Small Victories Today, Larger Ones to Come When Income Tax is Repealed
Welcome to the new Citizens for Limited Taxation blog. We hope you’ll visit here often and leave your comments from time to time.
CLT members receive regular updates via e-mail keeping them informed of what’s going on at the State House, what government in general is doing to them or planning to do. A day or two after members receive their copies, the Update gets posted on the CLT website, www.cltg.org, where the public is invited to read it and past Updates.
The most recent Update, sent to members on July 9, is available there now: “Small victories today, larger ones to come when income tax is repealed.”
The Committee for Small Government led by Carla Howell collected more than enough signatures to put the question of repealing the state income tax on the November ballot. Yesterday Secretary of State William Galvin assigned it ballot question #1.
This will be a great opportunity for taxpayers of the Commonwealth to at last tell the Bacon Hill pols what we think of their tax-borrow-and-spend agenda, and hopefully to end their reign of unaccountable profligacy squandering our hard-earned money.
In 2000, CLT and Gov. Cellucci put a question on the ballot to simply roll back the “temporary” income tax increase of 1989 to its traditional 5 percent. It was passed overwhelmingly (59-41 percent) by the voters; opposed by the very same cabal of public trough special interests that are now swarming to defeat Carla Howell’s Question One.
Two years later, in 2002 the Legislature — our alleged “representatives” — trampled that democratic outcome under their boots, gave the middle-finger Beacon Hill salute to the voters, and “froze” the citizens’ income tax rollback at 5.3 percent where it still stands today. The Dukakis “temporary” income tax hike of 1989 is now 19 years old.
The Legislature substituted a convoluted formula by which their “freeze” would be thawed by a minuscule fraction of a percentage point, bringing the income tax back down to five percent over a decade or more if perfect conditions were met every year. They called this their “trigger.” That trigger point was met last year with a revenue surplus. Where’s even that minuscule reduction? Another broken promise, but the suckers who keep electing them should be used to the boot to their backsides by now.
If the majority of State House pols can’t be trusted to respect the outcome of a fair election and their constituents’ mandate — or even their own alternative “trigger” scheme — then it’s time to take all our money paid through the income tax off the table and out of their hands — after all, every cent they have to spend comes from us.
Your chance arrives on Nov. 4. Vote YES on Question One. Remind them who they work for. Tell them who’s in charge. And let them know we’re fed up with bloated and far too expensive state government and with politicians who have no respect for taxpaying citizens and voters.
And while you’re at it on election day, vote against any tax-borrow-and-spend incumbent who fits that category of blatant disrespect for his or her employers, us.
Chip Ford –
Director of Operations
Citizens for Limited Taxation
7 comments July 11th, 2008
