[Editor’s Note: Proof the legitimate ‘teaparty’ was alive an well since 2007, not 2009 when GOP operatives tried to usurp the name for fundraising purposes.]
Snohomish County Business Journal
Angry and frustrated at England’s new tax on tea, American colonists calling themselves the Sons of Liberty boarded three British ships on December 16, 1773 and dumped 342 crates of British tea into Boston harbor. The same thing happened in Maryland, New York and New Jersey over the next few months, and tea was eventually boycotted throughout the colonies.
Fast forward to 2008. Another Boston Tea Party is brewing because people are fed up with high taxes and out-of-control state spending.
The problem? Massachusetts’ 5.3 percent income and wage tax as well as the state’s capital gains tax which goes as high as 12 percent. But instead of tossing tea overboard, the Citizens for Limited Taxation (CLT) collected 125,000 signatures to put an initiative on the November ballot to toss out both the income tax and the capital gains tax.
A similar initiative was defeated by voters in 2002, but if voters approve this version, 40 percent of the state’s tax collections vanish. That means the state loses $12.5 billion in taxes each year.
If it passes, these modern day Sons of Liberty could blow a huge hole in the state’s bloated budget, and polls shows it has a chance. In fact, 46 percent of those polled support the measure before they know a thing about it. When told what it does, 40 percent still say it is a good idea.
Reinforcing CLT’s argument is the Associated Industries of Massachusetts’ (AIM) Business Confidence Index, which dropped 4.3 points in July to 44.6, decisively below “neutral” (50) on the 100-point scale. “This is the lowest reading since May 2003, and the second-lowest since late 2001 when the economy was clearly in recession,” said Raymond G. Torto, global chief economist at CB Richard Ellis Group, Inc. and chair of AIM’s Board of Economic Advisors.
What happened? Why are people in Massachusetts so frustrated they are willing to risk what the state teachers’ union calls “Armageddon”?
According to the Wall Street Journal, in the last decade some 330,000 people have fled the state looking for jobs, and many ended up in neighboring New Hampshire which has no income tax. The exodus is worse than the flight from economically troubled Michigan in the wake of its slumping auto industry.
Taxpayer confidence in government has eroded significantly, and a recent poll for CLT shows voters believe that government wastes 41 cents of each tax dollar. One of the biggest targets is the state’s out-of-control pension system which doles out billions for government workers who can retire as young as 50, collect their pensions, and then go back to work in government. They are called the “double-dippers.”
Another bone of contention is the cost of the Massachusetts health care reform called “The Connector,” which requires everyone to purchase state sponsored health insurance. Taxpayers subsidize families with less than $70,000 in annual income. This plan is sinking the state. Just before the legislature went home on July 31, it added another $100 million in new taxes to prop up the system.
In what some would call piling on, lawmakers in Boston pushed through a set of climate control measures that will cost billions with little resulting benefit.
There is a lesson here for those of us trying to make a living in Washington, a state that didn’t exist until more than a century after the Boston Tea Party. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and when the pendulum swings hard to the left, it snaps back with vengeance to the right.
As elected officials in Massachusetts are learning, a voter torpedo blowing away nearly half the ship of state may well be Armageddon. But, for families hit with high utility bills, $4 a gallon gas and rapidly rising costs for groceries, $3,000 extra cash in their pockets may be well worth the risk when it comes to putting food on the table.