TODAY, TAKING the first step toward what could be the most momentous ballot fight in Massachusetts history, a group of small-government activists led by two-time Libertarian Party candidate Carla Howell will file an initiative petition to abolish the state's personal income tax. If the attorney general approves the language and if the petitioners collect the necessary signatures, the measure will be on the state ballot in 2002.
Fasten your seat belts. We may be in for a wild ride.
If Massachusetts voters get a chance to abolish the income tax, there will be a din the likes of which this state has never known. Every special interest that sups at the public trough will howl with fury, warning that an end to the income tax will mean an end to civilization as we know it. The schools will shut down, they will moan. The sick will die. The courts will collapse. Bridges will buckle, the unemployed will go hungry, and every city and town will sink into fiscal chaos. They will say, in short, that the loss of its income tax will leave Massachusetts starved and disgraced. How can Carla Howell possibly defend that?
Howell is the articulate Libertarian who challenged Ted Kennedy in the US Senate race last year and drew 12 percent of the vote, nearly tying the Republican candidate, who got 13 percent. It was a notable achievement for a third-party candidate, especially one whose philosophy of minimal government flies in the face of everything that liberal Taxachusetts is supposed to favor.
Still, 12 percent is only 12 percent. Massachusetts voters may have cut their taxes last November and voted Republican in the last three gubernatorial elections, but it isn't exactly obvious that they want to shrink state government radically. Howell and others who advocate an end to the income tax will be fighting an uphill battle. Voters will be skeptical. Opponents will be well-funded. Republican politicians no less than Democratic ones will rush to defend the status quo. The media will trumpet the horrors awaiting Massachusetts if the income tax goes by the boards. It won't be an easy sell.
Even for those of us who consider taxation little better than legalized theft, there is no denying that wiping out the income tax would take its toll on state government. In 2000, the income tax generated more than $9 billion for the treasury - 57 percent of the state's total tax revenue of $15.7 billion. It funded almost 41 percent of the state's $22 billion operating budget. Critics will demand to know how Massachusetts could survive without it. Will Howell have an answer?
Of course she will.
For a start, she can point out that seven states already manage without an income tax: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming. Two others, New Hampshire and Tennessee, tax only dividends and interest. Beacon Hill may be addicted to income tax revenues, but addictions aren't healthy. And as countless ex-smokers, ex-gamblers, and ex-drinkers can testify, it is a blessing to overcome them.
No doubt Howell will make the point that state government spends so much money because it has it, not because it needs it. The dollars gush in, so many in recent years that the state literally hasn't been able to spend them fast enough: Even with a budget racing far ahead of inflation, Beacon Hill kept winding up with nine- and 10-figure surpluses. And that doesn't count the billions stashed away, unused, in various rainy day and insurance funds. Or the state's $7 billion share of the tobacco settlement.
Deleting the income tax from the state's fiscal calculations would not roll us back to the 19th century. It would roll us back to 1991. Do the math: Subtract $9 billion of income tax revenues from this year's $22 billion budget and you are left with $13 billion. That was roughly the size of the state's budget (in unadjusted dollars) when Michael Dukakis left office. Many things have been said of Dukakis, but no one ever accused him of cutting government to the bone. At $13 billion, state government was big, powerful, intrusive, and top-heavy. Restored to $13 billion, it would still be far from Spartan.
But it will certainly be smaller. And that, say Howell and her fellow petitioners - who are organized as the Committee for Small Government - is the point.
''Making state government small will make people's lives better and happier,'' she told me yesterday. ''$9 billion less for the state means $9 billion more for voters to spend on their priorities: their kids' education, their churches, their retirement. It means $9 billion more for the Massachusetts economy - and that means new businesses, new opportunities, new jobs.''
Ready or not, the mother of all ballot fights is about to begin. Better buckle up.
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