Citizens for Limited Taxation & Government
"The Commonwealth Activist Network"
18 Tremont Street #608 * Boston, MA 02108
Phone: (617) 248-0022 * E-Mail: cltg@cltg.org
Visit our web-page at: http://cltg.org
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*** CLT&G Update ***
Tuesday, July 22, 1997

Boston Herald
Tuesday, July 22, 1997
Editorial: One senator speaks up

At long last, one member of the Legislature is displaying the public spirit to challenge House Speaker Tom Finneran’s sneaky pay raises for his vassals.

Sen. Robert Hedlund (R-Weymouth) says he will try to knock the $7,500 raises for eight House members—including two Republicans -- out of the $85 million deficiency budget when it come up in the Senate, perhaps today.

Finneran attached the raises to the bill in an informal session and gavelled them through with no one objecting.

Though their leaders may sometimes be at odds over particular policies—of for no good reason at all—one body almost always defers to the other on questions of internal organization.

Hedlund is thus playing a very long shot—unless Senate President Tom Birmingham is looking for leverage against Finneran.

As a backup, Hedlund says he’ll move to drop the raises for the two House Republicans. That at least would remind House GOP members that the duty of opposition is to oppose chicanery like this.

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Boston Globe
Tuesday, July 22, 1997
Metro / Region
Malone enters governor fray with tax challenge
By Adrian Walker
Globe Staff

State Treasurer Joseph D. Malone, 48 hours away from announcing his candidacy for governor, threw out a political dare to his opponents yesterday.

Mostly, they refused to take the bait.

Malone asked his three declared opponents - Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, Lieutenant Governor Paul Cellucci, and US Representative Joseph P. Kennedy II - to join him in supporting a petition drive to lower the state income tax from 5.95 percent to 5 percent.

In a letter to the three of them - but not, apparently, to another potential candidate, US ambassador to the Vatican Raymond L. Flynn - Malone resorted to the familiar political tactic of "challenging" his opponents to get behind a controversial initiative - in this case, a petition drive sponsored by Citizens for Limited Taxation and Government, to return the state’s income tax rate to its pre-1990, pre-recession, level.

CLT&G, led by Barbara Anderson, charges that the tax increase was packaged as an emergency measure to cope with the fiscal crisis of the early 1990s and was never meant to be permanent. They hope to collect enough signatures to put a repeal of the current tax on the ballot in 1998, an effort likely to win plenty of popular support. The initiative must be submitted by Aug. 6.

"You and I know the Legislature will never voluntarily enact major tax reform," Malone wrote. "One need only consider the half-hearted attempt to cut taxes in the fiscal year 1998 budget to know that government would prefer to use whatever surplus monies exist to increase spending well beyond the rate of inflation instead of trying to make life more affordable for the people who live in Massachusetts."

For Malone’s GOP primary rival, Lieutenant Governor Paul Cellucci, the treasurer’s letter was superfluous. Rob Gray, a spokesman for Cellucci, said Cellucci already supports the initiative.

In the Kennedy camp, the Malone gambit was greeted with glee. A Kennedy adviser said Malone seemed to want to distance himself from the tax record of the administration in which he is serving.

"We’re shocked he would take this back-door approach to attacking the Weld-Cellucci administration," said Michael Goldman, a consultant to the Kennedy campaign. "But what do we know? We’re only Democrats."

Goldman declined to say whether Kennedy would support a state income tax rollback, though he added that Kennedy has favored federal tax reductions.

Harshbarger declined to comment on the letter. Edward Cafasso, a Harshbarger spokesman, said Harshbarger could not comment because as attorney general he is responsible for deciding whether the petition, if submitted, is legal.