Return Tax rate to 5 percent

Every tax is a pay cut. Every tax cut is a pay raise.
Citizens for Limited Taxation

Return Tax rate to 5 percent Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Chip Ford, Director of Operations,
Citizens for Limited Taxation, Peabody Metrowest Daily News

Your editorial "Be prudent with surplus" (June 7) charged: "That loose change is burning a hole in Romney's pockets. Last week he gave into the temptation, unveiling a supplemental budget that not only spends the surplus but endorses an income tax cut that is anything but prudent."
The temptation is failing to learn from history.
In 1989, when the income tax rate was last at its historic five percent, before it was hiked "temporarily" we were promised, the state budget was about $12 billion. Today, 15 years later, with new bookkeeping "off-budget" sleight-of-hand, all three branches have proposed a budget hovering at around $26.5 billion -- more than doubled since the "temporary" tax hike.
As we learned in the late '80s, and should have learned again in the late '90s in the latest cyclical economic downturn, so long as our money is on the Legislature's table excuses to not return it will abound and it will be spent, setting us up all over again for the next "fiscal crisis" and the next round of tax hikes to sustain the overspending.
It's past time to return the tax rate to five percent, as the voters in 2000 mandated at the polls. That debate should have ended with that vote four years ago.
Now is the time. If not now, when?

Return Tax rate to 5 percent	Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Chip Ford, Director of Operations, Citizens for Limited Taxation, Peabody	Metrowest Daily News
Your editorial "Be prudent with surplus" (June 7) charged: "That loose change is burning a hole in Romney's pockets. Last week he gave into the temptation, unveiling a supplemental budget that not only spends the surplus but endorses an income tax cut that is anything but prudent." The temptation is failing to learn from history. In 1989, when the income tax rate was last at its historic five percent, before it was hiked "temporarily" we were promised, the state budget was about $12 billion. Today, 15 years later, with new bookkeeping "off-budget" sleight-of-hand, all three branches have proposed a budget hovering at around $26.5 billion -- more than doubled since the "temporary" tax hike. As we learned in the late '80s, and should have learned again in the late '90s in the latest cyclical economic downturn, so long as our money is on the Legislature's table excuses to not return it will abound and it will be spent, setting us up all over again for the next "fiscal crisis" and the next round of tax hikes to sustain the overspending. It's past time to return the tax rate to five percent, as the voters in 2000 mandated at the polls. That debate should have ended with that vote four years ago. Now is the time. If not now, when?

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