The Justices of the Supreme Judicial Court have ruled that the income tax proposal the Senate included in its budget is not unconstitutional, ending the legal controversy, but not the political controversy.
The Senate’s income tax plan would freeze the personal income tax rate at its current rate (5.15 percent) rather than allowing a formula to remain in place that year by year automatically lowers it to 5 percent. The plan would also increase the personal income tax exemption and the state earned income tax credit, thus providing a modestly progressive adjustment to state income tax collections.
Opponents of the plan have taken to saying that the proposed freeze amounts to “breaking faith” with the electorate that voted back in 2000 to reduce the rate to 5 percent. The Herald used the phrase in a recent editorial. And Governor Baker repeated the charge in an interview on Boston Public Radio last week.
“Breaking faith” — that sounds grave. It’s a phrase that might lead you to think, for example, that the Legislature has never before tampered with a ballot question that the voters had passed. Well, that’s an assumption easily disproved. We can start with a pair of ballot questions, one from 1998 and the other from 2000.
In 1998, voters approved with 58 percent of the vote a ballot question providing for public financing for political candidates who agreed to fund-raising limits. The Legislature, whose leadership abhorred the new law, refused to provide the revenue necessary for its operation. The law remained on the books for a while, but the lack of funding kept it from taking effect.
In 2000, two years after the voters approved the public campaign financing initiative, a question to reduce the state income tax from 5.85 percent to 5 percent over the course of three years was on the ballot. Republican Governor Paul Cellucci strongly supported this proposal, and his administration worked hard to convince skeptical voters that the state could afford this enormous tax cut without cutting state services. The Governor’s Secretary of Administration and Finance was dispatched to proclaim that, far from resulting in service cuts, the tax rate reduction would stimulate economic activity and produce more revenue. In what was likely one of the last straight-faced invocations of the Laffer curve, the Secretary promised: “when you cut taxes you have a stimulating effect” (Globe, 10/31/2000). As it happens, the Secretary was Stephen Crosby, the current chair of the state Gaming Commission, who yesterday promised that casino gambling will bring as much as $400 million annually to the state.
Voters approved the tax rate cut that November, although by a lesser margin than the public campaign financing initiative had received two years earlier. But even before the year was out, state tax collections had begun to drop precipitously: the tech stock bubble was bursting. Only weeks after promising no cuts in services, Secretary Crosby was rethinking the entire situation. “That’s a colossal drop” in tax collections, he said. “That’s like falling off a cliff. That gives the message that we need to be ready” for spending reductions (Globe, 12/24/2000).
And the next few years would bring even more problems — the tragedy of 9/11 and the additional economic bad news that followed. The Legislature turned to paring programs and services and they also used the fiscal crisis as an opportunity to repeal the public campaign financing law. Said Governor Mitt Romney in okaying the repeal — “I do not want to put in our budget, particularly in a year with the financial challenges we have, money going into a Clean Elections fund.” In addition to cutting services, the Legislature also halted the voter-approved income tax reduction at its then-current level of 5.3 percent and put in place a formula tying future rate reductions to growth during the prior year, which is how we arrived at the 2015 tax rate of 5.15 percent.
In order to pave the way for the repeal of public campaign financing, the Legislature placed a non-binding question on the ballot in 2002 asking voters whether they approved of using taxpayer funds to pay for political campaigns. Money raised from large corporations funded an ad campaign that persuaded voters to reverse their prior vote in support of public campaign financing. No comparable effort was launched with respect to the income tax cut, so we don’t know whether voters would have favored significant reductions in funding for their schools, libraries, police and fire departments.
In the 15 years since the voters approved the income tax cut on the basis of a promise that it would increase revenue, that cut has been responsible for much of the reduction in funding for important state services: higher education is down 20 percent; early education down 23 percent, public health down 25 percent; local aid down 44 percent. (Hat tip for the stats to MassBudget.)
So what does it mean to “break faith” with the voters? To freeze the income tax rate and provide a small governmental counterweight to the growing problem of income inequality? Or to continue to peddle a promise made the better part of a generation ago that never could have been kept?
(Cross-posted here).
Only stingy, pinching faiths are sacred and must not be broken. Generous, empowering faiths don’t count.
Or State Senator or State Rep…
Many of us are smart, capable, and well known in our communities. Time to make the House we ought to have rather than the one we currently have. But set up the ActBlue page and I’ll support Hester for any office! She may have a hard time running in Salem though đ
for the endorsements, guys!
…
Implicit in this notion of ‘breaking faith’ by ballot fiat is the assumption that a purer/better/cleaner/singular/recognizable (insert one) faith occurs or is displayed best upon a ballot initiative above that which would be found in a more prosaic ballot: that is to say a ballot with candidates rather than questions; as if the one — having faith where the other lacks — overrides the other. It is as though the vote for a ballot initiative has more legitimacy than the vote for a representative: even to eliding the ‘will of the people’ for a particular representative in favor of the purported ‘will of the people’ for a particular outcome. This, it strikes me, is apologia without explication… which becomes invitation to emotionalism and antipathy, rather than reason amid practical concerns in defense of principle.
