On Friday, Governor Healey opposed a proposed cut in the personal income tax that would put an average of $1,300 back into people’s pockets.
Her claim that it would devastate the budget and gut education is a wild distortion—and it ignores more than a decade of runaway growth in state spending.
The proposal would reduce spending by 3–4 percent—a modest correction after 15 years in which state government has grown twice as fast as median household income.
The state can absorb that by reversing the recent surge in hiring and fixing widespread mismanagement in major benefits programs—mistaken payments, overpayments, and fraud.
Address those basic management failures, and education need not be cut at all. Families manage far tougher pressures every day from taxes, regulation, and inflation.
A tax cut helps families. It also helps small and mid-sized businesses that employ large numbers of Massachusetts residents. Massachusetts is one of the few states now losing jobs while competitor states add hundreds of thousands. Many of these businesses are taxed through the personal income code and already operate in a high-cost state. This reform would provide meaningful relief for them and their employees.
Massachusetts is on the wrong path—that’s why so many people are leaving. No government can continue to grow twice as fast as the incomes of taxpayers.
