected House members and outside budget analysts for their input. In an
indication of how elusive consensus has been, House leaders polled all members for the third
time in four days.
Casey said the original list of more than 150 revenue
sources has been narrowed to less than 10 that will receive serious consideration today. On top of the cigarette tax, there
is strong support in the House for freezing the income tax rate at 5.3 percent and for a proposal to tax
capital gains like regular income, he said.
Those proposals, plus a tax amnesty program, would free up
just $750 million - well below the $1 billion that many members feel is necessary to ease the fiscal crunch, Casey said. The
next tier of taxes could include a repeal of the deduction for charitable contributions, a 1
percentage point increase in the sales tax, imposing a sales tax on alcoholic beverages or
halving the personal tax exemption.
Jones mocked the Democrats' inability to find agreement.
"There's consensus for doing something, but that's where the
consensus breaks down," he said. "It's not really a tax splurge. It's more like a sputter."
Globe correspondent Chris Tangney contributed to this report.
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The MetroWest Daily News
Thursday, May 2, 2002
Pols ponder tax hike fallout
By Michael Kunzelman
BOSTON - Although he is facing a Republican challenger in the
fall, state Rep. Stephen LeDuc, D-Marlborough, insists he isn't concerned that voting to raise taxes could carry a
steep political price.
Freezing the income-tax rollback and raising the cigarette
tax will help offset deep cuts in school funding and other local aid, LeDuc said yesterday on the eve of the House debate
over potential tax hikes.
"I'm trying to be responsible," LeDuc said. "We in the
Legislature have a responsibility to raise revenues and minimize as much pain as possible."
LeDuc may be the only House member from MetroWest who is
facing a Republican challenger on the fall ballot, but other incumbents appear to be concerned about the possible
backlash from raising taxes in an election year.
House leaders postponed the debate on tax increases from
yesterday until today because they apparently had difficulty reaching consensus on which measures should be included.
Tellingly, yesterday also was the deadline for candidates to
file nomination papers with town and city clerks.
"Some members may have been waiting to see if they had
opponents," said state Rep. David Linsky, D-Natick.
Rep. Patricia Walrath, an Acton Democrat who serves on House
Speaker Thomas Finneran's leadership team, expressed doubt that any lawmakers would vote against raising
taxes simply because they fear a backlash from voters.
"There's always political prices to pay for anything we do,"
Walrath said. "If we have an opponent, fine, but we still have to stand up for what we think is the right thing to do."
Finneran and his deputies aren't applying pressure to
support a particular slate of tax hikes, Linsky and other rank-and-file lawmakers said.
"They're not twisting arms," Linsky said. "At this point,
there really is no leadership tax package."
State Rep. Karen Spilka agreed.
"I personally haven't gotten any pressure," the Ashland
Democrat said. House leaders made another round of telephone calls yesterday to poll members on proposed tax increases.
State Rep. Lida Harkins, who polled nearly two dozen members
yesterday, said there didn't seem to be much support for raising the sales tax.
"But people still wanted to see the hard numbers," the
Needham Democrat said.
The House also is weighing changing the capital-gains tax
formula, raising the cigarette tax by $1 and freezing the income tax, which is scheduled to roll back to 5 percent.
Those three options had widespread support Tuesday in a poll
of House members, according to Harkins.
"We have quite a large menu of options," she said. "I think
we're just trying to get a package that a majority of people would support."
Lawmakers appear to be split on the total amount of money
that needs to be raised.
Estimates range from about $400 million to $1 billion. LeDuc
said he falls on the low end of that spectrum.
"I think there's a difference of opinion on how much money
we should raise," he said.
Some advocates fear that the House isn't prepared to raise
enough revenue to restore all the cuts to human-service programs.
"We always seem to be the last priority," said Eric Masi,
president and CEO of the Wayside Youth and Family Support Network in Framingham.
"I think there's going to be enough (funding) for education
and local aid, but whether they raise enough revenue to restore cuts to human services is still a concern."
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The Boston Globe
Thursday, May 2, 2002
Random musings
By Jeff Jacoby
* * *
If Massachusetts legislators raise taxes, they won't just be showing disdain for the 1.5 million Bay Staters who voted by a wide margin to lower them. They will also be demonstrating contempt for those who play by democracy's rules.
It was not easy to put Question 4 - the income-tax rollback - on the 2000 ballot. Supporters had to research the law and draft an initiative that would survive legal challenge. They had to spend thousands of man-hours collecting tens of thousands of signatures, then transport petitions to and from town halls all over the state. They had to combat well-heeled opponents - the high-tax lobby spent more than $3 million - and out-argue critics in the press and on Beacon Hill. They had to develop a ''vote yes'' campaign, pay for advertising, and make their case to the public.
At every step, Question 4's backers were outmanned and outshouted. But they believed the voters would be with them on Election Day. And they believed that once the voters spoke, their decision would be final. They did everything that Massachusetts law asked of them. They played by the rules. To cheat them of their hard-earned accomplishment now would be a betrayal of the worst sort and a stab in the back of Massachusetts democracy.
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The Eagle-Tribune
Lawrence, Mass.
Thursday, May 2, 2002
There's no reason for a tax hike
OUR VIEW
Legislators must have the courage to get through tough times without tax increases.
Legislators in the Massachusetts House of Representatives are poised to hit residents with a massive tax increase of up to $1.5 billion.
The people of this state should not stand for such an outrage.
Led by House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran, the Legislature wants to hit taxpayers on all fronts to avoid making tough decisions on budget priorities. An economic downturn has converted years of state budget surpluses into a shortfall estimated at $500 million this year and more than $2 billion next year.
This is a state in which lawmakers can call a $20.3 billion budget "bare bones." We are among the more highly taxed, excessively serviced citizens in the country. Yet it still is not enough to satisfy some. More than 1,000 people rallied at the Statehouse earlier this week protesting proposed budget cuts.
If lawmakers were impressed by that showing, wait until they see the protests when people find out how much their proposed tax increase will cost them.
House leaders want to freeze the income tax rollback at 5.3 percent. This is the rollback of "temporary" income tax increase put in place in the late 1980s. Voters demanded the rollback. The House wants to ignore their wishes.
Some legislators also want to cut the personal tax exemption in half from $4,400 to $2,200. Some want a capital gains tax increase to 5.3 percent. There will be a 50-cent hike in the cigarette tax to $1 a pack.
Still, this will not be enough. Legislators will seek more ways to extract money from us.
It's a shakedown of unprecedented proportion. And believe this: When lawmakers have wrung every last penny from our pockets and the recession ends, they will not be nearly as quick to lower our taxes as they were to raise them. Once the Legislature gets its hands on our money, its grip is iron.
The budget "crisis" is no crisis at all. It is a temporary setback. Temporary cuts in all programs, spending from "rainy day" and tobacco settlement funds could see us through until better times allow us to be more generous. As soon as the economy recovers, we can restore those funds.
All it takes is the political courage to say "No" to interest and advocacy groups. It's the kind of courage we ought to demand of those we elect to public office.
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