The most charitable view of ballot initiatives (although not a view to which I, particularly, subscribe) places the plebiscite in the context of checks and balances, neither wholly suasive nor subordinate to representation but another component of the give and take. This view sees the ballot initiative alongside the representation and gives representation as much due respect as the questions asked. Under this reading the representative cannot ‘break faith’ by acting against the implications of the ballot initiative — he or she is merely acting in their capacity to represent and — having possession of as much faith by the people who’ve assented to their representation — cannot ‘break faith’. The vote, whether it be for a ballot initiative or for representation is the faith and both are equal in intention and consequence.
The least generous reading of the ballot initiative (This also is a perspective to which I do not adhere) is, as above, fiat: it is the absolute end of the discussion as it is a clear evocation of the ‘will of the people’. This is, as I say, the least generous understanding because we can see (even in the narrative of this very diary) how easily the ‘will of the people’ is swayed and tossed. This reading of ‘initiative’ subordinates representation to this, sometimes feckless, ‘will’ and requires of the representative nothing more than compliance. In short, it is seen as absolute veto on representation. It is only in this context that a representative can ‘break faith’ by acting contrary to the initiative.
are halfway through high school. George W. Bush was still Governor of Texas. It was a long time ago.
If tax rates are set through legislation we don’t consider them sacrosanct. But if there’s a ballot initiative we have to honor it for how long? 15 years? 20? 25? 50? Even if the campaign promises of proponents prove false? Even if the state budgetary picture has changed dramatically? Even if the initiative makes the overall state tax system regressive? This talk of “breaking trust” is just a rhetorical ploy to justify keeping permanently enshrined a preferred tax policy.
…but as they say about dirty jobs, someone has to do it. I have never been a fan of legislating by popular vote. Most people don’t have enough information and there’s no opportunity to mark up initiatives to make them better. That said, it does seem that if we are going to have this system the legislature elected on the same ballot shouldn’t be allowed to touch it.
Or selectman overrule town meeting?
It’s pretty much the same idea, just on the local level.
authority not granted by statute, but town meetings can and do overrule select boards all the time.
Town meeting can vote down select board sponsored articles, amend them (within the scope of the article), and citizens can and do bring forward their own articles through the petitioning process.
But the conceptual argument is can the legislature override/overrule what “the people” voted for? I believe that is the thrust of the post.
Town meeting votes to build a new building and pay for it through an override. The selectman cannot then prevent that from happening.
If at the local level the selectman say “we want (or don’t want) this” and the town meeting says different, the town meeting has final say.
Isn’t a ballot initiative in essence a state-wide town meeting vote? The legislature should have to honor that.
non-binding. The budget, for example, can’t depend on the approval of a ballot initiative. One of our BMG attorneys would be able to tell you for sure, but taxation is the province of the legislature, not the ballot initiative. The ballot initiative, in this case, has political authority, but not legal authority.
for better or worse (and I go both ways).
It also, short of a constitutional amendment, cannot pass a law that is superior to other lawsâthat the Legislature cannot amend, subject to the Governor’s signature. On balance I think this is better than not (though I could think of ways to fine tune).
Why is interesting is why some popular votes are more equal than others de facto if not de jure.
It seems that all the ones where the Lege is duty bound to honor and respect The People are tax-cut laws. Other popular votes need not apply and The People can go pound sand.
So it’s a little like traffic laws in a town where the traffic laws are only enforced against people of color. There’s something fundamentally wrong, and it’s not the traffic laws.
…the Board of Selectmen is the executive of the town, which cannot go against the legislative authority of Town Meeting. OTOH, the General Court retains full legislative authority to alter or repeal laws enacted by the people acting as a legislature.
Thanks!
Selectmen are the executive branch of town government. Town meeting is the legislative branch of town government. Seems to me the comparison to the “keeping faith” issue is not especially useful.
nt
before I scrolled down and saw his post. Got a mother complaint?
nt
You never call
You never write
Why can’t you be more like your older brother?
and so on…
That’s what Holly Robichaud called it:
I oppose the thoughtless lowering of the income tax. It’s poor policy. Municipalities, I can tell you, desperately need the money. Sure, past legislatures can’t restrict the actions of future legislatures, but I want to see this legislature vote on lowering the income tax. I want to see them debate it. I want them to explain why it makes sense, not just because some idiots advanced the law 15 years ago.
BTW – really love how the diarist blamed the gutting of clean elections and the passage of the tax cut on omnipotent Republicans. Because, you know, the convicted Democratic speaker and the disgusted eletorate had nothing to do withit.
Your proposals might well get a lot of support.
Allow me to clarify that I do not blame the gutting of clean elections on the minority party (I would never use a word like “omnipotent” to describe them). Governor Romney would not have had the opportunity to sign the repeal into law had the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature not sent it to him.
He did forego an opportunity to expose the Dems on clean elections, though. If he had vetoed the repeal, the Dems would have had to take a roll call vote to override his veto — and names would have been named.
anti-taxers, accepted by the voters, and then doctored and approved by the legislature. Plenty of blame to go around on that one.
I was barely involved in politics at the time and voted against it, but I had no idea of what the actual ramifications would be.
We all know the reason the Mass GOP is so small is many of your potential “moderates” are Mass Dems. (And I don’t mean to imply that our Democratic convicts are would-be Republicans).
But you can and maybe should advocate for changes or repeal to laws that no longer make sense, or maybe you didn’t like to begin with. The entire General Court is up every two years, and while I think it makes sense for the people elected on the same ballot as the initiative shouldn’t touch it, I also think there’s no reason to hold the people’s vote sacrosanct beyond two years.