Massachusetts voters have the rare chance to vote themselves
an eminently sensible income tax cut on the November ballot. They should leap at the chance.
Question 4, which is backed by Gov. Paul Cellucci, would
over three years reduce the state income tax rate from 5.85 percent to 5 percent, what it was before the fiscal crisis of
1989 prompted a "temporary" increase. The reduction will constitute a major rebuke to ambitious
interest groups and politicians who feel free to break promises without penalty. It
would, in the process, substantially improve the competitive position of a state more and more dependent on
increasingly mobile brain power.
The best case for it becomes apparent in looking at the
arguments of opponents. The first objection in their entry in the official "Information for Voters" pamphlet is that it would
"make it harder to reduce class size."
This is an appeal to myth and feel-good sentiment. Class
size has no detectable effect on student achievement, with the exception of a reduction to about 15 students per teacher in
the first two grades.
Our point is that opponents of the tax cut are the "government is here to help you" believers,
locked into a conviction that all public problems are best tackled with more
money. This group finds "unmet needs" to justify more government "help," a process with no stopping-place.
These true believers skip analysis, evade reflection upon
experience and are immune to evidence, particularly evidence that a government program is harmful, counterproductive,
wasteful, doing no good, or helping those who don't need it.
The best counterattack to such profligacy is to make sure
that revenue is limited.
State spending in Massachusetts has grown at twice the rate
of inflation or faster for the greater part of the last decade. It has been able to do so because revenue growth, even after
several other tax cuts, has been extraordinary, recently 10 percent a year. No student of the
phenomenon believes revenues can continue growing that fast.
The Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation has not endorsed the
income tax cut; it has taken no position. But its analysis shows that even with a slowdown in revenue growth, the state
can still maintain comfortably balanced budgets after the income tax cut if spending growth is slowed
moderately from the recent 7 percent per year.
The 1989 tax increase was passed by four votes in the House
on the last-minute promise that it was "temporary." An argument that further increases in 1990 repealed the promise or
somehow made it ineffective, without explicit statements to that effect, is a strange quibble. The
rate never went back to the pre-1989 5 percent. The accurate thing to say is that those
1990 revisions broke the promise.
To say that government revenue must be limited is not an
attack on government or the necessary tasks it undertakes. It is simply an attempt to ensure that government proceeds by
deliberation and calculation, hard to do when the stream of tax revenue overflows its banks.
Vote "Yes" on Question 4.