WORKING STIFFS CATCH A BREAK
Court nixes ‘millionaire tax’ ploy
The “millionaire tax” is dead, and no matter how much money you make, that’s great news for you — at least if you’re not a hack or an illegal immigrant. Final score from yesterday’s SJC decision: People who work for a living 1, people who live off people who work for a living 0. What you have to understand is that the hackerama was running a bait-andswitch here. They claimed they were only going to rob people making “above $20,000 a week,” as one tubby payroll patriot put it over the weekend.
The proposed referendum question, now dead, was supposed to raise the tax on any income over $1 million from 5.1 percent to 9.1 percent — “only 4 percent,” the hacks kept saying, which was another lie. From 5.1 percent to 9.1 percent is actually almost doubling the rate, is it not?
Another lie — the socalled millionaire tax was supposed to raise about $2 billion. In every other state that’s tried this kind of obnoxious class warfare — think Maryland, Connecticut, New Jersey — the supply of millionaires (and billionaires) has instantly failed, and so have state revenue collections.
Working people either vote with their feet and flee, or they figure out a way to stay under the threshold, whatever the threshold might be.
Once the number of Massachusetts millionaires inevitably started to plummet, all the “advocates” would have said, gee whiz, what a shock, but I guess we’ll have to start taxing people at the higher rate who make less than a million a year, maybe, like, $950,000 less than a million a year.
The millionaire tax would have been great for property values — in New Hampshire. Not to mention Florida, Texas and Tennessee. You know, all the states with no income taxes.
Even the lame duck dimbulb governor of Connecticut, Dannel Malloy, finally figured out the folly of the millionaire tax — after cratering his state’s economy. In New Jersey, the Democrats in the legislature spent eight years passing one income-tax increase after another, knowing that Chris Christie, the Republican, would do the responsible thing and veto them.
Now, they’ve finally got a Democrat governor in Trenton who is willing to beggar the Garden State. But guess what happened — the Democrat leadership in the legislature had to step in and stop their own party’s tax hikes from finishing off the state’s faltering economy.
None of this history mattered to the local hacks. They’re addicts, taxaholics. One tax is too many, and a thousand are not enough.
As usual, the hate-has-nohome-here crowd miss the obvious solution. Everyone who wants to pay higher income taxes in Massachusetts can do so, voluntarily. All you have to do is check the box on your state income tax form. Instead of paying at the current 5.1 percent rate, you can “contribute” at the old confiscatory Dukakisera rate of 5.85 percent.
Hey, it’s for the children. Not to mention the crumbling infrastructure.
The last time I checked with the Department of Revenue, they told me that of the first 2,027,928 income-tax filers this year, exactly 894 had opted to pay their … fair share. That’s less than one-twentieth of 1 percent of the population who decided to virtue signal with their bank accounts instead of their Facebook postings.
Somehow, this will be spun as Donald Trump’s fault. Everything else is. I just hope this victory doesn’t mean that the people pushing the referendum question to cut the state sales tax back to 5 percent are going to blink.