Antitax group giving up?
By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
Thursday, June 11, 1998
God has inflicted many punishments on the people of
Massachusetts. Ted Kennedy. Michael Dukakis. Cambridge. The Green Line.
But those plagues will be as nothing next to the
agonies awaiting Bay Staters if the good lord lets Citizens for Limited Taxation and
Government go out of business.
CLT, as it is known to friend and foe, is one of the
great redoubts of the national tax revolt that burst out of California in the 1970s.
Founded in 1974, within two years it had collected its first scalp, crushing a ballot
initiative to replace Massachusetts's flat-rate income tax with a scheme of graduated
rates. ("That's when the harder you work," CLT explained, "the more they
take away.") Eighteen years later, when a gaggle of welfare statists and public
sector unions pushed a graduated income tax onto the ballot once again, CLT crushed it
once again.
Its finest hour came in 1980. Massachusetts was
cracking under the highest tax burden in America. From the governor's office on down, the
state was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party. Malaise ran deep. And then
came CLT, just a-walkin' down the street, with a prescription for tax relief that rocked
the establishment: Proposition 2½.
It slashed property taxes. Slashed the auto excise
tax. Slashed the income tax for renters. In return, Proposition 2½ was slashingly
attacked by the press and the politicos. Fires would burn out of control, voters were
warned, because there would be no fire departments to stop them. Sick people would die for
lack of hospitals to treat them. Schools would close. The dead would go unburied. If Prop
2½ became law, declared the Massachusetts League of Cities and Towns -- one of the many
such prophesies, and far from the most hysterical -- "it would effectively wipe out
government."
On election Day, Proposition 2½ won in a landslide,
59-41. and CLT, with its tiny staff and its army of volunteers, had become a force to
reckon with.
In the 1980s, CLT and its members were the closest
thing Massachusetts had to a functioning opposition party. It had one loyalty, and that
was to the taxpayers; one priority, and that was tax relief. In 1986, it forced the repeal
of the Dukakis income surtax. In 1987, it killed the Legislature's gluttonous pay raise --
the third raise in eight years, and a greedy 37 percent to boot.
As Dukakis ran for president, the state's economy
disintegrated. Red ink bled all over Beacon Hill, but the Democrats refused to trim the
budget. Instead they jacked up taxes -- raising the income tax from 5 percent to 5.75
percent, then again to 6.25 percent. A few honest legislators protested, but it was CLT
that declared war -- and especially CLT's incorruptible, irrepressible executive director,
Barbara Anderson. She vowed that her organization would put the tax hikes before the
voters, giving them the chance to undo the Legislature's damage. Sure enough, CLT got a
tax rollback on the ballot in November; it appeared as Question 3.
But this time the voters said no. CLT suffered its
first major defeat. On the other hand, it rejoiced in the election of a Republican
governor who had supported Question 3. William Weld promised CLT he would never sign any
law that raised taxes or weakened Prop 2½, and (by and large) he proved true to his word.
Now CLT has stumbled again, Its second attempt to
roll back the 1989-90 tax hikes has failed. This time it couldn't even muster enough
signatures to get on the ballot. Like locusts, the government employees unions --
especially the rapacious Massachusetts Teachers Association -- swarmed all over CLT's
petition sheets, challenging signatures for any reason, however minute and preposterous.
Outspent and outgunned, CLT's four staffers couldn't defeat the unions' army of lawyers
and deep pockets: They wound up 26 signatures short.
But what of CLT's own army -- the grass-roots
activists, the ticked-off taxpayers? Its membership has dwindled in recent years from
18,000 to 9,000. The voters who used to line up at shopping malls to sign CLT's tax-cut
petitions now brush past Barbara Anderson and her volunteers. "No thanks, I'm all
set," they mutter when asked if they'd like to help lower their own taxes. The
callers to radio talk shows who used to chew up the lines in a fury over arrogant
politicians now prefer to share Viagra jokes.
So Anderson and her co-director, Chip Ford, are
thinking of closing up shop. Their passion for limited taxation and honest government is
as hot as ever, but if the public no longer cares when the state rips them off, who needs
CLT?
