The Massachusetts House is expected to take up Speaker Tom Finneran's
proposal today to cut the state's income tax rate from 5.95 percent to 5.75 percent. This
is not a bad thing, of course. Cutting taxes is rarely a bad thing.
But the House should not kid itself that this cut would fulfill the
promises made back in 1989 when this "temporary" tax increase first saw the
light of day. In a full-page ad that ran in yesterday's Herald,
Citizens for Limited Taxation came up with a
host of newspaper stories published at the time, all attesting to the fact that
legislators intended this new tax burden to be only temporary, a boost to get the state
out of the fiscal crisis that then Gov. Michael Dukakis and his merry band of spendthrift
Democratic liberals had gotten it into.
Well, thanks to a strong economy, some fiscal prudence on the part of
Govs. William Weld and Paul Cellucci -- and with a good deal of help from Finneran too --
the state is in far better fiscal condition as the 1990s draw to a close. In fact, the
rainy-day fund is overflowing and still surplus tax dollars accumulate.
And as long as those tax dollars are flowing in, legislators will
find ways to spend them. The House budget for the coming fiscal year (which we will
explore more fully in tomorrow's editorial) is a prime example of that. This is a fact of
political life. It's time more of those dollars were returned to the people who earned
them. The House ought to consider its action today a mere down payment on a debt that has
for too long gone unpaid.
If the Legislature fails to reduce the income tax rate eventually to
5 percent, taxpayers will have no choice but to use the ballot to force lawmakers to keep
the promises made to them a decade ago.