Our love-hate relationship with taxes

Fed up Protesters took to Boston Common last April to vent about taxes and government spending. (David L. Ryan/Globe Staff)

The fight over taxes -- in Massachusetts and across the country -- is as furious as ever. But what is the battle really about?

By Charles P. Pierce
Boston Globe
February 7, 2010

It’s hard not to wonder about them, as they drive north to New Hampshire, blinded by plasma screens and home furnishings. As we are all painfully aware, Massachusetts -- “Taxachusetts” to political consultants and other public people on the dodge -- raised its sales tax to 6.25 percent back in May. This sent folks scattering northward, at $2.75 a gallon or more, mind you. People even told reporters that they were going to New Hampshire to shop for groceries, which are not taxed at all in Massachusetts, and apparel, which is not taxed here either until the purchase goes above $175. Nevertheless, they heard all the radio commercials asking them to come shop in “tax-free” New Hampshire, and they were on the road before they knew it. They were running away from ghosts.

Put simply, this state is fairly average when it comes to taxing its citizens. According to data from the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax research group in Washington, D.C., the state and local tax burden in Massachusetts is 9.5 percent, 0.2 points below the national average, placing Massachusetts 23d among the 50 states. The personal income tax system is the 29th highest. On the other hand, the data show that the state’s corporate tax structure ranks it fourth among those states that have corporate income taxes, and property taxes here are the eighth highest in the country. In short, by any empirical measure, calling this state “Taxachusetts” in 2010 is no more accurate than calling it “Massachusetts Bay.”

“That’s been the case since 1991,” says one veteran analyst who declined to be identified and who worked on the state’s tax structure under both Republican and Democratic administrations. “There’ve been about 50 tax reductions enacted by governors and the Legislature since then.”

Nevertheless, the cars still drive north, and the arguments continue, exacerbated over the past year by the national economic downturn and the angry, inchoate populist politics that resulted from both the downturn itself and the occasionally erratic attempts to solve it. The arguments were most clearly evident in the upset victory of Republican and former state senator Scott Brown in the race to replace the late US senator Ted Kennedy. Brown ran on the vague, but eminently salable, notion that he would lower our taxes, even though, as the member of a legislative minority with the least seniority, what he could actually do about them remained unclear. Indeed, some interviews with voters prior to the election led one to believe that people voted for Brown because he would somehow reduce all their taxes, state and federal.

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