They are surveying their members and asking the
public for advice. Keep punching, or hang up the gloves? Keep pushing the Legislature to
return some of the state's abundant revenue to the citizens who earned it, or let Beacon
Hill's insiders do as they please? Keep telling the truth, or abandon the field to the
liars?
Anderson and Ford are funny, blunt, hard-headed,
cheerful, and idealistic. They work 14 hours a day and pay themselves all of $369 a week.
They are two of the most selfless allies Massachusetts voters have ever had. But they
can't keep running on fumes. They need to know they've got some support, and they need
some money to cover the rent. It costs $25 a year to join CLT. The phone number is
617-248-0022.
Jeff Jacoby is a Globe columnist
Tax-and-spenders gleeful
By Jon Keller
The Boston Globe
Thursday, June 11, 1998
When the most significant woman in Massachusetts
politics says she's ready to walk away from it all out of frustration and disgust, you'd
expect a degree of hand-wringing from a political establishment that's justifiably
embarrassed about its chronic female leadership vacuum. But when the woman is
blunt-talking antitax activist Barbara Anderson, news of her possible retirement is
instead occasion for cork-popping all over Beacon Hill.
"It's great news," says public employee
union lobbyist Jim St. George of the Tax Equity Alliance for Massachusetts, or TEAM.
"It'll be easier to make good policy in the Commonwealth without a radical
libertarian throwing bombs into the arena."
Uh-oh. Say what you will about Anderson's politics,
but the loss of her feisty presence would seriously unhinge the Beacon Hill balance of
power.
For those who haven't studied tax-hike-speak, when
St. George talks about making "good policy," he means raising taxes on an
economy that perennially suffers from a competitive disadvantage with other, lower-tax
industrial states. And those "bombs" Anderson's been throwing since she took the
helm of Citizens for Limited Taxation and Government 17 years ago? That must refer to the
hundreds of thousands of voter signatures Anderson and her comrades have filed on various
initiative petitions aimed a imposing fiscal discipline on an often out-of-control state
government.
Why is Anderson edging toward the exit pending the
outcome of a survey of her group's members on the subject? "I've lost my tolerance
for people like Jim St. George and the teachers union who don't care how many people they
hurt or what they do to the children as long as they keep their power and keep the money
coming in," she explains. "I'm just sick of all of them, and I don't want to
have to deal with them anymore."
After all those years of grueling activism,
Anderson's burnout is understandable. And she can look back on a mission largely
accomplished. Anderson's impressive marshaling of public antitax sentiment over the years
is a major reason why no local politician in their right mind admits to wanting new taxes
anymore.
But it's also true that Anderson's been on the
demoralizing losing streak. Adversaries who couldn't whip her in the political arena have
fared better in the courts, deep-sixing the pay-raise repeal and term-limits petitions and
successfully challenging the signatures on her recent tax cut petition. "Our
opponents have found they can outspend us and try to keep the people from ever getting a
chance to vote," acknowledged Anderson.
And even back on political turf, "things on
Beacon Hill now are worse than I have ever seen them," she moans. As Anderson sees
it, House Speaker Tom Finneran is a balding Trojan horse waiting for the right moment to
renew his early-1990s crusade to undo the Proposition 2½ property-tax cap. Weld and
Cellucci lost the ability to sustain a veto in 1992 yet haven't had their impotence
exposed by a major tax bill because of the economic boom and its tax revenue harvest.
But come the next downturn, St. George and his
buddies in the public-employee gimme brigades will be sniffing around the treasury,
predicts Anderson. Another grim prospect: the possible election of Scott Harshbarger, who
told last weekend's Democratic convention that "labor's agenda is my agenda."
Should the Democratic electoral roll of the last three election cycles continue this fall,
"people will find out what it's like not having a taxpayer group in Massachusetts,
having only the Legislature in control," warns Anderson.
No wonder the tax-and-spenders are giddy over the end
of the Anderson era. They'll argue there's no need for a CLT&G anymore, that a
reinvented, centrist, Democratic Party can be its own fiscal watchdog. Is that true? Says
Anderson: "If we go away, the world will find out, won't it?"
Jon Keller is political analyst for WLVI-TV's
"Ten O'Clock News"