The margins of defeat in each case were overwhelming: 67% to 33%, and 70% to 30%, respectively.
This year, there’s a coalition called “Raise Up
Massachusetts” and it’s basically pushing a simplified, narrower version of the
graduated income tax. They have a pithy
name for it: the “millionaire’s tax.”
“Raise Up” wants to get a referendum on the statewide ballot
in 2018 to impose a 4% surtax on all incomes in excess of $1 million per year. The ballot question would be part of a legal
process that would ultimately encode the surtax through an amendment to the
state constitution.
Proceeds from the surtax, estimated to be between $1.3 and
$1.4 billion annually, would be earmarked for public education and public
transportation projects.
“Raise Up” campaign organizers believe the relatively small number
of taxpayers impacted by the surtax will work to their advantage: approximately
14,000 wealthy Massachusetts residents, out of a total population of 6.7
million, would be subjected to it.
When I first heard about it, I figured the campaign was as
fatally flawed as its 1972 and 1994 cousins. A majority of voters will not embrace a plan to soak the rich and put hundreds of millions of new dollars a year in the hands of politicians, I thought.
But the more I think about it, the more I think the surtax
could come to pass.
Reading what Senate President Stan Rosenberg had to say this
past Monday, April 4, at the Greater Boston Labor Council breakfast, helped nudge
me further in that direction.“We need to rebuild the middle class in America and Massachusetts,” Rosenberg said. “We can’t do it without the investment in education and transportation and housing and energy, and it’s going to require us to shift the paradigm and change people’s minds that they can and should support a change in the constitution to allow us to change the tax system so that those who earn the most pay the most.”
The Senate now has working groups on education,
transportation and housing. These groups
are setting the stage for what Rosenberg and many of his colleagues hope will soon
be a fruitful debate in the legislature, and beyond, on establishing the 4%
surtax. The housing working group
released its report in March.
“When we have the education plan and we have the
transportation plan, we’re going to have all the elements we need to be able to
go out and argue for the fair share tax plan,” Rosenberg said Monday, according
to a State House News Service article on the Labor Council breakfast. “Fair share tax plan” is the preferred
nomenclature at the State House for the millionaire’s tax.
I imagine there are a lot of wealthy and almost-wealthy
Massachusetts residents who are ready to dismiss Rosenberg as an out-of-touch ultra-liberal
with no appeal beyond the geographic bounds of his district.
That’s how folks used to dismiss Bernie Sanders, the
septuagenarian socialist from little Vermont, too. Last time I looked, Sanders had won six of the
last seven state Democratic primaries.
I happened on a quote in a recent (3-21-16) edition of The
New Yorker that, in just a few blunt words, captured why Sanders has become so incredibly
popular with young people, the millennials.
Ben Tolchin, who serves as Bernie’s pollster, told the
author of the article, Ryan Lizza, that millennials support Sanders “because
their generation is so fucked, for lack of a better word, unless they see
dramatic change. What’s their experience
been with capitalism? They have had two
recessions, one really bad one. They
have a mountain of student-loan debt.
They’ve got really high health-care costs, and their job prospects are
mediocre at best. So that’s capitalism for
you.”
I see those colleges in and around Stan Rosenberg’s district,
including UMass Amherst, his alma mater, and think how easy it would be for him
to get hundreds, maybe thousands, of student volunteers on the millionaire’s
tax bandwagon this fall, should he make a serious effort to do so. Like Bernie’s acolytes, they ‘d form a
formidable ground force.
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